Jodi Weintraub

▶0:00HostWelcome 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. I'm excited to welcome Jodi to the Built by People podcast. Jodi, thank you so much for joining us today. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:48GuestI do, and thanks for having me here. I appreciate the invite. I have been in the HR world and surrounding world for 30-plus years. So I've got a lot of experience in the space. Started out with a master's in HR, so have that kind of formal foundational kind of grounding and have worked in a number of different industries. Left HR actually for a dozen years though and went to go work with a professional services firm, actually two professional services firms. And I was in business development and account management roles and eventually ran P&L. And it really changed my perspective. Perspective on the role of HR in the organization. And about a dozen years ago, I got back into the HR space. And so I'm currently a CHRO for a private equity-backed technology company.

▶1:39HostJodi, as someone who describes themselves as the anti-HR person, can you share a specific instance where your business-first approach to HR revealed organizational barriers that traditional HR approaches might have missed?

▶1:52GuestSure. And I say the anti-HR person to mean the anti-stereotypical HR person. And so a lot of the other parts of the business still think about HR as a support function and not as a driver of business strategy. And if it's done— HR should be viewed as a business accelerator and not as a cost center. I spent a lot of time digging into and understanding what are the top 3 to 4 business metrics that we use to measure our success. Not HR metrics. Then I work backwards to start linking how the HR function directly impacts those metrics. So as an example, I walked into a situation where the CEO said to me, we have a billing issue. And typically when you would think about that, it would have been easy to say the billing issue was a finance department issue to address. But as I dug into it more, I realized it had been going on for some time and it was causing our customer success team to spend a disproportionate amount of their time on dealing with billing issues and not focusing on customer retention, which was a key business metric for us. And so from an organizational barrier perspective, after I started digging into it, what I realized is that we didn't have people who had experience in knowing how to resolve cross-functional business issues. They didn't understand how to influence other parts of the business that they weren't directly responsible for. And so what I did was I spearheaded a cross-functional group of people from sales ops, from finance, from technology, from customer success, and brought in a project manager to lead this effort. And we stopped calling it a billing issue because what we realized was it wasn't a billing issue. It was a cross-functional business process redesign issue that was really related to the entire lead to cash business process. And I know that if I hadn't asked the right business questions on the front end, that we wouldn't have gotten to the resolution of addressing it as a full business process redesign and not just a billing issue. Does that make sense?

▶4:03HostFor sure, Jodi, and thank you for that elaborate answer. You've mentioned in the past helping HR business partners understand the business side rather than just the HR side. What specific strategies or methods have you implemented to help your team develop develop their— this business acumen?

▶4:20GuestNo, I have been on a professional mission to help HR people see themselves as business people first and doing their jobs through the lens of the HR function. So it's my personal mission for years that I have been focused on. I think knowing your specific HR discipline area is table stakes for any HR person, but then understanding how to leverage that knowledge in the context of driving business results is what moves HR from a cost center to a business accelerator. So I recently started in a new industry, and I knew absolutely nothing about the industry. It was a technology company, and I understood technology, but I didn't understand the industry. So I asked my CEO to send me every industry newsletter that he gets so I could start getting familiar with language and terminology and what the issues were within the industry. I shared those with my HR team members and asked them, to start getting those and reading those as well. I discuss monthly and quarterly financial results with my team. I make sure everyone on the team understands how our HR goals are mapped into our business goals so they can start to see a line of sight in how what they do impacts business outcomes. So it's really important to me to create that line of sight from the HR goals to the business goals. One of the things I've started doing is bringing in functional leaders into our biweekly team meetings so that we can start to educate the group who are maybe not as involved on the front line in understanding parts of the business. So I brought in our chief product officer to start talking about product horizon planning and what that means to our business. I brought in the head of our sales development rep groups to start talking about What does the sales funnel look like? How does a funnel work? And what is the SDR role in creating pipeline that drives revenue for the business? I brought in our customer education team to start talking with our team through the customer journey and where our products play a role in impacting our customer success. So I think the more an HR professional understands what the drivers of the business are, the better they are at impacting the business. So I've mentored HR professionals at all different levels of the organization. And one of the things I encourage them to do is to make sure at some point in their career that they are in kind of an HR business partner role and not just a corporate HR role. Because I think the more connected you are to the frontline and your customers, the more you can really understand how to impact things. So it's my ongoing mission to get HR people to be business people first.

▶7:09HostJodi, can you walk us through a specific example where understanding the business operations led to a significant change in how you approached an HR issue, such as the roles and responsibilities for a particular department?

▶7:22GuestSure, happy to. So I left HR for a dozen years, and I worked with a couple of different, as I mentioned, professional services firms in both business development and account management functions. And I eventually ran the P&L for the Atlanta office where I'm located. And then I got back into HR a decade ago. But deeply understanding how the sales cycle works and the difference in going after net new business versus expanding existing relationships allows me to ask a different kind of question to our head of sales. And so understanding the account management side of a land and expand strategy and how that skill is different than going after net new business means that when I look at our current org structure and the roles and responsibilities of people, I can ask probing questions in a different light. And I can understand things like incentive comp plans differently. What are the behaviors that we are trying to really drive from either our customer success or salespeople? It lets me ask relevant questions as well about kind of skills and capabilities and whether we have roles structured the right way in the organization. To drive the business outcomes that we're looking for.

▶8:35HostJodi, how have you measured the impact of having HR leaders who think like business leaders first? What tangible results have you seen from this approach across the organization?

▶8:46GuestIt is the ever, ever-going challenge of trying to measure the results of the HR efforts, frankly. And it's a great question, and I wish I had a brilliant answer, but I don't. So all I can say is that When my business leaders include their HR partners in strategy and decision-making processes, not because they're concerned about compliance and legal issues, but because they trust their judgment and they seek their input, then I feel like we're helping them to drive the business forward. There aren't as many functional roles in the business that get a full kind of enterprise-wide view of the organization as HR. Finance does, or a few other areas. But understanding how changes in one part of the business impact other parts gives HR the opportunity come to migrate from being seen as overhead support to being seen as a driver of business outcomes. And so understanding the enterprise, the full scope of the enterprise, gives my team members the insights that they need to make what I call better trade-off decisions. And what I mean by that is if we have limited capacity, and who doesn't, what HR team does not have limited headcount, limited resources, then you're constantly having to make decisions about where do we make trade-offs. So if I've got a head of talent acquisition with limited recruiting capability, I need that person to understand what are we trying to drive from a business standpoint so they can understand where do I put my recruiting team's efforts and where will those efforts have the greatest impact on the business. So if we need to be driving sales, We may be looking at filling sales roles at a faster kind of velocity than maybe another role because that's where the driver of the business is right now.

▶10:30HostJodi, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

▶10:34GuestSo I would say lean into those areas that make you most uncomfortable and figure out ways to increase your knowledge in those areas. I am not naturally analytical, and I am certain I have an undiagnosed math learning disability. I'm absolutely convinced of that. So I build really deep relationships with my finance and my operations kind of counterparts. And I'm really honest with them about how I need their help in understanding their areas. And I think it's that willingness to ask for help that gives you the space to lean in to support and round out your own skills. So instead of pouring through spreadsheets on my own, which really does nothing for me. I ask incessant questions until I understand how metrics are impacted by different actions in the business so that I can figure out then how I and the rest of the HR team can impact those actions. I would say don't be afraid to show your vulnerabilities and keep asking questions until you understand. So for me, my first conversation with my CFO is, I don't understand your area. I am going to need you to explain it to me and walk me through until I do. And I think that willingness to be vulnerable allows for a better conversation and dialogue as you're trying to build out your own skills.

▶11:58HostJodi, thank you so much for joining us today on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶12:03GuestThank you. Appreciate it.