Lauren Tropeano

▶0:00IntroWelcome to the Built by People Podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top executive leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce. That's Crebi. Now let's jump in and get started with our next guest.

▶0:41HostLauren, I'm super excited to welcome you to the Built by People podcast, and truly thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your experiences so far.

▶0:51GuestWell, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, well, good.

▶0:56HostWell, number one, I always love to learn a little bit more about your career journey. So if you could, you know, walk us through, you know, how you got started, why, why HR? Yeah, absolutely.

▶1:06GuestSo I'll try to keep this short, but basically when I was in college, I was in a business program and I was going to school for marketing. And as part of the core requirements of my degree, I had to take a class called organizational behavior. And I didn't necessarily know at all what that was, but it turns out it was basically the the people side of business, which is, as we know today, is HR. And I loved it. It was actually, you know, something where I was like, wow, this is really cool. And I think I'll, you know, pursue more classes and pursue a degree in this path. I still double majored in marketing because I wasn't exactly sure that there were real jobs out there doing this work. But that's how I became introduced to this line of work. And then when I graduated from college, I interacted with a recruiter at a job fair, and I thought to myself, oh my God, that would be a really cool, you know, job to have. So then I set out to go on the recruiting path and then I, you know, got broke into HR that way.

▶2:02HostOh, okay. Interesting. So, all right, so you started the recruiting world and then kind of moved into the HR. Was there any like specific person inside of that organization that helped push you more into the HR, like, general side versus obviously the front side?

▶2:18GuestYeah. So I started, so I started my career actually in a recruiting agency and then I decided to go in-house as a recruiter and I found my way into, to tech in sort of an accidental way. I knew somebody at a company that referred me in, and I thought, oh God, I don't really have any business being here, but hey, why not? And, you know, as I, as I got going in my career there, I just stepped into different, different roles and grew into management and all that, but in talent acquisition. And this was a larger company now. It was actually acquired by Dell, so you can get a sense for like how big the company was. And there was, at the time I was still very early in my career, I had just become, I think, a manager or not even, I wasn't even a manager. There was a new head of talent acquisition that was appointed and he ended up becoming a mentor of mine that really opened a lot of possibility in my career. And, you know, I'm very grateful to him because he saw possibility in me. I just was somebody that put my hand up for projects and things. And, you know, he helped me grow into management within talent acquisition. But to answer your question, he actually was helpful in helping to seed me into some other really formative roles in HR operations and in even some other really non-conventional things like talent mobility and, you know, some of those other kind of programmatic type roles as well. So, I do have to give him credit. And yeah, that's— I just kind of found my way sort of accidentally into some of the roles just because I thought they were interesting. And that's how I ended up getting a breadth of experience.

▶3:47HostNow, I love that. I think that's one of the biggest parts for anybody early on in the career, right, is get access to multiple roles, right? Because then you kind of find, you can find something you're like, oh wow, that's something I want to gravitate towards. Or yeah, maybe not, right? It's kind of like a doctor, right? They're like, exactly, I don't know, what do I want?

▶4:06GuestYeah, yeah. And, and that is advice that I often give people because I will talk with earlier career professionals and people, and they'll ask me like, how do I grow? And I, I just tell them like, just put your hand up for things, even if it seems non-conventional, or even if it seems like something that you don't have any business being involved in, because you can learn, you can develop new skill sets, and then you're able to show capabilities of being able to learn new things even if you haven't had experience. And so then people that work around you will be able to develop pattern recognition to say, oh, you know what, she was able to take that project on even though she really didn't have any previous experience. She might be good for this role or this project as well. It starts to, you know, help you reputationally as well.

▶4:48HostYeah, I like that. I actually listened to somebody who was talking about imposter syndrome inside the workforce, right? Where it's like, sometimes you have to, you have to go sit in that room and act like you know what you're doing, even though you don't, and figure out how to do that to actually stretch yourself and grow and not get stagnant in that position that you're in, right? Because once it becomes comfortable, you're probably not growing.

▶5:11GuestYeah, that's true. That's true.

▶5:14HostNo, I love that advice. And the other part that I do love is, is the mentor side, right? I think a lot of us— I think it's hard for people to ask for help sometimes. And so being able to lean on a mentor and look at somebody and, and really almost very directly ask them, would you help me? Can you be a mentor for me? It's not the easiest thing to do. So I think that's a great thing to be able to bring to everybody and say, yeah, ask somebody, ask them to help you.

▶5:38GuestYeah, absolutely. And I think just the, just the humility to be willing to ask for help especially again, you know, if you're earlier on in your career, it's kind of hard to be vulnerable to ask someone more senior or someone that's, you know, a bit ahead of you in your, in your career. But truly, I mean, that is just a wealth of gold and knowledge that you can tap into that is, you know, so, so valuable as you, as you are shaping and growing in your own career as well. So that courage is, is everything, I think.

▶6:10HostAbsolutely. Well, okay, speaking of courage, right, this is one of the questions I like to ask is, is there a moment in your career where everything was on the line, right, and the decision you made and what happened next for you on that?

▶6:24GuestI usually say that, you know, HR or in the people field, it's not usually life or death, right? Like, we're not operating on people. We're not, you know, in a first responder capacity. And so, I say that to try to help to anchor people as we do this work. But the example that actually does come to mind was one where, in a way, we were acting as like a first responder type of a situation. And so, back in, I believe it was 2022, when the Russia and Ukraine war broke out, I was working for a company called DraftKings, and we had several hundred people, several hundred employees of ours that were working for us in Ukraine and in the midst of, you know, everything that was going down, we essentially had to literally overnight come up with an evacuation plan for our employees to be, to be able to assist them and in many cases their families to actually evacuate from the country or to get to safer places. And it was, incredible. So, when you say, you know, everything was on the line, it's not the traditional example where it was like, oh, it's a massive project and jobs will get lost or things like that. But this was literally like a humanitarian effort in terms of making sure that people were safe and that their families were safe and that they had a sense of security and stability. And in doing that, you know, we had to essentially figure out how to get people out of a war-torn region that none of us, you know, in America were— had ever had any experience with. And so it was truly an incredible effort of both learning intensely in the moment in a very, very compressed timeline because there was, you know, safety on the line, and also to like, you know, just throwing out a lot of like your, your typical like decision-making rationale. And it was like, let's just lead with heart, be amazing humans, like, and just try to do everything that we can to focus on safety and stability and comfort for people. And it's still one of the things that I often go back to and I'm like, you know what, this— sometimes this work feels thankless, or it can feel really challenging. And it's like, well, that was something where it's like, you literally are able to affect someone's well-being and truly their life and their safety.

▶8:50HostYeah. Wow. Yeah, I don't think many HR leaders get to have that kind of experience.

▶8:56GuestSo yeah, it was not on my bingo card, really. I mean, after, after being in 2020 of the pandemic, I was like, oh, this is a once in a lifetime. And then this came up and I'm like, oh my gosh, that's— this is so unexpected. But also, you know, this is an amazing moment to really show courage and just, you know, resolve and just figure out how to support people even if you don't know what you're really doing. Oh yeah, yeah, man.

▶9:21HostThat's so— so my question on that actually comes to, obviously there's a ton of organization that has to happen in order to actually do and accomplish anything that you're talking about, but communication becomes a really key component to that. How were you getting communication down, downward, right, to the company and, and getting everybody to go in line, right? Pull on, you know, like you said, the heartstrings, leading with the heart, right? Sometimes we talk about the IQ, EQ, and SQ, right, of an employee. How did you guys communicate that?

▶9:53GuestYeah. So some, some people were in, not that many, but somewhere in regions where their communication was like not reliable, but for most they went into, I forgot what they call them, but essentially like these like sort of bunkers or like hiding places or things like that. And, and many of them actually did have internet. So they were still able to, we had told people like, please, like do not work at this time.

▶10:16HostYeah.

▶10:16GuestBut a lot of people were just kind of. Waiting in these holding spaces. And so, they did have access to internet and Slack and things like that. And this was, again, very, very early. I think it was either right as or just before Russia had invaded. And so, people were really sort of hunkering down and all of that. It was before the borders closed. I do know that because then it was more difficult to get out. But yeah, we were just saying like, hey, this is people first. Safety first. So, you know, do not— we do not expect you to work at this time, but let us know how we can help you. And then we had, you know, organized a whole slew of efforts. We had— I'm forgetting again, like the name of the company, but basically we had these sort of rescue units, if you will, that went into the region that we coordinated with a local provider that would essentially go in and organize like a pickup location at a time and all of that. And they would transport people over to the border of whether that be Poland or another country that they wanted to go to, to arrange a pickup. And in some cases, we were doing that for family members. If an employee wanted to stay back to sort of, you know, look after the family's home, or a lot of them had a very strong sense of allegiance and didn't want to leave, you know, they wanted to defend their country and all of that, but they wanted to make sure their family members were safe. So anyways, with regard to communication, we were really, you know, just focused on multiple methods. So like written communications, Yeah, we would have managers in contact. We would have, you know, a variety of, again, third-party providers that were actually helping with the transportation of people and all of that. It was truly a coordinated effort. Yeah, yeah.

▶11:57HostNo, I'm sure we could spend the rest of the time on that, but I, I gotta skip ahead because that, that's wild. Um, yeah, what a unique and crazy experience. Um, okay, well, well, passing over that now and going to kind of the next piece, which is what would you say is the most meaningful change you've made in a company that employees still feel today, and how did you make it happen?

▶12:22GuestOne of the things, um, that I think was most impactful, um, again, when I was at DraftKings, we, we worked on, um, DraftKings at that time had had values, and they were very small at the time. It was only a couple hundred employees. And so, we were really looking to scale the culture and specifically really crystallize, like, what does it mean to be a great leader in our culture? And leadership, by the way, there and at DoTable, where I am today, and a few other places I've worked, has always been defined as being accessible to anyone. It had nothing to do with management, but more about, like, almost like, how do you move through the world as a professional here at this company? And so, in the So, we had had values, but we wanted to evolve those into leadership behaviors. And so, we actually took time to develop out like, what does it mean to be a leader here? And what then also does that not look like as well? So, it was like behaviors, but then also like anti-behaviors. And I mentioned that as a profound example because it allowed us to use those to shape so much of what we did to scale the culture. And I I was actually just yesterday watching an interview with the CEO from DraftKings, and he was mentioning how so much has changed with the business, but their culture has really been like a stronghold and has remained like quite a constant that has been a competitive advantage. And so it sounds like a lot of that early work really kind of kept hold and shaped what does it really mean to be successful here, and then how then do we evaluate people against that and how does that sit within our operating systems? So I think that that was a pretty profound piece of work. And I do think that they, I don't know if they've evolved since over the past couple of years since I have been there, but, but I do think that they're pretty unique to the company as well.

▶14:16HostI've been part of companies with incredible cultures. One of the things that's been pretty consistent across all those in those conversations is I feel like there's this, this constant communication on what the culture is. Right? What we're trying to do, how are we bettering the future, right? Of maybe it's, you know, the employees but also the end user of our product, right? Whatever it is that we're doing. So you mentioned a couple things, you know, around, uh, you know, processes and systems to be able to benchmark. Um, how were you guys communicating outward to identify that culture to the employees and getting them to really buy into that?

▶14:55GuestYeah, so I do think internal communications is absolutely critical when you're trying to do any type of a change effort or any type of like a campaign around anything, whether again, like you're talking about your, your campaign to your customers, or in our case, employees are my customers, so that I think about that in the same way. And culture being a product that we're, that we're building or shaping. But I also think that culture is not just what you tell people it is, but also how it is felt and how it is perceived in terms of the rhythm of a company, how work gets done, how people interact with each other. It's incredibly organic. And so, while I do think that you can have a point of view as a leadership team or as a company on like, you know, what is important and what you're going to prioritize, culture does tend to take shape on its own. So, you can, I guess what I would like to say is that whatever you're communicating definitely needs to feel like it resonates and is authentic. Because I think that that is where cultures get tripped up a little bit, which is companies or leaders will say, oh, we are this or we want to be this, but it really feels completely different than the lived experience of the people that are working within the company. So, I think it's a combination of both, which is, you know, communicate often and explicitly to really guide and anchor, but more importantly, to make sure that that is a lived experience that people are having.

▶16:16HostYeah, I believe— I'm with you. I believe it's that you've got the communication part, but you have the lead by example part, right?

▶16:22GuestYeah, for sure.

▶16:24HostYeah, you feel it, right? You can absolutely feel it when you have an executive team and a leadership team that is doing what they're preaching, and it just— it folds down through the rest of the company.

▶16:35GuestAnd so, yeah, yeah, for sure.

▶16:37HostThat's, that's amazing. Um, well, let's see, I'm— let's go to this one. You know, what's a leadership move or HR initiative you've repeated in more than one company because it just works?

▶16:50GuestWell, actually, this one's a good one. I have taken this or some iteration of this, which is this combination of like what I would call like a company operating system, which tends to— every company has one, but they're not often formalized, especially in smaller companies. So, it is a combination of company values, with, again, whether that be leadership principles or behaviors, whatever you want to call them, and then some type of goal system or North Star, OKRs, whatever you want to call them, those things together tend to be a really, really strong foundation for the what, the why, and the how of a company. So, you couple those things with the mission and the vision of a company, which often always exists, and then it's like, okay, not only do I know what I'm working towards, but I know how I should be showing up. And then why it matters is really the, the vision and the mission piece as well. So usually when, when you're able to articulate those things in a really thoughtful, like, package in a way, it really clarifies for people like, oh, like, this is— this all makes sense. And also it gives them a lot to anchor to as they think about not only their work, but also the values of the company and how they should be showing up to work in alignment there.

▶18:07HostYeah. Are there any tools, systems, softwares that you, that you've used that kind of make that easier to actually track and follow?

▶18:15GuestIt's a great question. Nothing that I've found with respect to like the values and like the leadership principles per se. I mean, oftentimes those things end up migrating into like your performance management systems or how you're recruiting. So then you would use those types of tools to support those workflows. But from a like a goals and OKRs perspective. I mean, there's a lot of different tools. I've used 15/5 in the past. I've used Workday. I've used— at Docebo, we use a company called Profit. So I think that each company, each tool has its own quirks and good and bad involved. But I think as long as you have something that can enable those rhythms and those routines, that's that's, you know, a great starting point.

▶19:03HostSo now that's helpful because that, you know, we get a lot of conversations and a lot of leaders are coming in and listening to the podcast, and half the time it's like, what system are they using? Because I'm— it saves them a lot of time from having to go through and do all that diligence, right? So we like to ask it and bring it in so that it might help somebody else in the future as they're looking at it.

▶19:23GuestYeah, for sure. And I think the other thing too is it depends if you want it to be integrated. Like, for example, you know, there was at one point we wanted like at a past company, we were doing goals in one tool, and then we decided to go to like more of a full stack provider. And we brought that goal module into that just so we could be operating one system. So I think it just depends on where you are in your maturity and what is important to you in terms of, you know, your tech stack.

▶19:50HostSo, yeah, absolutely. Okay. Well, I love this question. This is one of my favorites. Looking ahead, what's the single biggest shift you think HR leaders need to prepare for in the next 5 years?

▶20:02GuestI think that there is a very strategic mandate that is being thrust upon us as HR leaders, as people leaders, to figure out how to invite AI into the people conversation. And what I mean by that is, and it's already, you know, part of the people conversation. But what I mean by that is it's actually like looking at how work gets done and thinking about that not only through the lens of human beings, but also AI as a great enabler of human beings and of people. And also, you know, kind of thinking about that not with so much separation as we have in the past. So, I'll give you a little bit more specific specificity. So, as HR practitioners, as people practitioners, we've typically thought about the person, and then we think about tooling, which is usually something that IT or somebody in the business gives as a set of tools or an enablement so that they can get their job done. But I think now more than ever, we're being invited into more of a different conversation where we're actually needing to think about role design in terms of what is the role of a human and what is the role of how AI will work alongside that human within that role or within that function or whatever it may be. And so, it's not about less humans and more technology, it's actually about the very distinct partnership between the two and how that can unlock a lot of performance, a lot of capabilities, a lot of efficiency, whatever it may be. And I think that that's a new conversation that we're, that we're just stepping into now to really think, like rethink workforce design and think about like roles and skills that are going to be needed now that we have so much more technical capability at our fingertips.

▶21:52HostYeah. I love that approach because I think you, there's a lot of, obviously there's a lot of fear, I think right now, not, not just in, you know, in the HR world, but you know, the sales organization, the data engineers, right? All of them, they're, they're in this setting of like, oh my goodness, AI can do a lot. And where does that leave me? And I think that's really the right approach. How do I, how do I use it to better enhance my skill set? How do I use— Yeah, that's exactly right. Create more functionality out of myself. And ultimately, I wanted to do all the busy work, right? That, I mean, that's really where I want to sit so I can be very strategic in what I'm trying to focus on versus being stuck and bogged down. I think one of the things that's come up quite a bit is, you know, how do we help those that are maybe starting into the HR world as their first stop, right? And there is a lot of fear for them. Where it's like, man, like usually when you start in HR, you are the firefighter. You're kind of coming in and having to take care of a lot of that stuff that a lot of these tools are kind of built or being built to hopefully handle some of that. So how would you, how would you tell somebody like that, somebody new into HR coming into it, what should they start doing to prepare now to be exceptional?

▶23:12GuestI think they can start thinking about their own AI fluency first and foremost, and that is just, you know, are they curious about AI? Do they use it at all in their personal life? Um, you know, how can they start to experiment with it and really, again, view it as a great enabler as opposed to a disruptor in a negative way? Space. They can also get exposed to some tools because there's going to need to be a lot of human shepherding of AI. And even as, you know, AI consumes processes and things like that, there's still always going to need to be humans to orchestrate those things or architect those bodies of work. Again, you know, to your point about being able to level up and sort of be the strategic layer that sits alongside and works with AI. And then the other thing, the bit of advice specifically for HR professionals is, you know, lean into your human skills, right? The ability to do that very, very empathetic coaching, the ability to, you know, look for those interpersonal signals, you know, when you're working with, with people in the business and things like that, because those are the types of skill sets that I personally just don't think ever will be truly replicated by a machine. But it's just such a superpower of HR people is just their ability to bring connection and empathy and you know, situational awareness and those types of things, which, you know, I think again, if you couple that with some of the AI capability, I think will be really powerful.

▶24:42HostYeah. Oh, I, I agree completely. Well, all right. As, as parting advice to the community, what would be one piece of advice that you would leave to the community and maybe something that you wish you had known earlier in your career?

▶24:55GuestI would say for advice, you know, we talked about this a little bit earlier, but with your career, be willing to take some risks. Um, remember that getting uncomfortable is not, it's not a bad thing. It often signals growth and it often signals a lot of opportunity that is unfolding for you, even if it feels hard. And so, you know, with thinking about that, in terms of how to grow your career, you know, put your hand up for that project that's going to feel uncomfortable, or that might be a stretch. Maybe it'll take a little bit of extra time, but if you compound those experiences over time, you'll be very, very well suited for, you know, a very rich career in the future that's filled with, you know, lots of different opportunities and exciting ones as well. So keep taking risks.

▶25:39HostI love it. Keep the risk coming. I love it. So, well, Lauren, thank you so much for joining us today on the Built by People podcast.

▶25:45GuestYou're so welcome.

▶25:46HostIt was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶25:48GuestThank you so much.

▶25:49HostYou bet.

▶25:50GuestSee ya.