HR's New Mandate: Strategic Courage to Shape Culture, Drive Business Outcomes

Title: TRANSFORM SPONSOR: Leander LeSure, Chief People and Diversity Officer at Smarsh Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2025 09:00:00 GMT Duration: 00:13:13 Link: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/previ/episodes/TRANSFORM-SPONSOR-Leander-LeSure--Chief-People-and-Diversity-Officer-at-Smarsh-e30ot84 GUID: 0dff36cb-ba01-45b8-812e-558d2628804e ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

"How can you grow my business if you don't know my business?" It's a question Leander LeSure asked himself early in a 30-year HR career spanning manufacturing, consulting, and financial services — and the answer has shaped every leadership decision since. The Chief People and Diversity Officer at Smarsh learned the hard way, early, that HR credibility is earned on the operations floor, not in the policy manual.

His defining lesson came during his time at Pizza Hut, where he spent time working in restaurants before trying to support them. That experience transformed how he thought about the people function: HR that doesn't understand how the business actually runs — the pressures, the tradeoffs, the daily operational reality — gives advice that doesn't land and recommendations that don't stick. It's not a seat at the table problem. It's a relevance problem. Leander has spent the rest of his career building HR functions that are deeply embedded in the business they serve, with the courage to make talent decisions that most HR teams avoid.

At Smarsh, that means HR leaders who act as strategic partners in real decisions — not advisors who show up after the fact to manage fallout. It means pay-for-performance structures that are rigorous enough to actually differentiate top performers, and a culture-talent-results framework he describes as a three-legged stool: weaken any leg and the whole thing wobbles. His retention numbers — 90% for highest performers — reflect what that rigor produces.

• Learning the business before trying to change it — why embedded understanding is HR's most important credibility builder
• Courage as a leadership competency — how HR can use its horizontal organizational view to make the talent calls others avoid
• Culture is what you tolerate — how tolerance for low performance or misaligned behavior defines organizational culture in practice
• Pay for performance with teeth — how rigorous differentiation drove 90% retention of top performers at Smarsh
• The three-legged stool — why culture, talent, and business results are interdependent, and what happens when one weakens

This episode is in partnership with Transform — a community worth exploring at transform.us.

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