Jennifer McClure - Why HR Needs Disruption

[00:00:08] Welcome to the HR Data Labs Podcast, now part of the WorkDefined Podcast Network. Join us as we explore the vital role of compensation, strategy, data, and people analytics in navigating today's complex business world. With the resources of WorkDefined, we're now bringing you deeper insights and actionable ideas from top experts. Now, here is your host, David Turetsky. Hello and welcome to the HR Data Labs Podcast. I am your host, David Turetsky.

[00:00:36] And as always, we try and find the best and brightest inside and outside the world of HR. And this time we definitely nailed it. We're speaking with Jennifer McClure from Disrupt HR. Jennifer, how are you? I'm doing great today. I'm looking forward to talking with you. Me as well. This is going to be a lot of fun. We met up a few weeks ago or actually a few months ago, and then we talked again a few weeks ago. And I got totally jazzed by your story. Why don't you tell people a little bit about your background? Sure.

[00:01:06] Well, I spent the first maybe 18 and a half years, almost 20 years of my career in the corporate world in HR leader and executive roles, doing everything from an HR department of one to the last role as a VP of HR in a larger company. So I often say I've been in your shoes, whatever they are in HR probably. And then you're glad you're out of them now. You know, there are days where I would like to be back.

[00:01:31] But I'd like, like probably most people in HR, I'd like to go back and work in HR, but only do the parts of HR that I really enjoy. It was all the things that I don't enjoy that were also part of the job that some days drug me down. But, you know, overall, I still love HR. I still consider myself an HR professional. I did go to the dark side after that, though. I went into executive search for about four years. So I had always looked at external recruiters as the enemy if I had to use them. I failed.

[00:01:59] Thankfully, going over to the other side helped me to realize that a really good partner who has expertise and a focus, especially with executive searches, can be a benefit. So I had to learn some lessons that the new job I had was actually adding value and not taking away. And then while I was there, I had started being asked to come and speak at organizations about whether it was telling my introverted networking story or building relationships. And at the time, you know, this was 2000.

[00:02:28] Well, I was there from 2006 to 2010. And social media was really just coming on the scene. You know, the early adopters had gotten there in the early 2000s. But LinkedIn was becoming more mainstream. Twitter was just becoming a thing. Facebook was coming away from the college crowd into the business world or not business world, more just people in general.

[00:02:49] And so I was being asked to come in and speak a lot about what how they could use social media for recruiting, employer branding, communications back when HR people were still trying to block social media. Look how far we've come. Yeah. What I realized is I really enjoyed speaking. I'd kind of a few years earlier sitting in a training class, you know, really enjoying the instructor thought to myself that someday I'd like to be a speaker or trainer.

[00:03:16] And so started doing that kind of, you know, by chance while I was in executive search. And in 2010, made the decision to step out on my own. My company is called Unbridled Talent. I tried to get cool and creative with naming my company to match my passions of horses and people. And what I realized very quickly is I should have just named it ABC Corporation because nobody can say or spell Unbridled Talent.

[00:03:41] So here I am 16 years later, every time I check into a hotel or something else, having to spell it and realizing that more people pronounce the word unbridled than they do unbridled. And I'm so confused by that because unbridled is not a word. Wow. Yeah. Well, you know, people like making things up. They do. So in that role of my own company, I am a professional speaker.

[00:04:07] So I speak at conferences, events, you know, bar mitzvahs, whatever you want me to speak at. I'm probably going to be best speaking about people's strategies or high impact leadership or the future of work, something along those lines. Right. How much your bar mitzvah crowd would enjoy that. Well, you know, depends if it's an HR bar mitzvah crowd. I'll go. I'll talk to people almost anywhere. So I love that. I get to do, you know, some workshops, but most of what I do is speaking in keynotes. And I also have an executive coaching certification. So I coach some clients.

[00:04:36] About three years into my business journey with Unbridled Talent as a speaker, a local entrepreneur and I kind of came up with the idea for Disrupt HR. And so that became something that, in theory, I do off the corner of my desk as a, quote, volunteer desk. But yeah, it's become it's become a big volunteer activity. Yeah. So since 2013, I've been the chief excitement officer of Disrupt HR in addition to my own business.

[00:05:04] So that that probably brings us to today. So before we get into our topic for today, Jennifer, what's one fun thing that no one knows about you? Well, you already know the answer to this. My fun thing is that I absolutely hate icebreaker questions like that. Wow. I'm sorry that that won't work on the HR data. Can you ask me what kind of fruit I am or, you know, those things? No. What's one thing that nobody knows? Unfortunately, I've been an open book online.

[00:05:33] So I don't know if you don't know it about me. It's probably because I didn't want to share it. But I'd say probably a fun fact that not a lot of people know is that I am a I don't even know what generation farmer. So I do have horses. So that's that's kind of separate from the farm. The horses are here with me in Cincinnati. The farm is in Tennessee. And so my brother and I now run a farming operation in Tennessee that's been in our family for generations. So that's amazing.

[00:06:00] You know, that makes it really kind of like a third business. But, you know, I like I like the variety and these are all things that I love. So Tennessee will always be home. And that means that I have a connection there. That's great. I'm going to try and raise chickens. So that's it's not horses. It's chickens. But we'll see. Things are in now. People chicken. Everybody's got a chicken coop in their backyards. I have two.

[00:06:27] I have two gigantic chicken coops because the people who are here, they built them in 1935. And so you already got the properties. Huh? You already have the hotel for the chickens. You're right. I do. And I already built. I already have the big run for them. And I'm just looking for approval from my town now to actually have them. So that's tomorrow. Well, when this comes out, I'll know or not know. And I'll let you know what happens.

[00:06:54] So today's topic is very topical because we hear a lot about how HR enables and disables companies. And especially if you've paid attention on LinkedIn, you've seen the bolt.com CEO firing his HR team and creating a people operation space. But we want to talk about, from Jennifer's perspective, why HR needed to be disrupted. And we're going to get into that after the bump.

[00:07:40] So, Jennifer, as you were describing, you've had lots of roles in HR. And you've loved some of them and you hated the other great pieces. Tell us, why was HR ripe for disruption? Oh, that's probably, that's a broad, broad question. You know, is, was HR ripe for disruption more than any other profession? Probably not. But do people, do people rag on HR more than any other profession?

[00:08:10] Probably yes. Absolutely. And I think some of, you know, what made HR ripe for disruption and still does in some ways. But we have come very far in the four decades that I've been working in or around HR, or what was originally called personnel, or was when I joined. Right. It was primarily, again, when I started my first job as a personnel manager, it was very administrative oriented.

[00:08:36] You know, so it was, I mean, I worked in a small company and I actually had to send the, you know, monthly or weekly payroll to a dot matrix printer that then I had to go sit and babysit so that no one else picked up the paychecks. So, you know, some people out there can't appreciate dot matrix printer and waiting for things to print, but that was the time. And of course, you know, I had all the files and type things out in three part forms.

[00:09:02] You know, I also did, I think, some good leadership and, you know, I was an HR department once. So again, I, and I was setting up the department. So I set up the handbook. I tried to make employee relations something where we had, you know, a team and they felt like I was a part of it. So I was doing some of the, you know, more progressive things in HR, but a big portion of my job was administrative and that was how it was designed.

[00:09:25] So, you know, fast forward into maybe, I don't know when we first started talking about it, but maybe the 80s or early 90s when people started saying, you know, I want a seat at the table, which we, we love to hate on that phrase. But I think when we say it, we at least know what people were saying, that HR should, you know, be in the leadership meetings and should be contributing. I think the miss during that timeframe where it was all about, well, I, you know, everybody you've met and they introduced themselves. They're like, I'm a strategic HR leader. I always love to kind of dig in.

[00:09:55] Well, tell me what you, what you mean by saying you're a strategic HR leader. And a lot of times people would explain what to them strategic HR leader meant. And all that really meant was where they sat on the organization chart and whether or not they had a seat at the leadership meeting. What it didn't or what a lot of people didn't say was what being strategic really meant. You know, do you understand the business and not just from the SHRM, whatever they call it now, Bach something qualifications, but, you know, the business acumen.

[00:10:24] You know, say, oh, I need to have more business acumen. Well, what does even that mean to you? It's really not just I can read a P&L. It's I understand how the sausage is made and I understand how people are the lever that can help us either achieve our business objectives or not. So to me, talent strategy, business strategy, those are one. So we talk as HR leaders about aligning talent strategy to business strategy. I don't think you can have a business strategy without thinking about the talent strategy. So I don't know if they're aligned or integrated.

[00:10:53] So, again, I think in the 80s, 90s, maybe even early 2000s, there was a lot of this thought about I need that seat at the table. I need to be seen as strategic. And many people did make that leap. You know, they did move from the dot matrix printer babysitting and the triplicate forms to being more at the leadership table. But many were still left behind. So I think, you know, Disrupt HR came out of more than just that.

[00:11:19] You know, a piece of it was I felt like there were people out there who had something to say that were never going to fill out a call for speakers form. They didn't have a speaker demo reel. Maybe they've never even spoken before. And I wanted to hear their ideas. So that was really the driver of Disrupt HR. But to call it Disrupt HR, why did HR need disrupting? I think it was around that. You know, we need to make the leap beyond just wanting a seat at a table.

[00:11:44] We need to step into the real unique opportunity that I believe HR has, which is to have the most influence and impact in every organization. Again, if people drive the business strategy, if people are the ones that help us to innovate, to stay agile, to actually do the business, become more competitive, then I, as the HR leader, hold the lever to business success.

[00:12:08] And I think there's a real missed opportunity out there for, again, there are some great HR leaders, executives, CHROs who are doing amazing work. But we also still have a cohort that don't realize that opportunity. That the fact that I can access every part of the business through my influence on people, whether that's, you know, policies that we have or our, which again, HR is not responsible for culture, but they certainly are kind of the culture captain.

[00:12:38] They should be. You know, whether it's making sure we have benefits and pay structures to attract the right people, all of those things are really important to whether or not our company is actually able to be successful, grow, change, you know, evolve whatever they need to do. And so HR, I think, still needs to be disrupted, not because we're necessarily as behind as maybe many were during that seat at the table discussion where they were still in that transactional administrative role.

[00:13:08] But I think now there's never been a better opportunity to work in HR. And many organizations do realize how much a strong and strategic, truly strategic, HR leader can contribute to their business success. Yes, there are still a few businesses out there where they just want that transactional admin person. And there are HR people that want that role. You guys marry up and, you know, go do your thing.

[00:13:35] But if there is someone at a company like that who's saying, I want to do more, I want to be more, then I think they're going to have to be bold and step out and look for that opportunity because those are out there too. I love what you just said. The problem that I have is that every time business leaders blame HR for HR being HR, it's because they don't want to do the things that HR needs them to do. Compliance, forget about. Compliance, everybody's got to do.

[00:14:04] I'm talking about more of the performance management compensation culture you mentioned. They don't want it to be part of the business, but they want HR to lead it because it's got no other home and HR becomes the dumping ground for crap that leaders don't want to deal with. And most specifically around performance management, you know, find me a way to keep to to kill. Find me a way to to delete a part of my organization. I mean, riff a part of my organization.

[00:14:32] Find me a reason to fire that person. I want them gone. You know, those are things people actually hear in HR. And where I'm going with this, Jennifer, is that I believe that I don't think it's HR's fault necessarily, but I think that they get pasted with monikers because they get put in situations where leaders don't have a lot of acumen on certain things.

[00:15:01] And they just throw it at HR and say, you deal with it. It's your problem. It's an HR problem. And I think they're all business problems. Well, yeah, to your point, I think HR gets blamed for a lot. I mean, how many times have people said, you know, HR won't let me do that? And you're like, exactly. Did you actually go talk to HR? Well, I know they'd say no. Well, they might. Right. But, you know, would it behoove you to understand why they are saying, you know, a friend of mine, good mentor of mine, Chris Dunn, who's now the CHRO at Marriott Corporation.

[00:15:31] He wrote a book a few years ago, which I've got three copies on my shelf right here. The Nine Faces of HR. And he had been one of the early bloggers with a blog called the HR Capitalist, which was one of the first blogs I started reading back in 2006, 2007, something like that. And I always loved Chris's point of view. And I love his take on the, you know, in HR, a lot of us get that label of HR always says no. HR tells us what we can't do.

[00:15:59] When we come up with a great idea, they tell us it's illegal or against a policy. And Chris's take was when a manager comes to you, like in your example, and says, I want to fire this person. And you're looking at this person and they're in 12 different protected classes and you have no documentation in your files that they've ever had any decision. And they've been a performance exceeds performance every time. Yeah. So that manager comes to you and says, I want to fire this person. Instead of saying, no, you can't do that. You've never documented any performance issues and they're in a protected class.

[00:16:27] What about saying, great, I'll help you do that. But here's what I need from you in order to make that happen. So taking the responsibility off of HR to be the bad guy and putting it back on the manager. If you truly feel like this person needs to be fired, then I will work with you to do the work that we need to do to see if that's the right decision. Instead of just saying, no, we can't do that. You're really training your leadership that this is, again, we work together here.

[00:16:54] You know, I'm not guarding the gates of this and you're not, you know, able to run and do whatever you want. I'm not the police of you and you aren't the one to, you know, be out there telling people how terrible I am. We just have to have the EQ or whatever that is, be able to deal with people who come to HR that want to make them the scapegoat and not allow that to happen.

[00:17:17] Are they still going to, you know, like my son works at a company where he, you know, he's a manager and he called me a couple of years ago and he's like, one of my best employees is quitting. Who's been here 26 years and she's, I kept saying she's the most valuable employee in the company. And I'm like, and this is a large global company. I said, why is she quitting? And he said, because she want, she bought a house, you know, out of state and she wants to work remote. Which they're already mostly, they only work two days in the office since the pandemic anyway. And I said, well, you're her boss.

[00:17:47] Why, why is she quitting? Because she was told they couldn't do that. You're telling me that you'd like to keep her. And he said, yeah, I'd be happy for her to work remote. She does three days a week already. And I said, so why, why? Again, I'm confused. And he said, well, HR wouldn't let her do that. And I said, what do you mean? You're her manager. You're saying HR wouldn't let her work remote, but you'd be willing to allow that. And he said, yeah, HR said no. And I said, did you talk to HR? And he said, no. My boss told me HR said no.

[00:18:16] And I said, well, here's what you need to do. If you truly want this employee to stay, you need to make the case for why she needs to stay, why you can work with her remotely, how she did it all during the pandemic, how she's doing it three days a week now. And you need to go to HR and make that argument. He said, yeah, she's telling me she has a sister who works here in the company who works in HR and that it's not right. And I'm like, so again, the actual person who talked to HR is saying HR said that's not right. So somebody in the chain decided this couldn't happen.

[00:18:45] That wasn't her direct manager, but HR got the blame and the man never talked to him. And there are certain circumstances where no has to be appropriate. But, you know, we have to be, parent has to be the bad guy sometimes. And I'm not saying HR is the parent, but yeah, at some point we're going to make a decision that people aren't going to like. Well, you know, I don't know if you've been in compensation, but one time when I was a comp manager at a large global manufacturing medical device company,

[00:19:15] we were going through and doing option grants, for example. And a manager, a very senior leader of a business unit came to me and said, hey, I need another 50,000 units to grant to someone. And I said, no. And they said, what do you mean no? And I said, well, we've already granted them. We've already gotten approval by our CEO. The CEO is about to go to the board. No, unless you can take it from someone else.

[00:19:43] And he's like, I have nobody to take it from. I'm like, well, did you talk to the CEO about this? And he's like, no, I want to come to you first. I'm telling you. Unless you go talk to the CEO and the CEO says, okay, I don't see how we can do this. And I was branded the bad guy because I was telling him how to do it, how to get approval for it, but that there was no way my hands were tied. I had the purse strings and he should have come to me about two months ago when we were about to start the process.

[00:20:12] And I could have gone to the CEO or gone to the board and said, hey, could we get an additional amount to be able to give out? But that's where sometimes no has to be okay because there's rules for things like this. And like you mentioned, there's laws as well. But it wasn't in this case. It was we have hard and fast dates. And if we're going to the board with a certain recommendation, you can't come in at the end of the process and go, I need more. Well, but there's 100% chance that that manager went,

[00:20:42] you know, when they had their discussion with the employee said, I wanted to give you 50,000 more, but HR didn't let me. Right. So that's back to my, you know, Chris Dunn example. In that scenario who, you know, obviously you were there, you did the right thing, but the manager comes to you, the numbers have already been cut. It's about to go to the board to approval. You could, you know, maybe instead of saying, no, I can't, it's okay. If you want to do that, I can tell you the, you know, everything's already been finalized. It's about to go to the board.

[00:21:10] The only way to make that change would be for you to go talk to the CEO. Do you want to do that and then come back to me? You know, you've removed yourself from responsibility and put it back on them. And I think. Well, and ultimately that's what happened. Yeah. That's something that HR leaders have to get better at not allowing themselves to be the scapegoat when they shouldn't be. Sometimes they are going to be. Yeah. That's truly against the law. We can't do that. Exactly.

[00:21:35] Well, and especially in the, in the example you gave, which is the example of, you know, the remote work situation, it's become such a religious war now. And it really becomes a difference in power. The employee has the power or the, the, the manager and the leadership have power. You know, if that employee is really that valuable to the company, they have the power. And. Well, the manager needs to make the case though. Exactly.

[00:22:04] Well, if they want to keep them. Yes. Unless they want just the excuse. And then the excuse is HR said no. In which case it's self-fulfilling. It is. Let's, let's HR people from that fate. Exactly. Jennifer, we talked about, you know, HR is right for disruption. Yes. What is disrupt HR? I think disrupt HR to me as again, the person who. Maybe.

[00:22:32] Well, there are people disrupting HR before me. I'm not going to claim that I was the first, but. But at least put some formality around it. It really is that there are people out there that are not just in HR recruiting who have ideas about how to improve or change or disrupt the future of work. And so the goal with disrupt HR. Let's bring all those like-minded people together who want to do that, who aren't the people who just want to do the administrative work and check the boxes. And let's hear from people all across the spectrum.

[00:23:01] So again, it's called disrupt HR. But I love to hear, you know, an IT leader or a marketing person or all kinds of people give talks at disrupt HR because everyone's perspective on the future of work, you know, and how it can be improved is different. I know in the early days when I was able to watch a lot of the disrupt HR talks, I remember, you know, one talk was, it was an IT leader who was, his disrupt HR talk was about how to improve the application process because he so annoyed with how he had had to go through

[00:23:29] the apply processes at his own company. So he's bringing not only the customer lens to the process, but also an IT lens where, you know, not only had he probably never taken the initiative to go to his own HR team to tell them that, but HR also didn't open it up to everyone and say, hey, who has ideas? We know it sucks or we know it can be improved if you don't want to say it sucks.

[00:23:53] And we'd love to get anyone's ideas on how we can improve this and then try some of those things, maybe fail at some of those things and keep trying because even processes like I have a keynote now about being the chief disruption officer and we'll be giving that, you know, next week at the large annual sharing conference. One of the important things that I remind people of is disruption doesn't have to happen just because something's broken.

[00:24:20] Sometimes it's taking a process that's working just fine, but sitting down and saying, could it be better? Could it, you know, help us save time so that we could do something else? It's the same conversation we're having with people at AI. If we could improve this process, make it better, simpler, you know, solve some of the challenges with something that works just fine, then there's room for us to continue to do more maybe in other areas.

[00:24:46] So, you know, I think often maybe the first impression of being disruptive is that I'm going to, you know, move fast and break things. Okay, well, that can happen too. But I'm more about let's have some intentional disruption. Again, what is broken that needs to be fixed? Let's get all kinds of input on that, bringing people not just in HR to help us solve HR problems, but also what's working well that we haven't revisited because it's just easy and it works

[00:25:13] because there's real opportunities for disruption there too. And then, you know, maybe a third kind of disruption is what's the wild and wacky, crazy idea? I always tell people, look at your consumer experience. You know, it's overused to say you go to Netflix or to Amazon and they serve up things that they know you'll like because they have that data and it makes it easy for you to sit down on a Friday night and say, whoa, wow, this looks interesting. I'll watch that rather than the 3 billion titles that are on Netflix.

[00:25:40] Take that back into the workplace and maybe use learning and development as an example and say, I navigate Amazon and it tells me what it thinks I need to buy and it makes it easy for me to make a buying decision. I navigate Netflix and it tells me what it thinks I want to watch and that makes it easy. So with our learning development, how do we set up the system so that it both knows what types of learning people need and the jobs that they have or even the jobs that they want to have in the organization can suggest learning to them.

[00:26:09] So sometimes it's just doing something like that, taking like how I navigate the world as a person, what's easy for me when I go out in the world, what's hard for me, and then kind of turning lens back on the workplace and saying, if I hate this process out in the, you know, the working world or the real world, I hate, maybe it's my age, but I hate, you know, the answer 12 questions on the phone tree before I actually get to speak to a live person.

[00:26:38] So I am absolutely the old lady yelling in my phone, representative person, human, you know? So I had somebody tell me once that the secret is to start cursing and that you automatically get kicked to a representative. I'm like, well, why doesn't it kick me to a representative when I say representative? But still, it'll be like, I'm sorry, I didn't get that. If that absolutely drives me insane as a consumer, but yet I go to my company and we have a similar thing, even for the phone tree, just to speak to human in our company, or especially in the

[00:27:06] apply process or something like that, then I should be saying, this is painful for me out there. It's painful here too, and that's costing us. And Jennifer, just to be honest with you, a lot of the stuff that we're doing is replacing a lot of these processes and just slapping AI on the front end of it. But it's still the same damn process. What I love to do going into any organization as a consultant is to ask the three-letter question, which becomes a four-letter word for a lot of people. Why? Why do we do this?

[00:27:36] Who sets this up? Another three-letter word. Who? You know, why is this there? And a lot of times we hear, well, you know, we had Barbara here, you know, like 10, 15 years ago, and Barbara set this up, and it just works, and everybody's comfortable with it. And that's the who moved my cheese answer, which, you know, if you try and improve things, and they go, no, it's not improvement. It confuses me, and I don't like it because I like the old process. Why do you like the old process? Well, we've been doing it for 15 years. Yeah, 15 years was, you know, 2011?

[00:28:06] That's too long ago. You know, I have a lot of companies that I've dealt with things that they say, well, we built this in the early 2000s. Do you realize it was two decades ago? You know, there's a lot of change in the world of HR now. And to your point, you know, I'm that crazy guy who goes on that IVR tree as well and starts screaming, well, why was it created in the first place? It was created because we did IVR as if we were talking to a person going through those decision trees, right?

[00:28:36] And those decision trees were made 20, 30 years ago. Mm-hmm. It's different now. The large language models enable us to do NLP, natural language processing, on the fly, and so you could ask a question. Unfortunately, the thing at the other end of the phone is still stupid. Yes. Well, it also makes you go through the process, like with my bank. I have to go through the same 20-step, enter a number when I just want to talk to the loan department. Right.

[00:29:04] Why do I want to know your address, your hours, all this other stuff first? But, you know, again, the Disrupt HR, why does Disrupt HR exist? It exists because the goal is that people get to share those ideas. And then they get a video, ideally, of their talk. And then they can share that idea with the world. So, you know, since it started in 2013, there's now over 11,000 of the five-minute talks out there. Now, are all of them great or new or revolutionary?

[00:29:30] I always joke, like, you know, in the Gladiator movie where he's like, are you not entertained? People will tell me, I went to a Disrupt HR event and I wasn't disrupted. And I'm like, were you not disrupted? You maybe met someone new. You laughed. You got out of your house on a weeknight. And you probably heard something that at least piqued your interest, even though you might not have gotten, you know, space lasers or something from it. Disruption doesn't have, that's back to what I'm saying, it doesn't have to be completely doing something new.

[00:29:59] So it can be a new way of thinking about an old process. Right. And to be honest with you, every time I've presented, I've had people who said, meh. And I've had people who come up to me and said, that's the best presentation I've ever seen. You're going to get a continuum of response, no matter who's speaking at what, because you can't generalize these messages enough that they wash out completely and they're unnecessary.

[00:30:24] So I love your example because when I give presentations and I'm not speaking, I can't speak to everybody. I'm speaking to a few people. And if everybody in the audience is entertained, that's great. I try and use humor. I try and use great examples. I've been doing presentations for 40 years at least. And literally right after college, I was thrust into it by Taurus Perrin.

[00:30:51] And to be honest with you, I'm good at it, I think, but I'm not good at it to some people. And they don't like my humor and they don't like how childish I am and blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Okay, fine. Well, and I think to your point, anybody like I've been speaking, you know, if you count speaking in front of groups as an HR leader, four decades as well. And I even, I was going to bed last night because I'm, you know, working through practicing, rehearsing my talk for SHRM next week, which I think is amazing.

[00:31:17] And I absolutely, I couldn't love my slide deck anymore because I've updated all the slides and I'm like, this is literally my most valuable, precious asset. So I'm in love with the presentation. I'm in love with the talk. And I went to bed last night after kind of spending all day just going back. And I actually, I asked both Claude and ChatGBT to evaluate it. And of course they, they like, they go against each other sometimes. Of course they do. Chat, Claude gave me a B plus and I'm like, oh, Claude, I hate you. But I went to bed last night.

[00:31:44] Like what I know is I feel really good about this presentation. Good. I feel like it's what HR leaders need to hear. And I'm experienced enough that I believe I'll do a good job with it. But I need to go into this knowing there will be people who won't like it. There will always be one person, you know, it's funny because you don't get as much written feedback as you used to get when everybody filled out paper forms. Right. But even when they filled out paper forms, the ratio is still the same.

[00:32:14] Now they do it online. And the same presentation, well, again, it's updated now that I did last year at SHRM. I got my feedback back. You know, there were of the 2,000 people in the room, a few dozen that took the time to fill out the forms. But in reading through those written comments, it's like this is the best presentation ever. Jennifer was the highlight of the conference. It's amazing. But then you get to this person who's like, she was terrible. Exactly. I didn't learn anything. Well, yeah, I didn't learn anything way too. It was beneath me. It was boring. Yeah. Most people were in the same room and heard the same presentation.

[00:32:44] And that will always be. Yeah, exactly. And that's why I'm saying there's a bell curve of people who are going to adopt what you say and not. And I think what's interesting about the disrupts is it's meant to be fast moving, delivering a punchline and then getting on to the next one. And so it's not a long, one-hour, boring presentation with 150 slides that someone's reading from.

[00:33:12] It's taking on a new way of kind of disrupting the way in which we go to conferences, which I think is brilliant because people have the attention span of a dog with squirrels and with bright lights. And these two, every time they hear somebody passing by on the street, they go. So, you know, so my point is, and that's the reason why I keep my podcast always under 40 minutes, which we're getting close.

[00:33:38] But I think that a lot of people like or need to have quick, short messages that they can evaluate and then move on. And, you know, to the extent of which, and by the way, your presentation, I'm sure, Jennifer, is going to be amazing. Well, I'll love it. I'll walk off stage and give myself an A plus and take that call. Forget you, Claude. I'm firing you. I'm going to, you know, another model.

[00:34:06] But my point is that the way you've set up this formula, I think, is a testament to how the world is now consuming shorter bits of information. And, you know, those 11,000, I'm sure there are tons of great nuggets still from the early days or till now. There's going to be great nuggets in there that we could mine that would, you know, for a practitioner to learn from. I'm sure they could. So they have to go to, what's it?

[00:34:36] Disrupthr.co? Dot co. Dot co. Dot co. Dot com. To your point, it's, I always try to say to people, it's important not only to listen to talks that challenge you, that you agree with, but don't dismiss the talks that you disagree with because those people also help you to form your own beliefs. I always use the example of my best friend now is Laurie Rudiman, who's Punk Rock HR.

[00:35:03] Laurie had an anonymous blog when I started reading her blog back in 2007, 8, something like that. It was called Team Building is for Suckers. She's a great writer. So it was, you know, really amazing. And then she eventually, you know, changed that to Punk Rock HR and then came out and attached her name to it. And she's amazing in every way. But I always tell people, and Laurie knows this, Laurie and I are very different. We're best friends for a reason. We have a lot of different philosophies, a lot of different approaches to work.

[00:35:32] But what I've always appreciated and why she is my favorite writer of anything that she writes, probably four times out of 10, maybe now, as we've kind of both maybe merged a little bit. But in the early days, probably six or seven times out of 10, I would read her blog and be like, she's totally wrong. What I appreciated about it, she made the argument. It was well thought out, her point of view, that then, you know, my first response might be, I disagree with that.

[00:36:01] But instead of just leaving and going, she's wrong, I'd have to say, but can I explain why I disagree with her as eloquently as she has explained her position? And if I can't, do I truly have a firm belief in that? Or is my belief something that I need to explore opening up? Or even if I think I'm firm, you know, should I explore some of her counterpoints? So, you know, if you go to Disrupt HR, to your point, there's meant to be really one idea.

[00:36:28] Kind of hard in five minutes, 20 slides, 15 seconds to give, you know, the talk I'm going to give in a short next week. I mean, you pull one thing from that and you try to make the case for it. But if you hear 12 talks at a Disrupt HR event, five minutes each, they're probably going to be, again, like we talked about, some people who are just so nervous, they fall flat on their face. And, you know, at least they, but I'm always like, they challenge themselves. And those people often feel good about the fact that they tried and maybe they'll try again and they'll be better next time.

[00:36:54] But you'll hear, I assume in some of those, you'll be like, well, you know, that was nothing new. Well, maybe you should also then say, well, what would you say to add to that? Or, you know, so that's, like I said, when people tell me I wasn't disrupted. I'm like, because you went expecting some, you know, again, lightning bolt from the sky. And by the way, if they were disrupted, maybe that lightning bolt would have been something they hated or something that they were so angry about. In all of the talks, what do you take away?

[00:37:23] It's like, I agree with that person and here's why. Or, you know, that one is not really what I would have done, but could I apply something like that? So it's much more on us to extend the learning. Even if you just watch one of the videos, you know, extend the learning by then sitting back and saying, back to my consumer experience, if I hate the phone tree, I should look into my workplace and see if we have anything like that, that people also hate. Same thing with a Disrupt HR talk.

[00:37:50] If I like it or if I don't like it or if, you know, I agree with or I don't agree with it, take the lens back and say, are there things that because I disagree with what they said that I need to do myself? You know, okay, you totally disagree with my idea that I shared. Hopefully next Disrupt HR event, you'll share your idea instead. And what we're going to do on the show notes is talk about Disrupt HR a little bit and talk about how people can attend them or get involved.

[00:38:16] So as you mentioned, DisruptHR.co is the best place to start, right? Yes. Jennifer, it's been a pleasure to have you. It's been so cool to spend some time with you talking about how HR really needs to be disrupted and your story. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for having me. And again, I think I'm still getting disrupted and I look forward to it. So it's not a negative to say HR needs to be disrupted. Business needs to be disrupted. Work needs to be disrupted. The world needs to be disrupted, you know?

[00:38:47] But let's, what I hope people will take from this is I challenge you to disrupt yourself, your organization, your people. Always be looking for that lens of even if I agree with it or if it's working well, should we at least visit it to see if it could be better? If I disagree with it, then what can we do to make it better? You know, there's all kinds of opportunities to make improvements. And as a result, you need to pick one or two. But when you pick one or two, don't just pick the ones that are glaring problems.

[00:39:15] Pick something that's currently working as well to go back and look at it again. This is the definition of innovation. Mm-hmm. Thank you. All right. Thank you. We appreciate you. And we'll check in with you to see how the presentation went. Yes. A plus already, I can tell you. It's going to be. Thank you so much. Take care. And everybody, stay safe. All right. Thank you for listening to the HR Data Labs podcast. Don't forget to hit subscribe and share it with your network.

[00:39:43] You can also check out the recordings on Spotify or the HR channel, now on Roku and Fire TV. Thank you. Take care and stay safe.