312: Blowing Up the HR Playbook with Lisa Sterling

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[00:00:22] I think about job descriptions. They tell people what box to be in, not what they're capable of or what the company actually needs from them next, right? Performance conversations produce ratings, not growth. So we are blowing that all up. Is it going to be disruptive? Heck yeah. But for us, this is how we build and scale a talent infrastructure for a company who doesn't want to survive in the next phase of work, but wants to thrive in it. We got to be really impactful and really provocative, or we're going to become obsolete.

[00:00:53] Hey, everybody. I'm Lori Rudiman. Welcome to Punk Rock HR. My guest today is Lisa Sterling. She's the Chief People Officer at Perceptics. And she's on Punk Rock HR today to talk about all things about the future of work, the future of HR, and what Perceptics is trying to do in the marketplace. A funny thing happens when you prepare for an interview and you have all of your questions, somehow your guests just exceed your expectations.

[00:01:22] And during the conversation, Lisa does that. And we talk about all things related to leadership in HR and even imposter syndrome. So if you're into all of that and you're into a strong, amazing woman leading a people function at a really cool company, well, sit back and enjoy this conversation with Lisa Sterling on this week's Punk Rock HR.

[00:01:55] Hey, Lisa. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you. It's so good to be here and good to see you again. Yeah, you as well. We just saw one another like a month ago. And before we get into all of that, why don't you tell everybody who you are and what you're all about? Oh, goodness. How much time do we have? No, I'm just kidding. So professionally, my name is Lisa Sterling. I'm the Chief People Officer at a really cool company called Perceptics. In my personal life.

[00:02:21] I'm a mom to three amazing young women who are starting their own experiences and building their own lives. As I was just telling you, Lori, my last one just graduated. I live outside the Twin Cities. And yeah, I love to be disruptive in both of my personal lives and my professional lives, which anymore is one life, right? They're so fluid and so connected. I guess I'll just say I'm disruptive everywhere I go. Well, I would agree with that. I've known you for a long time, both personally and professionally.

[00:02:50] And it's been really great to see your career evolve. And so, you know, we don't have to do like the long Winston Churchill biography here. But like, when did you start in HR? And what was it like back in the day? It's interesting. I only really launched into a true HR role about 11 years ago.

[00:03:12] Up until then, I had always been in HR tech organizations who sold their products and services to HR. So I always kind of think about the fact that I've been in an adjacent role to HR, but I've never been responsible for all the bureaucracy and craziness that HR comes with up until about 2015. And that's when I stepped into this role. And here I am today wondering, what am I doing with my life?

[00:03:40] Well, I mean, that's everybody's journey, especially at our age. You know, that's how that works. When you decided to make that pivot from the HR tech adjacent world to human resources, what were your expectations about the HR job? Well, let me start with when I got asked to do this role in my first company, my answer was a very adamant, absolutely not. There might've been a few explicits in there,

[00:04:07] in my absolutely not. But it was because my expectations of what HR were, were so misaligned with how I fundamentally think, the beliefs that I have around employee experience, organizational performance, all those things. And so I went into this role with the guidance of, get rid of all of that, go build what you believe an exceptional people team looks like.

[00:04:32] And so my expectations were both low and high. They were low because I knew that there was just so much, again, bureaucracy and things that you had to deal with in what I perceived HR to really be. But they were also really high because I was like, well, there's so much low hanging fruit of how to just blow things up and, you know, make things better, rip things out and replace them. So I would say, you know, I expected this job to be both challenging and rewarding,

[00:05:02] that it was going to be one of the least respected executive roles in the organization. And my voice would not be nearly as important when I was at the table and the conversations that I was brought into, and that people were going to constantly question, why did you take the leap and go into this job? All of those things came true. Well, wait, I want to know, why'd you take the leap?

[00:05:28] I know in my heart and in my head, I knew I could be influential in starting to change the way people think about HR, the way HR is ran. I wanted to fundamentally change the role of a CHRO or chief people officer to something that was more business oriented, that was really the lever that drove organizational performance, not the person who ran all the people shit.

[00:05:55] Yeah. Yeah, no, no, it's Punk Rock HR. It truly is a lot of shit. You know, just because modern day HR leaders don't want to do all of that doesn't mean they don't do it. So I wonder if you had that experience in the role discovering, oh, I can get to do these strategic things, these elevated, you know, pieces of work, but someone still has to like go through visa paperwork. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. When I first started out here, the way work was prioritized

[00:06:23] for a CHRO and for an HR team at that time was far more about like, I would say it was the 80% that drove 20% of the outputs of the organization, right? Whereas now, like I look at things through the lens of how do we harness, you know, the collective good of 20% of our priorities to drive

[00:06:46] 80% of our success, right? That definitely was the lens, right? And so I don't think there was as much of an expectation on me in the beginning or on my team to be doing things that were provocative or that were really driving financial or organizational performance because we were HR. We were supposed to take care of job architectures and make sure we were compliant when we were hiring people, right? We weren't fundamentally driving successful performance or contribution

[00:07:16] in the organization. So a lot of people would say, it's really great that you now have the opportunity to do that. Many HR leaders, whether they're chief people officers or chief HR officers do not have that opportunity, but that work still needs to get done, right? The rote basic administrative work of HR. Is it getting done these days by people in HR or by AI?

[00:07:43] Honestly, I would say right now, it's a combination of both, right? I think organizations, I mean, God, I can't wake up any morning and not have seven emails, you know, top and top of my inbox about what AI is doing here. I think it is definitely, it's still a mixture, right? I think people haven't been able to really figure out beyond some basic and from like basic capabilities, how to really leverage AI.

[00:08:10] And they are using it for more of those tactical and transactional pieces. We, on the other hand, on my team are thinking about like, what are the biggest problems we are trying to solve that if we could solve them now, unlock a completely new level of growth in our organization. And that's how we're thinking, like, how can AI help us do that? The reality is many companies are now, are simply just using AI to do some of that stuff, like process the offboarding, the onboarding, do some visa paperwork,

[00:08:38] maybe get rid of your help desk for your people help desk and do some automation around tickets. They haven't gotten to a place where they are harnessing AI and truly augmenting, enhancing the human capability. Hey everybody, Tim Sackett, host of HR Famous, a new podcast on the Work Defined Network. Am I famous? No, I'm HR famous. My wife says I'm a micro celebrity and 13 HR ladies around the world

[00:09:04] want their picture with me, which I think is funny. So, hey, what do we talk about on the pod? We talk about all the dumb stuff we do in HR in any given day, week, month, and we have fun with it and we have some great guests. Come check us out. We're not famous, we're HR famous. Are you able to give us an example of some cool work that you've done in your role at Perceptics where you're really thinking about this differently? Because one of the things you're almost describing

[00:09:31] is the premortem that I teach, right? You're like, okay, this is a problem we see over and over again. There's a new and emerging technology out there that can help us rethink our strategy. Let's figure out how we continually fail in the past and let's start to plan for success. So, have you done it? Are you working on it? Like how is that going at Perceptics? Yeah, so I would say we're in flight. So, we are building the strategy right now around

[00:10:02] what has the potentiality to be a highly disruptive new way of thinking about talent practices across an organization. We don't have the automation fully baked in terms of what that will look like. We have the ideation because right now our focus has been like we need to build the philosophy and the strategy. And it really is about, it's moving away from all of the, I'm just going to say outdated

[00:10:28] and archaic processes and things that HR is typically responsible for. So, our goal at Perceptics is really to move away from job descriptions, career ladders, job architectures, siloed performance ratings within that single framework, right? And move to what we're calling a capability operating system, which really is more about how people operate versus how they actually work, right? Because

[00:10:55] if I think about, people have heard me say this on other podcasts, if I think about job descriptions, they tell people what box to be in, not what they're capable of or what the company actually needs from them next, right? Performance conversations produce ratings, not growth. So, we are blowing that all up and moving to this fluent operating system that is super simple. It's five domains, three expressions, and it will fundamentally drive all of our talent decisions from when we say hello

[00:11:21] to when we say goodbye. And the goal is to build this in an AI way where everything we do is conversational and it's all in the moment, in real time, and it's driven by our employees. It's not driven by our HR team or our leaders, right? It really is a bottom-up approach to this. Is it going to be disruptive? Heck yeah, but for us, this is how we build and scale a talent infrastructure for a company who doesn't want to survive in the next phase of work, but wants to thrive in it. And that's,

[00:11:50] we got to be really impactful and really provocative or we're going to become obsolete, right? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's so interesting that you are almost de-centering the job and centering the human in this conversation. So, it really forces you to rethink how you identify talent, how you train talent, how you keep them engaged. And I mean, this is what Perceptics is and does, and I think it might be appropriate right now to talk about your organization and why this goes hand

[00:12:19] in hand. So, what is Perceptics? What do they do? And to start for people who maybe have a perception of us, we started as truly an employee listening organization, right? Our foundation, we've been around for 22 years, really started in employee listening. So, you know, all types of opportunities to gather feedback from your employees. Most people commonly know us as like an annual engagement survey platform, right? That has shifted

[00:12:46] significantly. And our focus now is really on how we activate the power of people. And so, our platform has really evolved. And we talk about it as an AI-powered employee experience platform, but it's not about data collection and signal identification, et cetera. We are really now focused more on how do we take all the massive insights and data that organizations have and shift them actually

[00:13:15] into action, behavior change, and ultimately business performance, right? And so, we are really an AI-first organization. And it's an organization that's continuing to evolve. Laurie, you probably saw this when we were in Chicago, right? We are continuously looking at ways to really, truly get that energy from employees and activate that discretionary effort, that behavior change,

[00:13:41] so that people are using their superpowers in supercharged ways. And it's exciting. We drink our own champagne at Perceptics. Some people say eat your own dog food, which I never quite understood that analogy. I prefer champagne myself. Yeah. So do I. A good bottle of it, mind you. But no, I think it's, you know, I spoke to a CHRO a couple weeks ago, actually at our exact conference, who said

[00:14:05] to me, Lisa, we are data rich and insight poor. I paused for a minute. I think that's a lot of CHROs feel that way, right? Like, we can gather data from our employees through Proceptics. We can gather data about how our employees feel from doing things like Glassdoor, other platforms. But we have all this information and all these signals, and yet we become polarized and paralyzed on what the hell do we do with this,

[00:14:32] right? And so that really is the crux of where Proceptics is making a big impact. It's not just the data collection and signaling anymore. It's like actually driving behavior change that truly creates value for the organization, either financially or what have you. And it's exciting because the things that we're doing ourselves internally beyond our listening and behavior change, but this type of transformation around thinking about our talent practices differently really aligns very closely with what

[00:15:01] we're trying to help our customers do through behavior change. We're just doing it from all angles versus, you know, maybe a multi-point of entry within our customer base. Well, I think there's a lot of integrity there because you can't help your customers be it if they don't see it in you. And that's always been my disconnect in this HR tech market. We have these companies who are putting out world-class software and not doing any of the

[00:15:25] work internally to become a world-class organization. And I know Proceptics has made some really big announcements over the past couple of months about acquisitions and the way you're rethinking your whole business model. I think it's probably perfect to talk about that right now because it adds some really rich context. So tell us about some of the announcements you've made over the past few months. Yeah, absolutely. The one I think we are probably the most excited about right now is we

[00:15:53] acquired a small company called Lyceum a few months ago. They are a very interesting platform and I think it really is the future of this entire kind of people activation system because this is where the true behavior change comes, right? Lyceum is or was, now they're part of Proceptics, but our develop platform is a conversational learning platform. So think about, you know, traditional,

[00:16:21] I know for me, I am not the type of person you want to send to a seminar or to a training on Tuesday because that's not how I learn. It fundamentally is gone, right? What we have been able to build with develop is really that conversational education and learning in the flow of work that is tailored to your learning, right? We were just joking about this. We did an example of our own utilization of develop at Proceptics with our executive leadership team around our new messaging. As we were walking

[00:16:51] into exact, we wanted to make sure that all of our executive leadership team was talking about us in the same way. And so we each sat down in a conference room and we pulled up develop and we went through our own personalized learning. My personalized learning took, I think, about seven minutes for me to go through the learning. Our chief product officer did it in like three minutes and our CEO joked that it took him like 12 minutes. It is an adaptive learning that is all conversational,

[00:17:19] that is not just understanding and letting you say that you know what you're learning. It's actually making sure that you are comprehending what you're learning and on the back end building a skill graph, right? So instead of having your compliance training running in the background of your computer and you click the, you know, click ahead through everything and say, check, it's done. It's not about participation. It is truly about an actual understanding and demonstrating of

[00:17:45] capability. That's where true behavior change comes, right? It doesn't come by going to a seminar on Monday. It comes from participating in this on a Monday and that behavior showing up on Thursday or Friday. That to me is where learning is going. I see this ultimately being a replacement for a lot of learning management systems out there where content is outdated. It sits and it's not really utilized. And we don't know if people are actually consuming and translating consumption to capability.

[00:18:14] Yeah, absolutely. You know, as you were talking, I was thinking about what a radical rethinking of work is happening in the world. And yet for all the leading organizations that are out in front or even in the middle, there's still a bulk of people out there who are measured by really old and outdated KPIs. And never has that been more true than in the world of human resources. And your

[00:18:41] point about being data rich and insight poor really struck me because the things that people come to me with day in day out about their HR jobs are things that they could have mentioned in 1995, 2005, or even 2015 when you took your job, right? So I wonder how can we be so integral into the future of work while

[00:19:07] being tied into a way of doing business that is so outdated? Do you see the tension I'm talking about? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I joke, you and I have joked about this before, like, is this the job people even want? For sure. It has not moved forward. And I think about, you know, in one of my, in one of my previous CHRO gigs, I remember one of the KPIs that was on our scorecard for me

[00:19:32] was the employee engagement score. Now, listen, I work for a company who that's part of what we do, right? It infuriated me, right? For a couple of reasons. One, I don't care what a company's engagement score is. I don't care what our engagement score is. And I know people who work for Perceptix are like, please don't say that out loud. I don't care what the score is. I care what it does in terms of causation and correlation to business performance, you know, productivity,

[00:20:00] utilization, all those things. The number itself is irrelevant. It's all the connectivity to other things that are really important. And two, HR doesn't control engagement. HR engagement is based on all the intimate interactions between individuals and people leaders. And are we walking the talk and do it right? Like I don't own that. No, Lisa, either we are the most powerful

[00:20:25] force ever in corporate America, or we are powerless, right? There's like no in between. I think about HR leaders who come to me, who are responsible for their talent function and say, I'm being held accountable for time to fill when we've got people unresponsive to calendar invites. And like, you are either, you know, all knowing, all doing, all seeing, or you're powerless. There's no in between for a lot of these HR leaders. So when you're out in the field talking to some of your

[00:20:54] customers, what are you hearing from HR directors, HR VPs? Do they want to be promoted? The answer is some do. And I think there's different reasons why I do think there are people who are coming up the ranks, who think differently, who are more provocative. And that's no knock on existing CHROs. But there are some who are just really excited about

[00:21:21] blowing things up, not lifting and shifting, ripping out and replacing, right? And I think those individuals want to get to a place where they feel they have the authority to drive those types of decisions and those types of changes in organizations. I think there's others who sit at the crux of, am I really going to be able to do that? Like if I get to that proverbial seat at the table, is my voice going to be a powerful voice? Am I going to have the influence, right? And when

[00:21:50] people talk to me about that, my first thing is this isn't about the job. This it's bigger than that, right? It's about your own level of influence, your own strategic thinking. Are you going to work for an organization where your CEO sees you as the most important partner on the executive team or the HR person, right? Like those things all are things people should consider. But I do think people want

[00:22:17] the role. I do think people find it to be a really impactful and powerful role. I love being a chief people officer. How many more times am I going to do it? I don't know the answer to that. I've landed a pretty phenomenal gig here, have an amazing CEO, CFO partnership and a great executive team. I don't know if I can top that. I also don't know if I want to do it again, right? Like I think the role has changed and I like the new role way better than I liked the original role.

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[00:23:09] Well, for sure. And I think there's something to be said about getting to a position that often spoils you. And once you have it, there's no way that you can go back. I think about the most amazing boss I ever had in my life. And I think if I ever had to report to anybody again, if it's not Vadim, it's nobody. It's nobody, you know? So for me in my own life, there's like a certain standard that I hold my own

[00:23:36] experiences too. And I think a lot of people who are young or hungry or even older and hungry for that HR role will get to a position where they land it, but they still have to fight for it. And that fight can be exhausting. I don't know if you hear from people out in the field who are in HR roles who get there and within 18 months, they're like, oh my God, hello, new job, same as the old job, right? So do you have any words of wisdom for those individuals?

[00:24:04] Fundamentally, people go into a job in HR expecting it to move at the same pace as the rest of the organization. And I hate to say this out loud because I feel like I would never tell one of my daughters this, but reset your expectations, right? I think HR just historically and even now is slower to evolve than any other organization. Do I think it's speeding up? Absolutely.

[00:24:32] So I would say reset your expectations and then overperform in the role that you have in terms of your influence, right? Don't be afraid to break glass. Don't people always say, oh, we'll think outside the box. Get rid of the box, right? Like don't think outside it. You're still putting constraints around the way you're thinking. Go in and really get rid of that box and think big.

[00:24:56] There is far more appetite to change things in HR than I have seen in other organizations because, again, there's so much opportunity for things to be improved, right? Like I feel like I could go to our CEO at Perceptics and say, Ross, I'm going to blow this up. And Ross would be like, okay, tell me what you expect and how you're going to measure if you're successful. Okay, go. Versus our CRO going to

[00:25:23] him and saying, hey, I'm going to blow up the entire revenue organization, right? Ross is going to be like, whoa, what the shit are you doing? Like, right? So I do think, I think we're timid sometimes as HR leaders going into a new organization and how provocative can I be? How hard can I push? Can I actually shatter things versus, you know, move things around? Don't be afraid. I've learned and I'm talking with lots of CHRs. They want that, right? They want a team surrounding them that can

[00:25:51] help them do those things because the majority of CHRs I talk to in our customer base think like I do. They don't have the same level of either support or there's other legal aspects, unions, all kinds of things that make it harder for them to pivot at the same rate we can pivot at an organization like Perceptics. I think you're right. Context matters. I also think you've got this unique background

[00:26:18] of understanding business, of understanding strategy and technology aligned with HR that rounds you out so that when you sit on an executive leadership team, you're seeing more than just your own swim lane, right? You're more than just one car on the highway. You can see the entire highway, like all the different lanes. And I think that experience is so underrated and so underappreciated

[00:26:44] by a lot of modern HR leaders. And when I express my concern to people who come to me and say, I would like to go into a chief people officer role, but they've always been in HR, like you got to branch out. You've got to go be curious. I think your expectation is built up of all these different experiences. The depth in the domain of your experience is not just HR, it's life, right?

[00:27:09] It's interesting because I tell my own people team here in Rolls Pass, if you ever want my job, get out of HR. Literally your best bet in terms of expanding your sphere of influence, your knowledge base, et cetera, is leave the HR team, go work in a business unit, go work in product, go work in marketing, go work in customer success, run a global team, like get out of HR. I had the benefit of

[00:27:36] not ever being in HR when I got here. And I think it's been really beneficial. I'll use a prime example. I have my CHRO role and a couple of months ago, our CEO came to me and said, hey, we'd love for you to take over our global customer success team. And there were a number of people in our organization who probably paused and said, why are you giving the customer success team to our CHRO, right? We have a very large renewal target. One, it makes sense because we sell to CHROs. So the relationship and

[00:28:05] knowledge and perspective that I can bring to our customers, economic buyers made sense. But think about it even more broadly. We talk about the employee experience and we all know that the employee experience drives customer experience, which drives stakeholder or performance, right? Of the organization experience. Why not bring those two things together? The people who are responsible for creating an amazing experience for our employees probably can have a direct and material

[00:28:34] impact on people who are driving the success of our customers, right? So I'm sure when I told our customers that, hey, I'm also the global head of customer success, they're probably like, what? But you're the CHRO. Not many CHROs would want to do that because you have to have a sales lens. You have to have a commercial motion to you, right? If I had grown up in HR, I have to believe that that attribute about myself would be there

[00:29:00] because I love to influence people's decisions. But I wouldn't have had the experience and exposure of actually carrying a quota myself, of running a global sales team in my past life. It made it so much easier for me to step into that role and be able to step out when the time's right. But now I can be influential to the organization in a whole different way. And I have a greater appreciation for our customer experience now because I've lived in it with our customers for a quarter.

[00:29:29] Yeah, I love that. I love that so much. Also, you're just a more interesting human being by taking on different responsibilities. There's nothing like talking to someone who's only ever been in HR and all they can talk about is the HR perspective. Like I love my people, right? You know, but I want to talk about other things. And as I say all the time, like hyper-focusing on one thing kind of makes you weird. It makes you unrelatable, right? But if you can have a lot of life experiences,

[00:29:55] you have more to talk about, more opportunities to solve problems and more opportunities to be helpful, in my opinion. One of the things that has really, I've seen evolves in the CHRO and CPO role recently is I look at it that it's kind of like splitting in two different dimensions. One, we are being asked to be more strategic than we've ever been, right? Think AI governance, workforce design, org architecture,

[00:30:23] revenue accountability. And then on the other side, there's the human side of this, right? People are more uncertain. They're more burnt out. They're more skeptical, all those things than they were just a few years ago. And as a chief people officer, you have the opportunity to manage both of those realities at the same time, right? And I think living in the role for your entire time versus having all these

[00:30:49] adjacent or other opportunities, in my opinion and in my experience, allows you to think differently when it comes to workforce design. It allows you to think differently about organizational architecture and what's necessary to compete in six, 12, 24 months versus how you've competed up to here. Not saying that a CHRO who's been in HR their entire career can't do that, but I now understand the

[00:31:15] intricacies of what a revenue team's organization looks like to be hugely successful. I have an opinion now on, do you have separation between commercial renewal and strategic expansion motions, right? Like, I have those perspectives because I have experience in them. I wouldn't have had that if I had grown up entirely in HR. Yeah. So as we start to wrap up the conversation, I just want to drill down on one

[00:31:43] little thing that you've done throughout the talk. You've differentiated between CPO and chief HR officer in a really interesting way. Have you done that intentionally or is it just interchangeable in your mind? Do you talk about them differently? How, how do you position both titles? I do think there is a differentiation. I do not think the titles are interchangeable, but I think they are right in my head. I see a

[00:32:10] delineation. I think chief people officers look at things, at least the ones I have experienced in a different realm. I feel like the organizations who have moved away from CHRO titles to CPO titles have been deliberate in doing that because their expectation of that executive is different than running HR. Like Ross does not expect me to run HR. Ross expects me to be his strategic business

[00:32:38] partner who is thinking about organizational growth transformation and performance. Yes, there's people things and HR things we do, but it's through the lens of work performance, right? That does not mean our people are not important. It's just we're thinking about how do we leverage our people in a really awesome way to drive performance, right? I feel like the companies that are moving in that direction

[00:33:01] are more open to that evolution, right? Now I could be wrong. Some companies may say, well, we use CHRO and CPO interchangeably. We feel like there is a differentiation and maybe that's just because I look at my role through a different lens and I would, I don't call myself a CHRO. I'm not a CHRO. My job is not human resources. My job is organizational growth and value creation.

[00:33:28] That's really interesting. And I hope the way that you've delineated it actually becomes true. What I'm concerned about with this whole titling discussion is that it's the shift from personnel to human resources to business partners, right? Like we've gone through many iterations of what to call ourselves. And we still end up at this place where we're trying to demonstrate that we add value to

[00:33:54] the organization. And what I appreciate about you, Lisa, and why I think you're one of the role models out there is because you know that you deliver value. You have a certain confidence imbued in the way that you take on the job, you pursue the responsibilities and you deliver results. And I just wonder where did this confidence come from? Oh, Lori, that's a whole nother conversation. I was going to write a book, decided not to.

[00:34:19] Now I've started a series of blog posts on Substack that talks about my lack of confidence. I will be the first to admit I spent a number of years with imposter syndrome. The moments that followed after one specific event helped me start to see that I actually am good at what I do. I know what I'm doing. I'm impactful. And that was, I was standing in the box on the New York Stock Exchange when Ceridian was

[00:34:45] going public and the bell rang and everybody was clapping and cheering. And I was clapping and crying hysterically. There is a picture that I'm so glad I don't even know where it's at anymore, where I am sobbing. And everybody was like, oh my gosh, you're so excited. Those weren't tears of joy. Those were tears of feeling like I didn't contribute, that I was not like worthy of being in that box with our CEO,

[00:35:13] David Ossip, who frankly is one of the most brilliant CEOs I've ever had the pleasure of working with and feeling like you don't belong here. And I remember the days that followed in my conversations with David and with others, how instrumental I was to us getting to that moment. And I would never, I could never admit that I was part of that because I felt like if I said that I was going to come off

[00:35:39] as arrogant or egotistical, not confident. And I'm sure my gender had something to do with that, right? Like I didn't want people to think I was a bitch because I was confident and I was saying what I thought were my male counterparts were brilliant, right? But it was in those moments that followed such an exciting event in my career that I was like, you know what? I do know what I'm doing. I am part of this, right? And there are days I still have to remind myself of that. Confidence is

[00:36:07] something that you have to gain over time. Now there are people that get it, right? But I have to continuously remind myself that I'm not arrogant to be like excited about the fact that I am great at what I do. Are there, do I have weaknesses or non-strengths? Absolutely. But my superpowers, man, when my superpowers come out, get the hell out of the way, right? And I know what those are.

[00:36:33] So now I positioned myself and built an amazing team around me that allows me to lift up my superpowers and live in that moment far more than ever before. But for those out there who feel I was in your shoes and it sucks, but you got to find a way to put on new shoes and start running. Lisa, I am a subscriber to your sub stack. We will include the link in the show notes. And I'm just so grateful you came on here to talk a little bit about you, your perception of the modern people

[00:37:01] movement, perceptics, and all things related to HR and AI and the future of work. Like we covered a lot today. If people want to connect with you, where should they go? LinkedIn, probably the best place. Come find me on LinkedIn. I mean, I'm on Instagram, I'm on Facebook, I'm all those things. If you want to see the messy chaotic side of myself, go to those two sites. If you want to see the more polished, go to sub stack. Well, actually sub stack is my messy self. So I would say I LinkedIn or sub stack,

[00:37:29] probably the best places. I feel like wherever you are is terrific. And I follow you on all of those places. And I'm so glad we finally had the opportunity to have you as a guest on Punk Rock HR. Thanks for coming. My pleasure and good luck in your marathon training. I'm so excited to watch you go through this journey. I mean, I'm doing it again. I'm nuts, but I definitely don't feel like an imposter. If anything, I feel like I can kick back and just enjoy it a little bit. Is that the perks of getting older?

[00:37:56] Yes. Yes. I hope that we enjoy more things than we used to before. At least I feel like I do. I relish those little moments. So good luck to you. Hey, everybody. Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Lisa Sterling. Here are three things that stood out to me in this week's conversation. The first is that Lisa is focused on doing really cool work with the traditional HR function at

[00:38:22] Perceptix. But she's also leading the customer success function. And it really reinforced to me that HR knows business. HR does business. And if you can add value in the people domain, you sure as heck can add value throughout the entire enterprise. The second thing that stands out to me is that Lisa is out there talking to people about the future of work. And she is still

[00:38:48] optimistic about HR. She's still optimistic about the impact that we can have in organizations all over the world. So if you work in HR and you wonder like, is this worth it? Feel free to reach out to Lisa on LinkedIn, because I'm sure she'll have some good advice for you. And then third, we ended our conversation today talking about imposter syndrome. Now for a lot of executives,

[00:39:15] especially women, this would be a vulnerable topic. But Lisa is out there writing about it, addressing it head on. And she's put together a sub stack, something that's very cool, where she's just addressing it so people can read it. She called it messy. I don't think it's messy at all. It's authentic. And it's honest. And that's why I love Lisa. And I hope you do too. Punk Rock HR is produced by Repcap. They're a B2B content marketing agency who help organizations tell

[00:39:44] clear human stories that connect. Whether you need strategy, customer interviews or full production support, Repcap turns complex ideas into compelling content that moves business forward. Learn more at Repcap.com. Punk Rock HR can also be found on the Work Defined podcast network, along with hundreds of other work focused shows. To listen or learn how to advertise,

[00:40:11] head on over to WorkDefined.com. That's W-R-K-Defined.com. And finally, if you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a five star review wherever you stream it. It really helps the show. Now that's all for today. I've got some advice for you. Be safe, be kind, and don't sell out.