WHY People - Episode #15 - Skip Maloney (EVP, CHRO at InterDigital)

Yeah, thanks guys. Long time coming. I watched a lot of your episodes, so honor to be here. Appreciate it.

Well, I'll tell you, it's not easy, especially now. People around here have short memories of the decade, two decades long of winning. I have an amazing team of colleagues that are diehard Philly fans, and there's so much in common between the cities. The rapidness of the sports fans, the historical background of the cities. I would say the only difference is, well, we win. Someone on the executive team said Philadelphia is the city of champions, and I said no, you guys are the city of championship games. You actually don't win the games. So I get to live the rest of my life with that. Of course they're bringing up the Patriots season this year and all that, but let's just put it this way: a number of my colleagues on the executive team owe me lunch and other things because they led with their chin and they put money down on games or bets on games that they lost. So it's been fun for me, I'll tell you.

Sure, yeah. Well, you mentioned baseball. So my earlier plans were not to be an HR. It was to play first base for the Detroit Tigers, and that ended that career pretty quickly and destroyed my knee and all that. So I've always been one that if a door is locked, I look for how to get through the window. I figure out some other way to move forward. My career, I hear a lot of people say they fell into HR. I don't think I fell into HR. I think I chose HR. HR to me is a complex function, a complex science. And I get blown away by people who can make this great software or this great machinery, but this is the science of people, which I think is more complex. So I chose HR. Early in my career, I started in recruiting and staffing, and I wasn't very good at it. But I'll tell you, in my early 20s, I wouldn't have been good at anything. I just didn't know what I wanted to do. I was trying to figure out what that was. And like I said, I don't think I fell into it, but I started to get involved in more broader HR activities. And I was blessed with having early influencers in my life and in my career that put me in touch and gave me opportunities to do things outside of recruiting as well. I had this leadership bent of leading people that I always leaned on, so I started gravitating towards that. And I started in recruiting and just started taking it more seriously. One of my early influencers, Jim Donahue, who is a well-known staffing expert in Boston, taught me discipline. And I started to really take it seriously and tap into my ambition. And I started to get into other parts of HR and learn the business and learn the function and what I can do. And quite frankly, I wanted to change it. I saw the way the function was at the time and thought I could do more and I wanted to be part of that.

Yeah, I mean, every role in HR is different. But to me, you look at attract, retain, develop. Those three buckets, every one of them has an important role within what we do. When you're in recruiting, recruiting is as close as you're going to get to sales in HR. You're selling the company. But you got to pick the right people to go on this path and this journey with you, so they got to be cultural fits. So by nature, you got to know the business. One thing I've always had, I guess, is I've always embraced intellectual curiosity. So I always wanted to know how things work and what was around me, and I leaned on that for recruiting. I'll drop another name. There was a recruiting leader at the time that I worked with, Jeff Saab, back in the day. He just knew everything about companies. He really dug in deep and he knew the technology, and I learned a lot from him on that. Which I take to this day when I talk to my teams now and say, 'You learn the business.' Because one thing I noticed when I talk to other HR professionals at a party or whatever, and they say, 'Oh, so what do you guys do?' And they're not able to really tell you what they do. I'm not saying you got to get down to the line of code, but they really struggle with being able to explain what their business is and how they make money. And what I always tell people is, HR folks ask me all the time, 'What HR magazine should I get?' I go, 'Actually, get the Wall Street Journal first. Get that. Know how the business around you works and how people are making money, how people are losing money. Learn the business. Once you learn the business, you'll be able to learn HR and know how to support the business.' So I was able to gravitate towards that. And honestly, the other part for me is, with my vulnerability hat on, I have ADHD, and so I get bored quickly. So I was doing the recruiting, and then I was like, 'Ooh, what's that over there? I'm going to go start working on that.' And it helped me along. And for me, it was great because, look, especially over the last five years, something new is constantly coming around the corner for HR.

Sure, yeah. No, great question. It's funny. I think my parents had different plans. They sort of groomed me to play professional ball. They saw I had a talent for whatever and develop that, develop my skills. Yes, someone could just really make a quick line and say, 'Okay, you're a great hitter.' That's not what I took away from it. My father growing up would pitch me bottle caps every night for an hour, and I'd hit into a net with a broomstick. So one would say, 'Oh great, you developed an act for hitting.' True. But the reality is I developed discipline. I developed work ethic. I wasn't the tallest kid, I wasn't the fastest kid, I wasn't anything, but I was going to outwork anybody and anyone. Anyone who knows me, anyone who's worked for me, will know my favorite four-letter word is grit. So I worked hard at that. And so sports, and I try to pass this on to my two daughters as well, it's not just about winning and losing and learning those lessons in between. But everything in sports should be developing you how to be a better person. And the things I learn from sports takes me to this day. I'm obsessed with teams. I've been on very talented teams who didn't win, and I was on less talented teams who won it all. And so I get obsessed with why is that? What is the dynamic between the two? What happened? And so I try to apply that to the everyday. And I'll tell you a quick story. My daughter was a little kid just starting basketball, where if you score four points it's amazing. And she had this one game where she scored 25 points, which I was, after the game I was like, 'Oh my God.' And first thing she said to me was, 'Oh Dad, did you see Ella? She scored her first basket of the year. I'm so happy for her.' That's how I look at sports. I'm like, 'Okay, cool, you get it. It's about the people around you, not you.' And so sports to me, yes, I love to, believe me, I lead with my chin. I go in the office every day and say, 'Oh, how many championships do you guys have?' I'm Boston, right? That's what we do. But at the end of the day, it's about pulling people up and making the people around you better. That's one of, I never saw him play, it was before my time, but Bill Russell was always about that. He measured his career by how well or how better his teammates were because of him. And that's the correlation I bring from sports into my professional career.

I think the competitive advantage I guess I had over others in my field, which I'm not suggesting I'm any more special than anyone, I think at the time it was a little more rare, was I spoke truth to power. I just, I'm kind of unabashedly truthful on things. If I see something that's not right, I'm going to call it. I'm going to say it. And so I had what I call career courage to just speak my mind. And I thought a lot of people that were around me, they just stayed in their lanes. And that's one thing I would tell people is don't stay in your lane. First, know the business. Don't just spout up anything. But I often ask viewpoints from people from other functions because I want a different viewpoint. I'm a huge believer in diversity of thought, and I want people to come in and chime in on things. So for me, as I was kind of stretching out my leadership legs, it was I saw a way that I could be different. And one of the things I'm most proud of in my career is I've heard a lot of people say, 'Boy, you're not like most HR leaders that I've worked with before.' And I take that as a compliment and not as an insult to HR. I think the industry has grown, or the function has grown tremendously over the last few years. So I'm not alone. There are several people that approach it like I do. There's some incredibly great HR leaders out there that know the business, that consult, that are looked at as the co-pilot, if you will, for the leaders and for the CEOs and the board members and things like that. And I'm thrilled to have been on that journey. But when I started ages ago, it wasn't like that. It was very much, I mean, it was the tail end of it being the personnel department.

Sure, yeah. So one of the concepts I try, again going back to sports analogies, one of the concepts I try to impart on younger HR folks coming up, I said, 'Look, you could play one of three roles. You can decide to be a coach and coach the people around you to better performance and better results. You could be a cheerleader and just root them on their way and their journey and not really call anything out at all, they didn't do anything wrong at all. Or you could be a referee and just, referees look for infractions, they look for fouls, they look for penalties, they look to see if you touch the line.' I tell folks there's times to be one of all three for sure, but lean more on coaching. Lean more on bringing people along in their journey. Everyone's different. And I think that's where HR has gravitated towards the last 10 years, I would say. When I first started, it was more of a referee. It was we were there to blow the whistle on so-and-so. And I still believe, yeah, there's times you got to do that for sure. But if you do it from a coaching lens, there's times when you're going to blow it, like, 'Hey, yeah, you can't be doing that, and think about this ramification and think about things around you.' And then from a cheerleader when someone needs that pick-me-up. But you got to be able to shift in between. But I would lean more towards coaching in anything.

Yeah, I mean, it's certainly motivation, but it's who you're working for type of thing. Private, worked in private of course, and the goal was always to maintain or get to profitability, so you had different goals in mind. Everything was just as important. Culture is as important for any type of business that you're in. But in the public domain, you have shareholders. You can't just do what you want. You have to answer to more people, and there's a complexity to that. Whether it's institutional investors and the proxy advisors will advise the institutional investors on say and pay, for example. So you have to be very over and very public about everything that you do, which I like. I think that's great. From the private sector, you can stumble along a little bit more until you kind of get your legs and get to be a public company if that's the goal. But no, working in the public domain, there's a lot more rules and regulations. I think there's some CEOs that when they went private to public, they wish they stayed private. But the reality is, if you're running your business the right way, and oh by the way, sometimes you have to make decisions that a shareholder may not love. You explain why this is good for the long term. Most shareholders are in for the long term, not short term. So sometimes you have to make decisions whether it's comp related or benefit packages, whatever that may take money away from the business, but it's good for the long term. So as long as you know those things, you strategize and keep good relationships with the advisers, with the institutional investors, with shareholders. Be very, very public about what you do. And one of the things they look to me and my team and executives is how well do we shepherd the culture. We've all heard the quote, 'Culture eats strategy for breakfast.' That's true. But if you have a bad strategy, you're eating something that's going to give you a stomach ache. It's not going to work. They go hand in hand. So for me, there's a little bit more scrutiny, there's more of a spotlight when you're in the public domain. But I think if you have your act together, there's no disadvantage to that at all.

Yeah, well, let me answer it differently. I see HR eventually moving into more CEO roles and COO roles. I was a big-time champion for seeing CHROs be placed on boards. And I'll tell you why. When I was first starting out in the public domain, I would tell you 70 to 80% of the conversations we had centered around people at the board level. So I sat in the board meetings and participated, and it just hit me after a long time, there's not one board member that was a CHRO that has an HR background. And it's more prevalent for comp committee things, right? But on the other hand, you don't need to be a CHRO to run the comp. We have an outstanding human capital committee chair at InterDigital, and she doesn't have an HR background. So it doesn't, you don't necessarily need one or the other. But I find it interesting that those rules don't apply for HR. It's like, well, you need finance to do this and that. I'm not suggesting you're going to see a CHRO be a CFO, but the CHRO should know enough about every single function within the business that they could become a very strong COO. And I also think that you're going to start seeing more CHROs become CEOs down the road. I think this next decade you'll see that more. I think the world, certainly with COVID, I mean, there was something every three months something new was coming down the pike, and the CHRO and HR team had to be in the forefront and figure out a way to pivot around, get through, capitalize on whatever it was. That rounded out everyone's business experience. So I'm hoping to see more CHROs be CEOs of companies and boards taking a chance on CHROs to do that. We'll see. And not just human capital related companies, but more in general. So that's what I see the future as. I think the other thing that's helpful for folks in my role, and I'll be honest, I only learned this over the past five years. I used to always consider myself, when someone asked me, 'What team are you on?' I say, 'Oh, HR. I lead HR.' Reality is, that's not right. My team is the executive team. I tell my team this all the time. We're not on the same team. You're the team I lead, and I'm closely aligned with, but my team is the executive team. That's the team I play on. And I think we'll start to see more so when that happens, I think you'll start to see a little bit more adoption of senior HR leaders going to boards and playing different C-suite roles. But that was a hard lesson for me. And going back to the referee analogy, it was like, if one of my teammates is failing, I'm failing. So instead of putting a spotlight on that person, I looked to say, 'How can we get them out of this rut?' And I think that'll go a long way to see my vision of CHROs as CEOs.

Yeah, well, to be honest, I had an epiphany at a leadership development partner called TLDG, the Leadership Development Group out of West Point. So when I was at AspenTech, we were looking to gravitate towards a command and control culture into one of, we call disciplined agility. And we used them as a partner. And we go through our executive team meetings, we went down there, did team events and all this sort of stuff. And they just simply asked the question, we all answered it, 'Oh, you know, I lead finance, I lead this.' And it's sort of the USA 1980 hockey moment where they're like, 'What team do you play for?' And it just hit me. It was just like it staring at me in the face that if one of my colleagues, whether it was sales or whatever, then I'm failing. And I got to, what could I do to help them out? And I would hope that they would do that for me, and not call out. So that was my sort of epiphany. Fast forward to where I am now with InterDigital. And this isn't my CEO, probably never see this, he's outstanding. He really enforces a team mentality. He's very open. He shares everything with us. And I felt this way my first week at InterDigital. I felt this was the team I was on because it wasn't, he never segregated a group over here to go talk about this and that group, 'Oh, you don't need to hear this.' It was everyone in the room. And honestly, Antonio Pietri, my former CEO at AspenTech, did the same thing. We're all in the room, and we heard the good and the bad. And you just realized this is the team I play on. So I'm thrilled it wasn't something I had to really work for and work at at InterDigital. It was already in place. We've got a strong executive team there. And so now it's like, now I don't have to build that. I can now take advantage of a strong team and build out and get us to grow more. And we're doing well. We're a successful company, but I see bigger things for us and a bigger future. I love it.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, a little of what I said in the very beginning. Subscribe to the Wall Street Journal or a business paper, magazine, whatever. If you want to, there's an old commercial out there, and forgive me, I don't know the brand, it might be NetSuite for all I know, but it says, 'If you don't know your numbers, you don't know your business.' And what I tell folks all the time is, 'If you don't know your people, you don't know your business either.' So in HR, you have to know a lot about the different functions and what everyone does. But learn the business world around you. I'm an investor myself, and so I get obsessed with digging into companies and learning what they do and what their strengths and weaknesses are. But it doesn't compare to what I know of my own. I should know the ins and outs. I want to know how we bring in revenue. I want to know where we lose revenue. I want to know all of those things that makes me a better HR person. And don't just, SHRM's a great organization, don't just stay in your lane and learn HR tactics. Look, if there's anything that I could be accused of, it's I know probably more about the business than HR. But that's okay. I'll have to go to my experts on my team and say, 'Hey, what is this about that?' And we have a great labor attorney, employment attorney, that sits in the legal department but is part of the team. So I have that luxury of turning to her and say, 'Amy, what does this mean for us here and there?' I look at it from the business aspect to say, 'Is this good for the business or is it bad for the business?' And so, look, I tell younger folks kind of getting into it, and the thing I love too is, don't make HR be where you fall. Make it a destination. I want HR the function to be a destination. I would love to see people choosing HR for that reason because they want to be a leader. I get asked all the time, 'What do you do?' I'm like, 'I'm a leader. I just happen to practice human capital. But I'm a leader first. That's my first title. I'm a leader.' And then you start making decisions based on what's right for the business. For a long time, I'd ask people interviewing, 'So what do you like about HR? What do you want to go into HR?' And they say, 'I love everything about HR.' Like, no, I don't love everything about HR. So that's not true. So come on, really, what do you like, what don't you? And then you get a little bit more of the truth, and then you can hone in on what their passion is within HR. Some people, their highest mountain would be the head of talent acquisition. That's awesome, that's amazing, and they have a passion for it, and that's great. Others, you have so many different pathways. But if you want to run the whole function, learn the business. Learn the business at every level of HR. But that's my biggest advice to younger people going in. You gain so much more credibility when you're in a meeting and you know you can talk the talk with the engineers and the attorneys and whomever because you know the business. They put you in a different peg. They're one of us. And that's huge.

Well, I'll tell you what. If I were to adopt their fandom hood, I would start planning the parade now. I got a lot of heat because the very first regular season game, mind you it was Game 11, the Sixers beat the Celtics, and I got pummeled the next day coming into work. And the first question I said, 'This is great. What time does the parade start? Where do I go?' And I go, 'Guys, it's game 11. Pump the brakes a little bit here.' So no, look, I'll go out on a limb. The Sixers, third place is nice. I think that's as best as they're going to do. They're not a playoff team. I'd love to say we can't wait to see them in the playoffs. I'm not sure we will see them in the playoffs. To me, this is Boston's year. We've knocked on the door several times, but this is it. They're going to have to give it up. The Sixers are a nice, cute team. I think they have two championships in their, yeah, I think we got our second one in '59 or '60. So we'll get Banner number 18 this year, 2024. And then I won't hear anything from my colleagues for a little while. It's funny how I don't hear anything about football when the Eagles have lost three in a row or whatever. No one seems to look me in the eye in the hallway. Funny.

Yeah, well, Skip, we had a lot of fun. Buddy, you're a great BHRC council member. Love the conversation. And looking forward to hanging out and what's in store for you in 2024.

That sounds good, Skip. Here you go.