Wise in Five with Soni Basi

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm happy to give you a high-level overview. I started my career actually in Chicago, which is where I know you are currently located, at a small boutique company called International Survey Research. Really at the forefront of culture work and I was able to cut my teeth there working with Fortune 500 companies around their engagement strategy, their cultural transformation, working for some of the world's highly recognized companies. And I was there for about seven years until one of those companies asked me to move to New Jersey and join them in a space of learning and development. And I've been in New Jersey now 20 years since. So the company was Shire Pharmaceuticals. I was with them through a number of acquisitions and transformations that I had an opportunity to really dig my teeth into and help to support before I moved to the Estee Lauder Company. So slight shift in terms of industry, but incredible organization where I had an opportunity to be there for about six years doing all of their talent transformation work with a new CEO who was on board and really just wanted to turn around the company from the standpoint of what does talent of tomorrow look like for the Estee Lauder company. So anything and everything from performance management to talent reviews, learning and development programs globally. It was an extraordinary time and I left there only to join some of my colleagues who were now at Allergan Pharmaceuticals and they'd been asking me to join them. Allergan had just recently undergone a failed acquisition attempt by Pfizer and so it was an opportunity for me to come in and really help build all of the people needs for the future. So anything and everything from how are we hiring people now post this failed acquisition, right? What's our value proposition out on the street now? How do we build our people who were expecting to go into these really big roles at Pfizer, but now we're rebuilding the leadership bench. So really exciting time until they were bought by AbbVie, seems to be kind of a theme of mine. So went from there to AIG and built out their talent programs again a CEO transformation or CEO change while I was at AIG which was exciting to support as well as a major divestiture of one of their business units. And so from AIG landed at Edelman as their global head of HR, industry that is going through a massive change in communications with AI but also just an organization that not only is at the top of its game but is meeting with a lot of competitive challenges as well. So very, very meaty roles that I've had an opportunity to be involved in, in a lot of transformation all underpinned I would say with by culture which I always say can either be an accelerant to what you're trying to accomplish or it can be a major drag, right? So that I would say would be kind of the core of what I've done.

When I was at the Estee Lauder Companies and I would walk between our buildings to meetings, I would see these incredible graffiti trucks that are all around New York City and my mind would be blown by the variety of artwork that there is in this world. And then when you're working from your home for a little while, I do find that I need to step outside of my house to find inspiration and to really connect in with people and where the world is going. I think one of the things I always bring to the table from an HR standpoint is there has to be a creative lens to what we do. It can't be cookie cutter from company to company. So where the world is headed is where I want to be from an HR standpoint. So I do a lot of talking to people. So I'll talk to the next generation talent. I love just chatting with them if I'm in a kitchen somewhere and they're grabbing their lunch or their coffee and I'll pick their brains. But I also lean in on my sailing adventures. About 5 years ago, I found sailing and it has been transformational for me in terms of inspiration. When I'm out on the water and there's nothing else that I can really focus on besides what's ahead of me, what are people doing on the boat? How safe are all of us? What is my role? How's that going to impact someone else's role? I feel like that freedom from everything except what you're doing in the moment is incredibly inspirational as well.

Well, we're usually watching out for power boats.

Yeah, and it's such a great question because I think these are human experiences and what I find is that the size of the company often doesn't matter, right? There are some core principles I found whether in some recent interim roles with 500 employees to 1,000 employees or if I look across a 40,000 person company there's some universal truths which I would point to. I think first and foremost, clarity really matters whether you're going to be going through a transformation, a reduction in force, you're going through growth or you just want people to line up to strategy. Being clear is number one, right? You find like when there's rumor mill is when it's a really unhealthy culture. You can either be addressing it head on or you can let people make their own assumptions. So I always say let's go for clarity first. Second, I would say that empowerment is a very personal thing, right? So you're clear with someone. But here's an example in terms of empowerment being personal. I had somebody on my team who had done a bang-up job on a project and so I was like amazing you should present next week to the leadership team, right? Because I'm thinking I'm giving her this opportunity to get visibility and she's going to be super engaged and it's going to help with her retention and she looked at me like a deer caught in the headlights and she's like I really appreciate it but that is not for me. I'm happy for you to present this work, but she said, if you're trying to reward me, a spot bonus is what I want. Right? And so, you go back to clarity comes down to empowerment as well. Being really clear with individuals like what is it that motivates you? Let's just have that conversation and then giving them more of that is going to pay off in the long term. And then I think the third I would point to is about inclusion. So, I'm invited to the meeting, but when I'm in the meeting, does my voice actually matter? And so, it doesn't matter what level you are in the company, but if you feel like you're invited as a kind of a thank you for the invitation, but you're not really valued within a company or in a situation, it's going to cut away at your feeling of engagement with that company. And then finally, I would say those are very personal for the individual. From a leadership standpoint, I've been in so many situations where leadership is not walking the talk, right? So they may say it can come down to something so simple, Jason, like of course we want transparency in terms of what jobs are available so people can have the opportunity to post for those roles, but then in the background they're like, I don't really want to post that job and I know who I want. Right? We have to be intentional about it. Leadership has to set the tone and if they can set the tone by saying these are the principles that matter to me and then aligning to those like but let's be clear and let's set the tone. So I would say those are the four things that I find are really important to individuals otherwise you start to get into some of the toxic behaviors and the toxic cultures.

Exactly, exactly. And it is such a social world that you can control the messaging, you can control the culture or you can let it control you.

Yeah, I do. And this was probably the most pivotal advice I received when I was early in my career. And that was to set up my own board of directors, right? To consider myself the CEO of my career and so having a board of directors and I'll revisit that board of directors from time to time and just make sure that there isn't somebody new that I want to add in and that has served me so well in my career. It includes individuals who've been former managers of mine. It includes individuals who I've met along the way who I thought this is just somebody who's really brilliant and thinks through things really clearly. It includes individuals who've been on my teams because I find that they hold the mirror up to me even better than others can. And so that personal board of directors has been really important to me. And I do stay in touch with a lot of people as a result. So I believe in having a big community of individuals. That's also where I get my inspiration from too is through them.

Yeah, it's definitely turbulent times we like to say, right? And there's a lot that's happening to your point. One of the things I've started to realize is you can have processes all you want, so much of it's about personalization. And so even as technology evolves, you've got to come back to that individual. And that's where managers really have an opportunity to step up. If a manager can sit down with you and have a conversation and say, tell me about what motivates you or tell me about what you're feeling as we're going through this transformation. Can we reskill you? Or, look, you're not keeping pace, right? Let's be clear. You're not keeping pace with where we're headed. These types of conversations become really critical and I do think that it's coming to a head with personalization and this is an area actually I talked about my personal board of directors just a moment ago one of those individuals is a former direct report of mine and she was just giving a presentation last week at a conference and she sent me a video of her presentation and so I'm going to steal something from her or borrow something from her, right? So she spoke about the three types of experiences that individuals really need because we were talking about the sense of personalization. The human experience, a growth experience, and a transparency experience. So the human experience is just very much as technology is evolving, there's so much fear that there's still this incredible room for empathy and emotional intelligence. And you can get it from your manager, you can get it from your peers, but everyone is looking for that human experience. And it's why we go into the office, right? It's because we want a human experience. We want to connect with people, collaborate with them, do whiteboarding with them, celebrate with them. Some of my best friends are from the workplace. And so, absolutely, right. I've gone to their marriages, now I'm going to their kids' marriages. So, it's fun. So, that's a human experience. The growth experience is shifting for a lot of individuals now. Whether it's being reskilled in certain areas and not wanting to be left behind like when digital was really a big deal and people were trying to upskill individuals for the digital transformation. Or it could be that the next generation is really looking for more of that gig work, right? So let me take something for six months or a year but I'm not going to fully commit but I do need the benefits, right? Like there's all these considerations underway. So how do we meet that challenge as well? And then the third is around transparency. So where are we going? What is my future here? I think there's even on TikTok people are posting what their compensation is, right? So there's a lot more transparency these days about everything. And so we've got to keep pace within corporations and companies as well. She talked about those three, but I'm expanding on those three as well. And in line with her, I do think it's a really great way to think about personalization.

Right. That's right. And an example of culture done really well and having people aligned was one of the companies I did a major performance management change for. They hadn't been doing performance management and the CEO was like look I need good performance management here because it's going to help me achieve my agenda. So the CEO understood he had his marching orders from the board get that done. It was if the entire company understood what was needed out of each of their roles to line up to it. So created a global performance management program for the company, created very strong rating scale that tied to compensation in a very strong way so people could really understand the entire reason they're coming in to work every single day, right? Is to help the company achieve its strategy. And then he would have his quarterly town halls with his one slide saying here's where we are right on the strategy and here so people really understood it. That was a culture change through performance management and he called it the secret sauce. He's like this is the secret sauce of our company and this is how we're going to beat our competitors is through performance management. It was a huge cultural accelerant, right, as one example, versus in another organization where toxic behaviors and not role modeling the values of the company and inconsistency in terms of who's living the values and who's not living the values that became a major drag and that company now is losing so much talent to a competitor as a result.

That's right. And that CEO got it so quickly. Right. And I meet other CEOs who are the same or some others who may say, well, what's the value of doing performance management? Oh, here's HR again. But if you understand and you lay it up and you have a strong HR program or team that can say here's what you're trying to do and here's why and now it's going to ladder up to you then it makes more sense.

Yeah, there are some key things that are similar across organizations of any size, especially when it comes to people, but there are nuances. I think smaller companies or mid-size companies have more agility and sometimes they do say we're scrappy, right? Like we're very scrappy and we've limited resources and that's wonderful, but I think that shouldn't take away from being professional. And so midsize companies may have fewer resources, but there's still an opportunity to professionalize and make sure that culture is an accelerant, for example, and talent is valued. So your decisions in those companies have an outsized impact. If you make a decision about one person, that doesn't go in the right direction, the amount of drain in a midsize company from that one person is more significant than in a large company. I'd also say that the second is around culture is it's easier to shape in a smaller company so busy founder companies and building the product and the results that it's almost a secondary or a tertiary is around culture so by the time you get to a certain size leaders are scratching their head thinking okay what have we done here and what is our culture. And then I would say level of bureaucracy, right? You can move quickly, you're agile, but then as you're starting to scale or you're starting to put processes together to make sure you manage not to become bureaucratic, right? You can have process without the bureaucracy.

And I'm glad you did, right? Because it makes a really big difference. Every decision to my point is outsized. So, who you hire and who you lose in a small company becomes really important. So, having some of those values, cultural moments, really laid down early days is important.

Yeah, I think I would come back to a couple of things that we touched on today. The first and foremost is culture. How do you scale your culture or define your culture without losing maybe the soul of the company? I know that's always like the fear is we don't want to lose our soul. That's number one. Number two is what do you have to get right about talent to be competitive in this environment that we're in? And especially as in a lot of organizations or smaller companies, you're still sourcing from the bigger companies. So what's your value proposition as you're sourcing from bigger companies to bring in the best talent? And then I would say third is I meet a lot of CEOs who have been thinking about some of the big company experiences but some of those big company experiences may not be right and so what type of benefits are really critical in a small company as you're scaling, what kind of rewards programs, how do you maintain competitive compensation when you're in a smaller company as well. Those would be the three. So around culture, around what do you need to get right in terms of talent, and then three, what are some of the processes you can borrow from the big companies but make them right for your company?

Thank you. Thank you, Jason. It's a pleasure to be a part of the Wisery. Thank you for having me.