Turning HR Data Into Real Insight

Speaker A: Welcome to HR Disrupted with me, Lucy Adams. Each episode will explore innovative approaches for leaders and HR professionals and challenge the status quo with inspiring but practical people strategies. So if you're looking for fresh ideas, tips, and our take on the latest HR trends, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. HR doesn't struggle with not having enough data. We've got tons of it. You know, engagement scores, churn rates, absenteeism rates, performance ratings, DEI metrics, the works. But can we honestly say that we're brilliant at, uh, using that data to drive our people strategies? And I know from talking to loads of you that the answer's probably not yet. So today we're going to explore how we can get better at, ah, turning data into real insight and how that insight can help us build more trust, better performance, stronger cultures. And, um, my guest is Jenny Dearborn, who spent her career helping organizations do exactly that. Her new book, the Insight Driven Leader, is a practical roadmap for HR teams and leaders who want to make analytics genuinely useful and human. Welcome, Jenny. It is great to have you here.

Speaker B: Lovely to be here.

Speaker A: Now, I know you're in a hotel, so we're hoping all the kind of, you know, WI fi holds out. Whereabouts are you?

Speaker B: I'm in Carmel Valley, California. I'm at the Carmel branch.

Speaker A: Things could be a lot worse, right?

Speaker B: I know, I know. I was here working on an off site for the last two days, so.

Speaker A: Nice, nice. So let's talk a bit about you. You've had such an interesting career. You've worked across, so sales, learning, hr, leadership, professional services. Now you're a writer as well. So can you start by giving us a bit of your story and what sparked your fascination with people and data and how they come together to drive performance?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's, um. Um, my therapist and I have figured out that it's a very personal journey growing up. Um, undiagnosed, dyslexic, adhd, ocd, all sorts of fun, you know, crazy neurodiversity challenges, um, that it was, um, hard to articulate the value that I wanted to bring into the world because of, you know, um, just cognitive disconnect stuff. And when that clicked into gear, then I was all about proving, I gotta prove everything that I say is accurate and the best with data. And, you know, nothing was irrefutable. Like, I just, you know, I was very into facts and statistics and like, this was the, you know, you know, just because I was tired of, you know, this first 20 years of my life of people saying, like, I don't think you're right or you know, just some sort of skepticism because of you know, a uh, neurodiversity, uh, disconnect in communication. And so I sort of over rotated and became fixated on statistics and math and proving that there's a right answer and it's right and that I can prove it. But I also, I mean I got into education um, and learning because I wanted to make sure that like what happened to me and my K through 12 experience didn't happen to other people. But I didn't last long as a, you know, in a, in primary education. I was there for two years and

Speaker A: then I didn't last long in education either. I used to spend hours doing my beautiful lesson plans and then the students would come in and mess it up with their learning needs. And then I kind of figured out that it probably wasn't the right profession for me.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I, I loved the process of change and learning is instinctively a change process. You didn't know something, you're taught something, now you know it and you can apply it. And so I like that brain science of it. Um, but I don't like kids so. And yours, but exactly they were in the room with me.

Speaker A: What the best are our own. Everybody else is an absolute pain.

Speaker B: God bless the people that do it. But it wasn't for me so very short time doing that a million years ago. Um, it was an easy pivot to uh, corporate learning really. Teaching 18 year olds about Hamlet and then teaching 25 year olds about new employee orientation and professional development skills. And I've got a little bit of a drama personality in me. So the stage aspect really um, suited me and um, so kind of just rose through the ranks in uh, corporate education is where I started. So um, eight years at Hewlett Packard and six uh, years at Sun Microsystems. Uh, I live in Silicon Valley which is about two hours um, from here and that's just what was in the area. So uh, I fell into tech because the geography that I live in, um, but I was in uh, you know, I was an HR person in education. I carried a quota and sold education services, sold education software, um, B2B SAS, um, you know, learning technology. Um, everything was sort of HR adjacent. You know my client was always hr. So I would go back and forth between having an internal HR role to then having a customer facing role at my next company and, and then back to an internal role at a higher level and then back to a customer facing role at a higher level at another Company. So I kind of zigzagged back and forth. So I carried a quota three times at three different companies. I, um, was in, uh, uh, sales at SuccessFactors. So responsible for global, um, customer partner and employee readiness, learning, development, certification, all of that. And then we were acquired by SAP, and I got moved into, um, talent at SAP and had a really great run there for seven years and then left and became a chief people officer at a lot of. Not a lot. What am I saying? Um, this is my third time being a chief people officer in the role that I have now. And, um, maybe I'm jumping the gun a little bit. But what drove me back to data, like, the data story is when I was in sales, people were like, oh, got your metrics, got your number, you got. This is your pipeline, this is your close rate, this is your discount rate. Like, you knew if you were successful, you commanded the room. You know, I carried $100 million quota at Sun Microsystems. Like, you know, it was amazing, the gravitas and credibility and influence that immediately comes with, I'm meeting my numbers, I got my shit together, I know what I'm doing. And then you, you know, at a higher level, you know, sort of at another company, now you're back in hr, and then all of a sudden it's like, well, why are you here? Well, what do you mean? You're commenting on our P and L or our sales pipeline. I was like, wait, what? I know what I'm doing. Uh, and then, you know, that role. And then back, you're like, I think I missed sales. Back to sales. Credibility, influence, all of this stuff. You're like, in the, you know, heart of the business. Back into hr and they're like, why are you here? It's like, what is going on with this function?

Speaker A: Yeah, so there's a huge void of great data or that we're not using it properly. And that's what we're going to get into and explore now. Um, I love the book. Um, and we'll talk about the book and we'll. We'll use it as the kind of framework for the discussion. And in it, you talk about business first, hr second. So, you know, I think you've begun to explore that when you were sort of describing your career. But how did that perspective shape this book?

Speaker B: Yeah, so, I mean, uh, started in hr, but I really feel like most of my years were in the business. And I hate sort of separating it that way. But, you know, carrying quota, being in.

Speaker A: I know, I hate that expression, too. But it's what we get.

Speaker B: Um, uh, having those experiences in the business, um, really, really informed, um, my time, my years as a practitioner in hr. Like, you're in the room. You know what metrics are important to business leaders. You know what that top line dashboard is? Um, there's six key metrics in sales, there's four key metrics in customer success and support. You know that there's only two metrics, hr, that make it to the board of directors level. So why are we squabbling so much back and forth in HR about the metrics that are in my little area if they don't, if they're not in service to the metric that somebody with influence actually cares about, you know, so it informed my, uh, you know, the way I think about my scope as like, okay, my scope is in service of someone else's metric. Right? So I need to make sure that I understand how what I'm doing, which was like, when I was doing learning as a chief Learning officer, the only metric that was really important to, you know, the CEO that, excuse me, the Chro presents to the CEO is regrettable attrition of top performers, you know, talent readiness in the most critical roles, um, cost per hire, things like that. So if I'm going around going, learning hours are the most important thing. And why don't people respect my mandate around, like, honestly, all of that stuff is just needs to get done in service of other things. So if I can communicate how my learning programs help, um, the retention of top performers in critical roles, that's kind of the only thing that matters. Like now people are like, oh, I'm gonna sit up right now.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'd never thought of it that way. This kind of all of those metrics that we kind of amassed and we would put out there. And to be honest, most of the time, um, my exec team were relatively disinterested in what I was putting in front of them, or they would just get into a narky dispute about the methodology of collation and collection. Um, but I hadn't thought about it like that, that actually they're only interested in two or three metrics. And how are those. How are the other metrics insert. Because they're not. We don't think about data as being joined up in that way. As you say, the talent acquisition team have got theirs and the performance team have got theirs. And, um, and also there's a lot of wasted energy about with creating metrics that actually don't really tell a story. They don't actually give you any insight? Um, now in the book you interviewed, um, over 100 leaders and HR professionals one on one. It wasn't just big focus groups to get you to that number. It was over 100 individual discussions. And this is a horrible question because there's going to be so much, but what did you find most surprising about how organizations are using or maybe not using data right now? Was there anything that you had gone in with your own assumptions and you were like, wow, I hadn't expected that.

Speaker B: When I was in the learning and talent role, I felt like I had metrics that were, um, relevant to a CEO and a board. Like they would sit up and listen and go, oh, these are important things. So I said, ah, when I got into the Chro role after SAP was like, there must be magic metrics that, that the best companies are measuring on their dashboard that I don't know about. So, uh, part of what drove me to write this book is like, what do the best companies measure? And how can I start to measure what they measure? And what was a huge. So I expected like, well, here's my magic dashbo and how you calculate these things. And I thought I never would have known to calculate it that way. No, that's not it. So it was a surprise to me that the very best companies are measuring regrettable attrition of top performers in key roles. The same as not so good companies or whatever other companies. But, uh, it's the fidelity of the measurement. It's everything that leads into it. Like, how do you know what a top performer is? How do you know what a critical role is? You know, how do you know if somebody's actually doing what they're supposed to be doing. Um, just because somebody has the skill doesn't mean they're performing and executing against the capabilities that they have in that skill, like all of that stuff. But the measure at the end of all of that work is regrettable attrition of top performers and critical roles. Um, so when someone says, oh, this is my, you know, my attrition number and it's some dumb average across the whole company, every CEO just, oh God, I know, I don't care. I don't care if people who suck that we want to retire are quitting. I don't care. Like, why are you pushing this all together?

Speaker A: And it's aggregated at such a high level so you could have a contact center and, ah, an engineering area and it's all just kind of lumped in. You get one number and everyone goes, so what?

Speaker B: What? So what, what am I supposed to do with this? So the biggest takeaway for me, so getting back to your question, biggest take away from me, from the interviews was, um, I, so I interviewed mostly CEOs, um, board director chairs or, or like the head of the comp committee, you know, the primary relationship. So board directors, CEOs and CHROs as a primary audiences. Um, and Chro said, I get a stone face when I show the metric. Um, or if they lean in a little bit, they say, why does this matter? Or what does this mean? And then CEOs are saying they're presenting things that I don't know how they connect to the business. And directors are saying, I don't see how these metrics connect to the business. But then what do the best of the best do they use that number as the beginning of a story? Um, this number means this because. And here's what we're going to go do about it. And they get to, they slice the numbers. So, you know, an average performing chro is going to say this is attrition across the company. A top performing chro is going to say this is regrettable attrition. And we have a lot of high fidelity that we know what a regrettable is. And it's not just if a manager codes it themselves, you know, because a manager doesn't want to embarrass themselves by saying they let a top performer go because they were such a jerk. Um, you know, or some, they forced somebody to act, quit because they were just so, like uncool or so, I don't know, whatever, you know, just like not a good manager. Um, so, you know, is there fidelity in all of the pieces and are you measuring something specific enough, um, that your board actually matters? You know, it matters to your board.

Speaker A: Let's get into it a little bit more then because I think you've begun to kind of answer this question. But, um, you talk about the difference between being data informed and insight driven. So what does an insight driven leader do differently? What is it that they are doing differently to someone who is just informed by the data?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So if you're data informed, you have a lot of information, but you don't really know what it's telling you. Um, and you don't know how your people data connects to all your business metrics. So insight driven is going to be you take your CRM data and your ERP data and you know, all of the different systems, uh, data coming from your customer success, customer support, marketing, all of these things, and you're marrying that with a very robust view of your people data and say, how is business metrics impacting? Um, who is hired, developed, retained, moved, internal mobility, uh, our employer brand. What is happening with our people and how is that connecting with performance, business performance? So it takes, you know, it takes a sophisticated data lake to be able to pull all of that, those data sources together. But so much easier now with AI. I mean, when I, when I did this at SAP, I had a huge data team that reported to me in hr and they built all this stuff the hard way. You don't have to do that now. And so the expectations of CEOs is so high, like, why can't you do this? And if you are an old school thinking kind of HR person and you're like, well, you know, these systems don't talk to each other like, screw this, you know, like, dump all the raw data into an AI system and have it automatically produce insight for you. There's no excuse anymore.

Speaker A: I think that's so right. And I think, you know, I look back on my days when I would ask my team, I would want to find out, I don't know, a, uh, particular metric or a measure or. And I didn't realize that they would be going away and trawling through Excel spreadsheets and you know, I'd be thinking, why haven't they come back to me within a day on this? And it would take them a fortnight and they're all exhausted. And then I'd go, oh, actually, that hasn't really kind of told me what I wanted. Anyway, maybe you could go and look at this. And of course, off they go.

Speaker B: They're like always changing.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. But, um, I think, you know, the point that you're making there is that it's not just about, um, having the information, it's then acting on those insights and being driven. I mean, that's the title of the book, right? It's, it's not just that you are insightful, is that you are insight driven. So what are they doing differently when they're driven by insights? I mean, I, I would hope I know what you're going to say, but, but just for the benefit of doubt,

Speaker B: it's that, it's that grounding in, in business acumen. So, you know, when, so it's the, it's the instinct to know that when you have, you know, regrettable attrition of top performers and in key critical roles, like, you know, what's at risk and you can tell that story with urgency and credibility. And influence. Right. Um, so you know, you could you, if you were to, you know, be an HR first lens, you could say, oh, I can take, you know, attrition and I can break it into by country, by region, by top performers, low performers. But I don't really know if my top performers and low performers are accurate, um, or by role. But I don't really know if that's accurate. Um, and I can probably get to the number, um, but then I can't say because of this, this product launches at risk or us getting our, uh, you know, we're about to expand in Asia and that whole uh, you know, sales motion is at risk and here's what we need to do about it. You know, and I went in and I pulled of these, you know, critical roles, top performers. I went into the CRM and I pulled, you know, their sales pipeline. And it, it turns out that 70% of our entire sales pipeline is sitting on these five people. Like, uh, there is a huge business risk here. And so that's to bring that conversation.

Speaker A: I know you can't speak for the whole of the HR profession, um, that would be funny. But given that you interviewed so many people, you know, a really good size sample. How many chros are doing that, what you've just described?

Speaker B: Few. Yeah, I mean, um, what we found, um, is, and the biggest reason why or why not, um, is the alignment with the CEO, uh, and the comp committee chair on the board, um, in terms of the alignment of expectations of the role. So it's how the. It's not if the chro is capable of doing that work, it's if the corporation creates the space that wants the chro to do that work and wants that information. So you know, if you think about a, you know, uh, a two by two grid where how the CEO thinks about the CHRO's role. Does the CEO think they want a strategic, impactful, business insight driven or you know, blocking, tackling, uh, you know, make sure payroll, um, you know, keep compliance, keep us off the front page of the paper of any scandals, all of that stuff. So administrative and tactical or strategic. So what does the CEO want from the HR function? What does CEO expect? And you kind of have to have the blocking and tackling done first before you can do the more strategic. Because if you're in that strategic space and people aren't getting your paycheck, you're in a lot of trouble. So it's what does the CEO want and what does the chro can do?

Speaker A: But isn't there uh, Also a responsibility on the chro to suggest to the CEO, uh, what could be possible if they were open to it.

Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. So what we saw was an incredibly interviewed several incredibly strategic, impactful, insight driven chros that were perfectly aligned with their CEO. And then a CEO change and the new CEO comes in and says, why are you in these meetings? I didn't ask for this report. Um, I kind of feel like there's too much horsepower coming from your function. Um, maybe I'm going to save a lot of money by cutting the HR in half and getting, you know, and I'll just put a more junior person because I don't think I need all that you're giving me. And it's there. Uh, you know, that chro can say, here's what insight can bring you, here's the value that I can bring you in this role. Sometimes we interview people that could influence that new CEO. And sometimes they were like, you know, yeah, it seems like at this phase of the business you need, ah, ah, an administrative chro, ah, and probably half the size. Keep the lights on. Save money maybe, if that's what you need to do. Um, two years of just keeping everything running and then when they go, oh, crap, you know, and then they'll do it again. Um, but if the CEO doesn't want it or can't see the vision, and the chro can't convince the CEO of the vision, they're wasting their time. They're too much for that organization completely.

Speaker A: Right. I'm just going to pause here for a moment just to mention our disruptive HR club. Uh, we've got thousands of members, HR professionals who want to do things differently. And in the club they get tons of resources like live and on demand training to help them do it. Um, so if you're interested, just check out, uh, our website, disruptivehr.com and you can find the links in the show notes from this podcast. Um, let's have a chat about your AI. Because you can't do any kind of podcast or article or blog or whatever on HR without mentioning AI. And it's mandatory. And as you already touched on, this is a very exciting area. But AI cognitive analytics, game changing when it comes to workforce data. But how can leaders use these tools responsibly without losing the kind of the human touch in decision making?

Speaker B: Well, certainly the analysis and the connection of HR data and business data is that much faster, um, which should inform HR professionals to have really, really m. Impactful conversations straight away. But it's still the HR person That's having that conversation with the CEO and the board of directors. Um, they're coming to those conversations with more insight, influence, uh, the ability to have a data driven story about the business. So it should do nothing but help the chro, um, with their influence with the people that matter at the board of directors.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think that we can learn so much from the way that marketing and sales have done it in the past, the way that they've pulled together, sometimes proxy measures, sometimes hard measures, sometimes qualitative measures, but they've just got away. And they've been very skilled and adept at pulling this together into a compelling narrative that doesn't bore the pants off everybody that, you know, instead of just giving people numbers, they tell them this story and they hook them in. Um, and I think that that's really where we need to be playing. It's not just getting better data, it's actually helping our audience connect with that data and think, what does this mean for me? Doesn't it?

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Um, you share some brilliant case studies in the book, but you also showed that analytics can fail when the culture isn't ready for it. Um, what are the signs that a company just isn't there yet. Was that the kind of the piece you were talking about with the CEO or there are other factors.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, that's part of it. But you can tell in a culture. Um, you can see the patterns of, um, an organization saying, we need to make this decision, let's go around the table, and everybody says how they feel. Do you have a culture that says just in your vocabulary? Um, that's an interesting idea. Show me the data that supports that point of view. I'd love to learn more. Educate me in how you came to that proposal. What data informed that insight? And so just are you, Is it an instinct in the culture to back up what you're saying with some numbers? And is it an instinct in the culture to say, I have a question, let's gather a bunch of data, see what the data tells us, and then make a decision? Or is it the instinct in the culture to say, I think the number is seven? Can somebody. I think the answer is seven. Can somebody go find me some data that proves that my instinct is right, that it's seven? And so then you're selectively finding things, um, that just back you up because your decision making is from a gut space. Um, some leaders are brilliant, true. But, uh, most are just great business people and they need to follow practices. You know, I mean, there are savants out there that, you know, people have written books about them, but those are one in a billion. And the rest of the people are really methodical and organized and they, you know, what is the white space in the market and what will customers pay for and what are our competitors doing and what is, you know, what can we build and what can we sell? And like, okay, that is a, is a, like in marketing and sales, that's a data gathering process and you make informed decisions with that. Um, and you can tell in a culture, um, I mean, when you're interviewing as a potential chro candidate and you're going in and you're talking, always talk about when you're talking to whatever in the interview process. How do you make decisions? What data informs the decisions that you make? What's the most transformational thing that has happened in this company? How did you come to the decision that that was what you needed to do in the past? Because if they don't have a culture of that, you could present all kinds of really compelling data with a lot of business insight and business acumen and they're just like, yeah, it's not how we do things here.

Speaker A: Um, we're going to need to start to wrap this up. Unfortunately. I just wondered, and I hate being asked this question myself, so apologies. But you know, for any leader listening, any chro listening who really wants to become more insight driven, you know, from tomorrow, they want to become more insight driven. They know. And when we, when we work with, you know, multiple CPOs, CHROs, whenever we're asking them about the areas that they know they're not great on, this always comes near the top, uh, using data and insights effectively. So if they're listening and they're thinking, I do want to get better at this, what's the one or two small steps you would advise them to take?

Speaker B: Um, if folks are, if they know, if you're early in your career and you know, you want to be in hr, um, and you started in HR and you. I'd say the best advice is to leave HR and come back, have an experience in the business, uh, a year, two years, three years, in something that is very data driven, like, um, uh, sales, operations, marketing operations, you know, something that's very, you know, when there are stage gates and uh, you know, it's incredibly informative. Um, and uh, if you're later in your career, I have found, um, tremendous value in, um, studying books about sales operations. And there's a couple out there that are really good. And I've, you know, I Have a couple friends that are very data driven chief marketing officers. And I've said, can I shadow you? You know, I have a good friend, um, Katti Srinivasan, and she's an amazing data driven cmo. And I've said to her, like, when I'm between things, can I just shadow you and listen to the types of questions that you ask your team about, you know, how do we go from, um, how do we get better fidelity in our marketing lead generation to be able to go from marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads? Because when a sales rep, you know, our percentage of deals that fall through halfway through the sales funnel, it's because they weren't, they shouldn't have been in the sales funnel to begin with. They weren't good leads. And then you could say that applies to, like, candidates or leadership development. Are we even giving leadership development to the right people that have the capacity to be the future leaders? You know, like, this is a very precious thing. We could give a really not so great experience to everybody and hope somebody, you know, learns on their own how to be the leader of the future. But we could figure out who are really the best, most capable future leaders, invest a lot in them, and then have a better, higher fidelity of. Yeah, this cohort, 80% of this cohort are the leaders of the future of this company.

Speaker A: Um, fascinating, this. I've got about a million questions, but we're going to have to start to wrap things up, unfortunately. I just think it's so. It's an area that is so rich and so, um, there's so much to explore in it. And I just think that we have not, not been great at it. And maybe it's because our CEOs weren't expecting it from us in a way that they would expect it from finance or they would expect it from the cmo. Um, but you and I were talking, um, before we started recording and just the demands on Chros now are so dramatic and they've increased significantly even in the last year. Right. And there is no, there's no getting away from the fact that being data driven, insight driven is going to be a key factor, I think, in the future for chros and HR leaders as well as broader business leaders. Jenny, thank you so much for joining us. Um, it's been a brilliant conversation. So a reminder that Jenny's book, for those of you who are, uh, looking on, uh, YouTube. There you go. This is the Insight Driven Leader. It's out now. It's a fantastic read. It's a blend of really kind of thought provoking, challenging. Great case studies, obviously, insight, data driven, um, but really practical as well. So it's a fantastic resource. How can people get hold of you, Jenny, if they want to get in touch?

Speaker B: Yeah, LinkedIn is really best, honestly. Um, um, you know, there's no, whatever, firewall or something, whatever it's called. So just, um, reach out to me, put a little note in, you know, I heard you on this thing and, um, and then let's, let's connect. And I post all the time and people DM me all the time and I respond.

Speaker A: So, yeah, fantastic. Jenny, thank you so much.

Speaker B: My pleasure.