EP # 2 Mia Lim: You Need To Stop Speaking HR & Start Speaking Human

Speaker A: I think in HR we have a lot of really great frameworks and we have leaders that are so good at, uh, using these frameworks to design systems, processes. But the missing piece often or the last mile in managing change, in really changing behaviors is translating that and making it relevant and important to your audience. And, uh, that's really often, I think, where change fails.

Speaker B: Here in the Philippines, we've built our workplaces on something deeply cultural. Uh, deference, hierarchy, don't challenge the person at the top of the room. And it made sense once, but the workforce walking into your offices today didn't get the memo and they're not interested in signing it. Human centric leadership isn't an option anymore. It's the most commercially intelligent decision you can make right now. This is Lead Human, a podcast for senior leaders and anyone who wants to become one who already sense that something needs to change and are ready to do something about it. My name is Eli Harrell and on this show I sit down with people who lead teams in the Philippines who want to build something different. Not just better businesses, but better ways of leading the people inside them, better cultures and a better future of work. Alright, let's get into it. If you lead HR or run a company or lead a team in the Philippines, this episode is for you. This week on Lead Human, I sat down with Mia Liem. She's head of people for Tala across the Philippines and Vietnam. She's one of my favorite thinkers on people culture and hr and the way that she thinks about people work is genuinely different. Mia didn't come up the traditional HR route. Brand management consulting, executive coaching, these are in her background and it really shows in how she operates. We get into the moment when Tala realized that 75% of their people were rated 4 or 5 out of 5 in performance. Why that's not actually good and what they actually did about it, the forwarded email she wasn't supposed to see and the lesson it beat into her about pushing agendas without context. Why most change efforts fall apart at the last mile. The simple one word shift that transforms how your team thinks about problems and what leaders leading Filipino teams need to change to unlock the talent already sitting inside their teams. Mia is one of my favorite people to talk to on these topics. And if you've ever felt like HR is speaking a different language than the business from either direction, this conversation is for you. I'm really excited to hear what you think about this conversation, wherever you found it. LinkedIn, Spotify, please pop a comment in there. Share Your thoughts. Let Mia and I know what you thought about it. Let's jump into the conversation.

Speaker C: Mia, thank you so much for having a conversation with me on Lead Human. Really excited to get this podcast rolling and uh, talk to people like you and learn something out of your white experience and focusing on kind of building human centric cultures. That's what I know you for. Why don't you start us out with just a little bit of your background and kind of how did you get where you are, where you're kind of known for caring about people and caring about what their work life is like?

Speaker A: Sure. So today in, in 2026, um, head of Ah, People for Tala in the Philippines and Vietnam. But my background started outside of the people and HR space. Um, I started my career in brand management and marketing and then transitioned into change management, management consulting and then went into uh, the uh, HR learning and org development space. So I think that transition was really fundamental in shaping the way I think about my work, the way I think about showing up for the people that I work with. My questions to the business are always not how can HR support you? But what is the role of people, of humans in this business and how can we evolve that into making the business even better and making the business be a great place for people to work, to exist? Because work is such a big part of our lives. We spend like 30% of our day or more if you're not so lucky.

Speaker C: If you don't count sleeping.

Speaker A: Yeah, we're nice to you. Great. Um, it's so important to have an environment where people can show up at their best and bring that value to business.

Speaker C: Nice. And through that set of experience, I think it's pretty cool that you spent time in change management. So you really would imagine that led you to seeing a lot of the inner workings of leadership and culture and how challenging it can be to really shift mindsets, paradigm behavior change across an organization. I think a lot of times that's a great background for somebody running HR and taking care of people. Where was it in your journey that you kind of realized that, um, you wanted to kind of focus more on the people side of things?

Speaker A: Where was it in my career? Ah, funny enough, I think I decided in high school that I wanted to do something about related to people. I had always been someone that liked organizing opportunities for myself and other people to learn. So whether that was like inviting speakers over, um, being part of student council, I like organizing conferences and training programs. Um, and then that led to me being a trainer myself. Even in my college days. So I always knew that I wanted to do something related to building people's capabilities and helping them achieve their potential. In, in my career, though, I think one of the moments that I go back to that really shaped the way I am, um, as a leader. As a leader was in the pandemic. This was 2020, April 2020. I started a job in a tobacco company, and I was so afraid to leave my house. This was, yeah, uh, it was in the middle of the pandemic. I was so afraid to leave my bubble and interact with other people. And my boss, uh, and I, um, was working in change management and org development, um, and my boss kept telling me, mia, uh, you need to go out and meet our salespeople. You need to go to our factories. You need to visit the sari. Sari stores where we sell our products. And by the way, I'm not a smoker. But it was also like, you just need to understand who our customers and who our people are and who we are serving, um, as an HR function. And I was just so. At the time, I was not receptive to that message. But she kept saying it as, like, the one thing that was keeping me from being an effective, um, professional in change management. Fast forward to where I am now. The first six months of the role that I'm in, what I really focused on was sitting next to our people, listening to them taking calls with our customers, asking them about their workflow, asking them about the tools that they're working with. Because now I get it. Now I get it. My boss used to say, like, unless you have tobacco running through your veins, you're not going to be able to do your job well. And I didn't like the way she said, Yeah, I didn't like the way she said it. But it's the principle of, like, you need to be able to speak the language of the humans at work and

Speaker C: not know what their life is like

Speaker A: and not speak like an HR person. Otherwise you're not going to design solutions that they work.

Speaker C: Would you say that's somewhat uncommon in your line of work?

Speaker A: I think so. I think so. It's sadly not that common because, um, you know, I think in hr, we, we have a lot of really great frameworks, and we have leaders that are so good at, uh, you know, using these frameworks to design systems and processes. But the missing piece often, or the last mile in managing change in really changing behaviors is translating that and making it relevant and important to your audience.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: And, uh, that's really Often, I think where change fails.

Speaker C: So if you had to translate that into a very simple tactical how to guide, how would somebody start? Like, what do you, what's the cadence look like for you? Or what did it look like in the first six months when you made this your goal?

Speaker A: So, so at tala, my first six months was really just listening to the business understanding not what the HR problems were, but really understanding what people were experiencing as problems in their day to day work. And then what the leaders also in the business were experiencing as, uh, challenges in managing talent. And the way that I bridged that with our HR frameworks and HR processes is really taking a look at some of the systems that we had, the policies that we had, and saying, okay, here's where we are no longer relevant. We need to update some of our playbooks and we need to really start speaking like business metrics instead of HR jar. So I'll give you an example. We have this apprenticeship program where in our operations team you can't get promoted until you have proven for at least six months that you're already operating at the next level.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: So it's like a trial period for both you and for the team that you may be managing in the future. And HR used to just be kind of the administrators of that program. But once I started getting much more involved in operations, I was able to then help the leads design what an apprenticeship experience should look like, what are some of the outcomes that we want to see? And then also providing more support like, okay, I think for this person to succeed in this program, to get them, um, to graduate from this program, they're probably going to need X, Y and Z skills. Here are some resources that you can provide from a learning perspective, but not like coming in with a box and saying, here's what I have in terms of like learning programs. What can we make, what can work from.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's kind of crazy how often we don't realize we're implementing something or prescribing something with just nowhere near enough context. Right. Nowhere near enough understanding.

Speaker A: And I always tell my team this context is your superpower.

Speaker C: So yes, context I think is just often overlooked. Well, we think we're getting enough, but we're not. So I think it's awesome that you really realized like how much you need to invest in that. So go spend more time on the front line knowing what people's lives are really like before you try to bridge between the business needs and actual people needs. Fair summary.

Speaker A: Yeah, sneaky.

Speaker C: Um, so let's talk about org transformation and maybe, yeah, creating actual change in an organization. What are your thoughts on that? What have you learned? What's your take?

Speaker A: So I started out in my career as a consultant, right. And I came in from the perspective of like being a facilitator of change. So creating all these tools and communication, upskilling programs, et cetera. So, you know, that was my background and my very basic understanding of how change happened. But when I came into corporate roles, I realized that all of those things are accessories to change. But change really starts with leadership and uh, especially in founder, uh, led organizations. So whether it's SMEs or startups or even like large family corporations where the founder or at least the CEO and their worldview really permeates, like it really branches out in ways that they don't even realize more often than not. Right. And so before I kind of came into this role, I got certified as an executive coach because I recognized that to really change hearts and minds, you really have to start sometimes at uh, these top layers and think about how they envision the future of the company in order to create like real, lasting, sustainable change.

Speaker C: Yeah, I totally see that and agree. And I've always felt like you've got to go to the top to really change things. And then at the same time I feel like sometimes we don't invest enough at scale where behavior and mindsets can really change faster at the bottom if we invest in certain things like, like coaching skills are often not invested in things like that. How do you balance between the time you spend trying to work with senior executives and their paradigms versus what you invest in, you know, changing behavior and skill sets.

Speaker A: The rest of the layers. Yeah. So I would say firstly it is uh, at least like 20% of your time has to be spent with the leader or the leaders and really getting clear on what is it that they need to change from. Where are we today? Even just like having a reasonable assessment of uh, where we are today is one of the most difficult things because people don't like to admit that there

Speaker C: are things that are as the senior leaders.

Speaker A: As senior leaders, of course, yeah, nobody wants to admit that for sure. Things are broken, things aren't perfect. So even just spending that time up front will make the, the rest of the 80% of the time much easier and much clearer. And then to your question about like spending time in the middle and lower like tiers of the company, I don't have a great answer to that, but I do, uh, like to use the skill and will Assessment sometimes. We are doing that today at Tala. Uh, there's a lot of things that are transforming. The culture is moving into this space where we need people to operate with much more agility, much more openness to change. And the fact of the matter is there are people that are either unwilling or unable to move into that space. So having very clear metrics for how to measure like skill and will, when it comes to openness to change, I think is also really important. But it's very difficult. It's very, very. It can get a bit subjective. So that's a bit trickier.

Speaker C: Yeah. When it comes to measuring. So what, what are you doing now or what is working when it comes to measuring that ability or will?

Speaker A: So I think one thing that is working is that we are getting much more, uh, disciplined, much more structured in how we measure performance first and foremost. Because I think performance is your first signal that someone may not be fit for where we're going to. So if they're not performing with the current set of expectations, then what will lead us to believe that they can perform in tomorrow's set of expectations? Right, so we start with that and then for those that are. And by the way, Sala used to be globally, a uh, couple of years ago, our performance ratings were very, very skewed. Um, to the top ratings. We have a five point scale. Once upon a time when I first joined, 75% of the company were rated 4 or 5 out of a 5 scale. And so it's like, it's not realistic, it's not a reasonable distribution. Right. We're very skewed.

Speaker C: Well, you could have just all superstars.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, if we had all superstars, we would probably all be millionaires by now. And that's just not the reality. So we had to take a really hard look, um, and calibrate some of those, um, performance ratings, calibrate the expectations that we were communicating to people. So it's really like the discipline of creating performance reviews and creating a culture of feedback. So you don't wait for the next performance review to uh, assess someone's.

Speaker C: Right. People, people are getting data back on how they're doing. Much faster cadence.

Speaker A: Yeah, More real time and more based on smart, smart objectives, smart feedback. So that was one piece of it. And then the other piece of it was really just like training managers on how to coach in real time as well. Because if you're giving feedback but you're not coaching, then you're not enabling people to uh, or you're not giving people the Opportunity to prove that they have the uh, skill and the, and the will to move into the next stage.

Speaker C: So how did you go about you know, lifting sort of elevating, upskilling people and coaching skills? I'm really curious what worked for you?

Speaker A: Yeah, so we actually spent a lot of time on what was working and not working in coaching, especially for our front lines. What I've observed is frequency was not a problem because they, especially in these like you have a lot of BPO type jobs. I can't um, customer care teams, collections teams, they're trained to give weekly coaching sessions. So it's not a frequent part of the system. Yeah, it's part of the system. It's part of their metric also if they miss a coaching session it shows up and it gets flagged to management. Right. But the quality of the coaching. Exactly was what was missing. And um, it also started with not having clear performance metrics, performance target. So it was actually fixing a lot of these like systemic issues like not having the right visibility into uh, their frontliners performance because they could just give like very subjective coaching and not have it work. Right. But actually giving them visibility into the metrics, giving them clarity on targets and then giving them the tools. So we also supported like a whole work stream of creating these dashboards and tools that would help real time coaching made such a real difference and also reduce a lot of the friction because people used to like do coaching in all sorts of different ways but standardizing it and giving them a common set of tools and language around made up that's often needed. So I was very afraid in the beginning that you know, because I was asking a lot of questions in my first six months I sat in on a lot of meetings that HR had never sat in on.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, I was like asking for access to all these like tools and presentations that uh, no one from my team had ever asked for. But I was also very, very conscious of not making people feel like I was stepping on their toes or that I was like trying to claim credit where credit.

Speaker C: So they received you as an ally.

Speaker A: Yes. So I think building allyship, building the relationships was an equal part. So equal parts digging and trying to understand things but all. And approaching things with genuine curiosity rather than approaching things with judgment. Yeah. Was really, really key to that. And I think yeah, going back to like getting certified as a coach also helped with that. Uh, like the line of questioning or the language that I was using was coming from a sense of curiosity rather than like oh, why are we doing things this Way. Why. Why don't we do things this.

Speaker C: When you did change management consulting before, did you do that with different organizations? Did you work as a outside consultant?

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker C: So I imagine that also probably taught you how to come in and not put up a bunch of walls right away.

Speaker A: I think it was foundational, but it was also very different because as a consultant, you are given the mandate to. To do that, to ask tough questions.

Speaker C: It doesn't mean people want you there.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And sometimes people will withhold things from a consultant because the attitude that I would get sometimes was like, speak only when spoken to and only share the information that's requested by consultants. So coming in as a consultant actually doesn't always work. I think coming in as a coach or with a coaching mindset is much more effective, especially as a leader, because people feel that you are there to actually help them.

Speaker C: Yeah, spot on. I agree. To add a tiny bit to that, I would say for consultants out there, come in as a coach if you can.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Like, also build the. Just because there's a mandate doesn't mean you have them as allies. So.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Anyway.

Speaker A: And it's two very different toolkits. I, I credit my time in consulting with giving me, like, the disciplined analytical skills, skill set, uh, the frameworks, all that. So the structure, I still lean on that, but my time as a coach.

Speaker C: And that came after.

Speaker A: Came after. And I think that gave me that layer of, like, the emotional resonance with my stakeholders that I didn't have as

Speaker C: a consultant in that journey of developing more emotional intelligence and understanding people better. Sounds like the coaching learning, you know, getting certified as a coach was a big part of that learning. What were, I don't know, what are some shifts or memories of when things went wrong because you didn't have that kind of eq.

Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. So back to that, um, that first job that I had back in the Philippines, I was given another hack, which was head of, uh, dei. So I was leading, like, DEI across all these different departments. I was, um, I was leading all these different DEI projects and we, we had an internship program and I wanted to hire a few interns to help, like, implement these DEI projects across different departments. And so I was, uh, offering. I, I sent this proposal to one of the HR BPs who was, uh, in charge of the department. So I got a response from him, which was a forwarded email. So he forwarded my email to someone else and it was. The email was retracted, but I saw it before he retracted the email. You know what? I'm saying, like, he tried to in Outlook there.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, I remember that feature. Uh, pulled him back.

Speaker A: Yeah. So he tried to pull it back, but I saw it before he actually did it, and it was basically forwarded it to someone else. And he said in Filipino, he said, damning time ni ate. Which in English is like, this girl has so much time on her hand. And I was so passionate about DEI at the time. And I was like, what does this person mean? Like, why. Why is he saying, I have so much time on my hands? So I felt like they were making fun of the fact that I was trying to push this DEI agenda. Uh, so I confronted this person and I said, hey, I saw the message that you tried to. Because he accidentally copied me in a forwarded email. So I confronted him and we had a chat, and he basically said, very long story short, he basically said, you know, the feedback that I've been hearing from the team is you come across as this consultant. You have, like, these programs that are already, like, fully fleshed out, and you've been trying to push this team DEI program. But none of us have the time to actually work on DEI. So these are HRBPs who are in charge of the people in our factories. Right. And he was like, people in operations don't need dei. What they need is training. What they need is better recruitment processes. What they need is better tools. So he kind of chewed me out for something that I was really passionate about. And again, at that time, um, it hurt me a lot. And, um, I was very unreceptive to that. Very similar to my boss's advice that, like, you know, unless you have tobacco running through your veins, you're not gonna get it. You're not gonna.

Speaker C: That quote taken out of context. You have to. If you just heard that part, go back and listen to the beginning.

Speaker A: But I only understood it years later, where I'm sitting now, like, oh, okay. I wasn't trying to help the business. I was trying to push an agenda.

Speaker C: Yeah. Without understanding what their lives are like,

Speaker A: without understanding their context, and without really understanding the need in that part of the business.

Speaker C: Um, thanks for sharing that story. I think the journey often is, like, we figure out how to get good at something, get efficient at it, and then people progress in their careers, but then eventually they realize, like, oh, there's this human part of life that we can't ignore, and efficiency doesn't always work with people.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Love it. You talked about working with senior leaders. When you look at your organization right now and you think of the people that you see potential in. How do you approach. What are some of your best ways of supporting the development of those people into the potential they have for leadership or supporting existing leaders in their growth? What works for you?

Speaker A: What works, I think, is really getting to know them as people first and understanding what motivates them, them as people before all else, but then also understanding what the business needs and being able to translate that into human terms, meaning what are the capabilities that are actually going to get us there? Maybe I can give an example.

Speaker C: Stories work.

Speaker A: Yeah. So I have one senior leader in our organization has been up for. So she's, um, a manager that has been up for a promotion to senior manager for several cycles now. And for two years now, senior, um, leadership has not given their blessing or has not approved a promotion for her. You know, I always worried about that conflict because I, I think this person is very, very good at their, um, at the technical aspects of their job. So I worry that, like, you know, how is this person's morale going? But I actually just sat down with that person and she was like, you know what? I'm very happy where I am. And in fact, I think a lot of the transformation that's been happening has been really positive for me, and I've learned a lot. What I assume would be a motivator for her was having a promotion. But what motivates her actually is the opportunity to deepen her craft and to deepen her technical skills. So I think coming in without assumptions about what motivates people helps a lot. But then I was also able to extract from her through that conversation, through like, coaching questions, that she recognizes that what has been limiting for her is really her ability to get her people to level up. And that was what was keeping her from getting to her next level. So she and I are working very closely on that and identifying like, uh, the next level of her leadership team. And I think often that is what is what holds leaders back. Right. You can be excellent at your job, you can be a very strong leader, but if you're not pulling people up with you, you're not also going to be perceived as a leader by other folks in the organization.

Speaker C: I love it when I see people leading the people side of the business, HR people and culture that are taking such proactive role in defining what good leadership looks like and kind of bringing that learning. It's not, not everybody has that in them yet. They can't always give it if they don't have it. But I've also seen some incredible leaders in HR role, you know, senior VP level, et cetera, that are really trying to bring that kind of change to the organization because they do have that understanding and skillset and then running into resistance and sort of having a challenge. I know we already touched on senior leadership and influencing, but if you could, it sounds to me like you're somebody who is really doing a great job at making positive change in the organization leadership skills, helping other people learn how to grow. People in their organizations or people who are in, in the HR department, leading it, who really want to make that kind of change. I know some who are really struggling there. Any, any tips or tricks, recommendations that you could give them to get, you know, more traction if they're having a challenge with influence.

Speaker A: I think just approaching your stakeholders and approaching the business with genuine curiosity while also challenging the status quo with a, uh, humble and curious mindset goes a really, really long way. Challenging what can we do with what resources we have can go a really, really long way. And then also asking things in a different way makes a big difference. So one of the things that I learned um, in coaching is asking a powerful question. Sometimes it's just about changing the first word. So instead of asking something like why did you do it that way? Asking what made you do it that way?

Speaker C: I had a feeling this was going to be a why to what shift?

Speaker A: Yes, you know that, you know about this. So the why to what shift is so powerful because you, you are separating the person from the problem that is such a.

Speaker C: And there's far less implicit like accusation in the question as well.

Speaker A: It makes people less defensive, um, it makes people more introspective and really forces them to think of factors and systems rather than making excuses for themselves. So even just that the way like using a different set of language through ask powerful questions can transform the way people think about the problem and then how they come to a solution for that problem.

Speaker C: There's another kind of behind the scenes curiosity that I have, which is a lot of people that I see in a role like yours seem quite bogged down with a lot of other chaos that they don't really get to, you know, put a lot of energy into leadership change. Or maybe it's just that they haven't made the decision that that's their role.

Speaker A: I think so. And that has always been a thing filter of mine before joining an organization is figuring out if HR has a true seat at the table where we can have the agency and the capability to empowerment to make change. But you're right, I don't think everyone feels that they have that empowerment and it is a strategic choice. Right. You can build a business with HR just keeping the lights on. I think there are many, many businesses, especially in the Philippines.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's been that way that have

Speaker A: been around for decades, for generations, without having hr, um, have a seat at the table.

Speaker C: I think those companies are on the brink of trouble, though, if you agree.

Speaker B: Why?

Speaker A: I like to think so. Of course, this is my bias. But I do think that there is danger in that because you're then building a business around just seeing people as replaceable boxes. Right. Um, when HR doesn't have a seat at the table, then you're not actually building systems where you can scale. So to give an example, I think we had many processes that were very reliant on a person knowing what to do. So, like payroll, for instance, was a very manual process and relied on one person doing everything end to end. Um, and that breaks very easily. And that is also impossible to scale, scale. So when HR doesn't have the ability to say, hey, this is what I need, these are the tools that I need so that I can actually partner with a business and actually really help them be strategic. Uh, as a partner, you are building a foundation that can very easily break. The next time you have a leadership change, the next time there's a disruptive piece of technology in your industry, the next time you have a competitor that all of a sudden, you know, starts to poach your talent.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: So it is a very, very vulnerable place to be. And I would not want to be in a company that has built that kind of foundation.

Speaker C: Yeah. I think there's more and more older companies in the Philippines discovering that they're losing their best people because they just haven't built it the right way and they have to shift. But, yeah, and I think more of them are seeing that, and the question is how? Yeah, trickier.

Speaker A: Uh, and we're going to see that within this generation, I believe, because I, I do think There are many SMEs, there are many big companies where they have a whole layer of leadership and management that are ready to retire but don't have anyone to pass on to.

Speaker C: And I'm curious, you know, what is your perspective there and what, what do you think relates to the purpose of this show and that topic?

Speaker A: So one of my favorite professors at mit, uh, wrote. Her name is Zainab Dan, and she wrote a book called, called the Good Job Strategy. Um, and I invite you to, to watch her TED Talk. Um, so just search.

Speaker C: We'll link to it.

Speaker A: Yeah, just search on the ted TED Doc site. Uh, Good Job Strategy and relating to the future work. So her whole thesis is that creating good jobs is a strategic choice that companies can choose to design jobs that are both good for business, meaning they are good for your bottom line, good for the people that are occupying those jobs, and good for the customer experience. And she gives a number of different examples of that where, see like case studies where companies were able to trim down their workforce, but also focus the jobs on jobs that really matter so that where there are the highest touch points with your customers, they that is where you invest more of your resources, your training, your best talent. And that is a choice that you can make and that it stems from, you know, making strategic choices for the business. Like not having a hundred variants of different products, but really being choiceful of like what you're offering to the market. There's a whole body of work around that. But the way that shows up in my work is I see a future for the Philippines where technology like AI and automation and all of these great systems that we're seeing come into the market can really help us to focus work that brings dignity back to work or focus jobs that bring dignity back to the work.

Speaker C: Can you define bringing dignity back to work? What do you mean by that?

Speaker A: I can define it by defining the opposite. The opposite of that is just hiring people to be warm bodies at work. Hiring people to, uh, sit by the parking lot like, you know, these parking attendants that are paid to just press a button that releases your parking ticket so you can get into a parking lot. That is a terrible way to invest a person's time. Right. And it's also because the machine was probably placed somewhere that's a bit like awkward for the driver to access. So it's a strategic choice because whoever designed that, uh, probably wasn't really like thinking through what the customer's experience would be and what are some of the requirements of building a system that actually works. So I think the future of work is very human in that sense. I do think there are going to be a number of jobs that will go away.

Speaker C: Um, like pushing the button, hopefully, hopefully

Speaker A: just button pushing or warm body jobs. And I would like to think that that means we'll have more jobs that actually give people meaning.

Speaker C: So in leadership, in you know, just like shifting or shifting the priority set when it comes to designing products, services, our workflows, but even the roles themselves, specifically around meaning and dignity in the role and like building the business so that's kind of becomes a central priority.

Speaker A: Yeah. And then using technology to automate a way things, things that are repeatable, that are, you know, very rules based, transactional, so that we can spend more time on interactions that actually bring meaning to.

Speaker C: I love it.

Speaker A: Yeah. Between you and your customer.

Speaker C: It very much aligns with what I would like to see and what I think AI can do for us if we choose to prioritize it that way. And um, Yeah, I love that. That way of defining it. Thank you. All right, last question. We have a vision, something I've been talking about more this past year. I think the Philippines is really known for talent, not really known for leadership right now. And. But there's so much potential here. I think there's so much potential in people. So what's one or two things that you think we all as, let's say, senior leaders, if they're listening to this in our own organizations, things that we need to shift to be able to unlock more of that leadership potential in people in this country.

Speaker A: Unlocking leadership potential for Filipinos.

Speaker C: Yeah. You know, what do we need to shift in our own way of treating people? The cultures we create, the rules we make.

Speaker A: I think it's increasingly important for senior leaders to, uh, bring people on the journey. So whether or not you see someone's potential to eventually become a leader themselves, it's important to give them enough context and, uh, clear expectations so that people can rise up to that challenge. Right. Because very often I think people, Filipinos can be very good executors. Well, what's the term? Like implementers?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: Executors are like executors or implementers. But often it's just executing someone else's vision without the context when leaders really stop. And this takes time, like it really takes skill and time, um, and mindfulness to really explain what this means, what the big picture is, what our end state should look like when people, when leaders start to do that, I am often very surprised who rises up and actually goes beyond what's being asked for and the solutions that come out of the front lines once they have more clear context is so surprising to me.

Speaker C: So setting the objective of just being more aware of what kind of visibility people do or don't have, because sometimes we accidentally engineer things to where people are really like they're in a tunnel. Right. They don't have that perspective.

Speaker A: Yeah. And they get.

Speaker C: And you only, you only get it when you rise up, but you're never going to rise up if you don't have it. Sometimes.

Speaker A: Right, Exactly. And I've seen this, um, just last week I, we're implementing a new performance management policy, which is like a very HR thing. The way that we did it was we got buy in first from the leaders in the organization and then we got, uh, buy in from the team leads. And they understood that this is important for us to get right because this will actually make us stronger and help us get to the level of performance as a whole organization that we need to our annual target for this year. And uh, when we kind of walked through that thinking, we then had one of the team leads lead a cascade session to his direct reports and to our frontliners. And he became one of the biggest champions of this program. It's like a small thing, but it was so surprising and honestly so touching for me to see because it could have just been like, it was one of those things that like, hey, yeah, this meeting could have been an email. But because it was led with such heart and championship and allyship between like the business and hr, it became so much more powerful. Uh, and people actually embraced the program where as, uh, most people would not be very happy about performance management.

Speaker C: It's like, beautiful. Awesome. Very cool story. Thank you for sharing. All right, amazing conversation. Feel like I'm learning a lot, but also there's so much more that I would take years to learn from you. I'd appreciate you, uh, taking the time to share some wisdom with us. Question that I would like to start asking people One last bonus question. You, you referenced a book. What are a couple of the books that been transformational for you and your journey? Personal development, career, business, anything in that genre?

Speaker A: I think the Good Job Strategy by Zainab Dunt is one. And then Work Rules by Laszlo Bach. Um, so Laszlo Bach was the very first chief people officer at Google for 10 years and then went on and started his own business. Work Rules really, I think breaks down what it means to be a, ah, real people partner. And he by the way, was also the one that popularized like calling HR people and vulture function rather than just human resources. So really starting to see people as people.

Speaker C: Nice.

Speaker A: I think those two.

Speaker C: Those two, yeah. Awesome. All right, thank you so much. Looking forward to the next time we talk.

Speaker A: Yeah, thank you for having me.

Speaker B: All right, that's the conversation for today. And you know what? If something in there hit good, sit with it. The most expensive leadership insight is the one you agree with and never act on. If this felt worth your time, pass it on to one leader in your life who needs to hear it. That's how this conversation grows. Thank you again for being here. Would love to hear your comments on the conversation again. I'm Eli Harrell, and this is what leadership looks like when humans come first.

Speaker C: See you next time.