310 - Rethinking the Manager Role & Career Growth (CPOs of Yelp, Zapier, & Time Doctor @ Running Remote)

Brandon Samood: How high can you go before you have to start managing humans in our organizations today? Now, I think practically there was a reason why in a lot of organizations there was only so high you could go. Because a lot of these decisions around these senior roles were based on the breadth of your accountability. Right. It wasn't necessarily about managing people, but because managing people was typically needed to produce that level of impact. It just so happened, right, that to have some of the highest level roles in the company, you had to manage people, entire teams or departments. That's starting to change too. At Zapier today, for example, three of our ten exec roles, uh, do not involve people management.

Vinny Coelho: We have to start looking at the job of a leader, uh, as a privilege as well. It's not that not everyone can do it, but if you want to do it now, you have to prepare yourself to do it and you have to coach yourself as well. It's not only you being developed to become one, uh, because those roles are going to be scarcer, they're going to be less of them. Uh, and I truly believe that not only that IC factor and being that builder, but if you really want to be a leader, you really got to show it.

Carmen Amara: I do think the role of the manager is changing faster than the job. And we are asking now our managers. And the manager of the future is going to have to be more strategic and the manager of the future is going to have to be able to frame and ask the right questions and integrate context and then interpret potentially ambiguous results. So it's less about managing tasks in the future and it's more about making sure we're doing the right work in smart ways.

Narrator: You're listening to the Modern People Leader podcast where we go behind the scenes with today's top HR leaders and work experts. We talk to them about how they've gotten to where they're at, what they do every day, and what they see coming next for the future of work. Hope you enjoy.

Host: Hello everybody. Welcome to our session and thank you for joining us. As she said, I have a podcast called the Modern People Leader. I think we've done like 300 ish episodes over the last five years. We've done live events that are similar ish to this, but this is actually my first panel that I'm moderating outside of mpl, so it feels a little weird. So go easy on me, guys. Super excited for today's topic. It's something that we can't get away from on the podcast, at least probably every other week for the last Year, this has been a really hot topic, and I feel like it's especially ramped up over the last couple of months. Just a couple of weeks ago, we had a live event in Toronto, and we had programmed 80 minutes for the content, and 20 minutes of it was going to be Q and A. And we ended up spending 40 minutes going really deep on the questions that we're going to cover in our discussion today. We were getting questions like, what does the career ladder look like today? Do we even have entry level roles anymore? What does the new manager role look like going forward? And honestly, people didn't have perfect answers, but that's okay. That's why we're, we're having this, this conversation. I'm, um, so excited about the group that we have with us here today. We have Carmen Amara, who's the Chief People Officer of Yelp. We've got Brandon Samood, Chief people and AI Transformation Officer at Zapier. Probably like, top one or two voices in the AI and HR space. I feel like anytime I need to learn about AI, I go to Brandon. And we've been lucky to have him on the podcast three or four times.

Carmen Amara: And.

Host: And we have Vinny, uh, Coelho. Did I get that right? Okay, good. Um, he's the VP of operations and chief of staff at Time. Dr. And this was actually a recent promotion as of two weeks ago, so congrats. And so, in preparation for today's discussion, I, um, had the chance to meet with all of them, and Brandon shared this framework for what it means to be a good manager. And. And I loved it. He said great managers need to do three things really well. One, provide clarity. Two, allocate resources, and three, develop their people. And so, Vinny, the first question's for you. Which of those three breaks down first when teams go distributed and where, if anywhere, is AI actually helping close the gap?

Vinny Coelho: I'd say always clarity. Clarity is the one that breaks first. Because if you think about distributed work and office work, right. In office, you have proximity, you have people talking about development, but it's easy to hide clarity in the office, Right? Um, and mediocre clarity or bad clarity becomes very visible in the remote environment and distributed work in general, right? So definitely, to me, that's the first one it breaks, and that's the one that AI is helping make it even clearer in the new world, right. In this new environment. So to me, all of them can be issues, but it's like the first one you observe, and especially if you're moving from a office environment towards the remote environment. It's the first thing. And even for us at time. Dr. We've been remote since day one, for 15 years now. And the evolution of things, what happened over the past, uh, few couple of years especially has made us rethink how we look at a playbook for leadership and a playbook for working in the distributed mode as well.

Host: And, uh, so on that point, needing a new internal playbook for leaders. What do you mean by that?

Vinny Coelho: I think we look at a different perspective, and it's still evolving and we're still building that. Right. But leaders, if you think them in a regular sense of work, of how we've approached, approached work over the past 50, 60 years, is that leaders have to manage. And for them to manage people well, they need to be on top of things, right? They need to be very operational, they need to be with the people. And I think that the new reality, especially adding AI to that, is that makes the necessity of leaders to be not only technical, not only being with the people. Right. But they need to bring that clarity. They cannot be executioners anymore with the team. People need to rely on them, but they also need to rely on the systems that they build so they become less operators and more system architects for how people and how work happens. Actually,

Host: Brandon, I see you nodding over there. Anything you want to add?

Brandon Samood: Well, I have a lot to say on the talent development piece of this equation too, if you're ready to go there.

Host: Yeah, let's do it.

Carmen Amara: Yeah.

Brandon Samood: Okay. Building on where you started us, Vinny, you know, the, um, the work of a manager is getting harder, not easier. So I think that's like one reality. And, uh, what you were showing about clarity reminded me of this, because while, uh, it is conceivably true that with the help of AI, leaders can be more clear and communicate in different ways, uh, to meet the needs of different audiences. Like, that's a superpower of AI. It's great. Um, the environment in which the work is happening, in which the leadership is required, is changing a lot right now. And it's not just within an organization. It's even just like the broader markets in which a lot of our companies are operating like things are getting turned upside down sometimes overnight. Uh, and that's a lot to handle. We had our exec offsite. We do this quarterly at Zapier, also. All remote physically. 15 years. I think we have the same work birthday as companies. That's awesome. Um, so we meet every quarter. It's really important. Right. And what's the number one Reason why it is really important for us to come together is to provide the clarity that you were talking about. And it does not come easily, even when things are fairly chill like in the broader market. And that is not the case right now. And then the other thing you made me think about on talent development, right, like this is another place where, like, the work of a leader is especially hard right now because the goal post for what we are developing people towards keeps getting pushed out. Feels like every 90 days it's getting pushed out. And so I have a lot of empathy for, uh, leaders, of course, but I also have a lot of empathy for the peers that we work with who do anything related to talent development. I mean, every manager is in the business of talent development, but we also typically lean on our people, talent development L and D organizations to provide some framework, some standards to help. And right now, a lot of those teams as well are trying to figure out the new way of doing this.

Host: Carmen, anything to add?

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Carmen Amara: I'll pull on the Clarity thread. So I do also think that AI has a huge potential to help in this space. Um, what we've been seeing at Yelp. We just, uh, completed our annual employee engagement survey and the data was really interesting. You See a gap between the clarity that the frontline manager provides and the clarity that employees are feeling, uh, further up in the organization. So there is this, um, with every, all of the ambiguity that's happening with the pace of evolution and change, uh, our employees are saying, okay, I kind of know what I need to do on, uh, the day to day, but help me understand again how this relates back to our strategy, which has actually shifted really quickly, and what's the why behind the decision and what's my role and what we're trying to achieve, which I don't think are new problems or questions. It's just that with the pace of change and all of the ambiguity right now, um, I think it's really heightened and I do think that puts our managers in a really challenging spot.

Host: And so when you refer to the ambiguity, what are some examples that you're hearing from the team where there could be a little bit more clarity?

Carmen Amara: Well, I think, um, I mean, there's a couple of things. So we've taken some business decisions around strategic mergers and acquisitions and our employees are saying, like, help me understand exactly how that fits into our strategy. But I think more on a day to day basis. Like, if you look at the approach we've taken with AI, kind of leading to the talent development point is to start with skill building, um, not mandates, and really enable people to get in, build familiarity, play around with the tools, learn from one another. We've created forums for managers to get together and learn, um, from one another. Um, and in our recent survey, our employees told us that like 79% of them actually feel, feel that they have good access to tools, that they have resources, that they use it. But most of them are in experimental Mode, whereas only 44% say that they use it on a regular basis within their workflows. So there is this question that's coming up around, well, what is it that you want me to do with it? And so I think that's where we kind of find ourselves right now, also as a leadership team saying, what's the strategic shift that we need to make to help our employees here? So that's one pretty loud avenue.

Host: And so, Brandon, on the skill development front, I think we first had you on the podcast like three years ago or two years ago, and you talked about how Wade called a code Red and had everybody do a one week hackathon where everybody was going into the tools. And it feels like over the last couple of years everybody's done some version of that, whether it's a hackathon or like a weekly, uh, show and tell of what they've built. And so I'm curious at Zapier, what's the journey look like? How has that evolved over the past couple of years? And what's the most recent iteration of how people are picking up these new skills?

Brandon Samood: I still think what we talked about two or three years ago is a good place to start because it evokes a lot of the things we heard from Carmen, like curiosity, like openness. You know, we're not trying to like turn the screws or immediately raise performance standards or things of that nature. So many of the behaviors or the mindsets that we all need to model as leaders, but that we also want to inspire in our people, require, uh, this type of starting point. Right. Openness, curiosity. The other thing I remember, uh, observing in those early like hackathon days, uh, is it really helped me understand within my own people team, for example, the variation in business knowledge or even people slash HR knowledge across my team. Because when you are building with AI, you are ostensibly building to solve a problem. And we set up all of these hackathons all the way to this day. It's like you start problem first and then you go experiment and then you show what you learned and what worked and what didn't work and so on. Very classic format. All of the building was very interesting, all of the demos were very interesting. But the thing I remember most from that first AI hackathon three years ago was just the variation of how folks thought about the problems worth solving. And the thing that that taught me, uh, is that across the whole company, including on my own team, we had work to do in growing folks context. Very much like this is another form of clarity, by the way, to come back to that framework around what is it that we are trying to be great at? Why is it those things and not other things? How do we know measurably the difference between being not great. Okay. Or truly great at those things? And there was plenty of variety in that within my team. So there's actually a place where I focus next and I would highly encourage any of us to like hold on to that idea. Is that anything good that any of our teams will ever do with AI, uh, is going to be anchored on a problem that's actually worth solving and for folks to really have a strong handle on that. It starts with really understanding, uh, the work and what great looks like. Yeah.

Host: The other week somebody brought up that through these hackathons or these company wide mandates, they've done a really good job of driving adoption. And now they're at a point of like, okay, so what, uh, like how do we connect this to something that really matters? And so I remember again, I'm going back to this episode three years ago, but it was so good. I think we were talking about the secondment program that Zapier had and how there were three different business drivers that you were connecting it to. And so you were mapping these skills back to these three different pathways. And I'm curious for all three of you guys, is that how you're thinking about your AI strategy? Have maybe two or three big drivers and instead of just pushing out this company wide mandate, like more AI, let's focus it in on these two or three things.

Vinny Coelho: I will start on this one. Um, and I love the question because the three of us here, Carmen, Brandon and I, we come from very different environments. Right? Yelp is a huge global company and Zapier is at the forefront of so many things. And we at time. Dr. We have a fantastic product, fantastic people. We're much smaller. We have about 140 people distributed in 39 countries. So it's very pulverized around the globe. Right. Um, for us, uh, it started as a panic. You know, everyone is starting to do it. So let's do it. Let's give access to tools. Let's have a sort of a mandate. So we went through all fronts, that's what we did. And we started filtering out what really works and whatnot. So we do have teams that are already more developed than that and we have teams that need to get there. And I think over the past three or four months, that's when we really put together an AI area, internal area in the company. Um, because we've experimented for long enough to understand that we can have a structure now. So I wouldn't go into the business drivers, but I'll go into the management and people drivers for that decision, which is we need as leaders, we need to make decisions faster. They need to be the right decisions. We need agility, we need velocity on those decisions. Right? And I think that is the shift that make us, or made us think about a centralized area that now we redistribute, uh, not only budget and tools and access, but also help us guide through this next moment. So this is where we're at in our size today.

Carmen Amara: So as far as Yelp goes, um, our product itself, um, is really, we are no stranger to AI. So Yelp has been using LLMs in the product design for many years and really, um, the last few years is this acceleration of AI that's really transforming Yelp as a platform, which has historically been discovery. So you think about Yelp probably for, oh, there's, you know, what restaurant can I go find while I'm here in Austin? Who's got great tacos? Um, to an organization that now is informing, ah, discovery, but also action. So, so that you can go and find the place with great tacos that can accommodate your party of seven, um, and your grandmother who's gluten free and your father who's pescatarian and who also has, um, a reservation on Saturday night that can accommodate you all. And go ahead and book that for me. So, um, we're really relying on AI to be able to do those things. And I say that because it has informed the way that we've rolled out and how we have they thought about AI skills and development within the organization because the engineers build the product, so the engineers had to be familiar with the product. So it was very much a product led strategy, necessity to build skills within those organizations. And as the proliferation of AI tools and resources has really accelerated over, I mean it's really not that long if you can think about it. But like over the last year and a half maybe it's oh, now how do we build the skills for everyone else in the organization to enable them to incorporate these into their own workflows? And so on the engineering side of the house, there are certain standards that we've asked engineers to adopt and technologies that we've asked them, uh, to adopt. For everyone else, it's, we're creating content and resources. You know, starting last year on teaching people, how do you ask the right question, how do you write a good prompt, um, to continuing to evolve, uh, things, uh, using um, various agents and creating roundtables and opportunities for collaboration where people can go in and experiment, um, and, and learn from one another. So as I mentioned earlier, we haven't had any mandates around efficiencies, but we do hear now from our employees saying we're using these things. These are great. So and so over there has had some great success. How do we think about really operationalizing this now, um, into our workflows? And so I'd say that's where we are. It's like what, what is our strategy for operationalizing AI to help drive efficiencies? While acknowledging our stance to date has been AI, um, makes you more effective at your job. It augments what you as a human can do. We talk on the people team about how do you use AI to make our work more human? Um, and we're now bumping up against that. That like, is that really going to be the narrative going forward?

Vinny Coelho: Right.

Host: What I'm hearing is the fundamentals of what makes a good manager or what makes a manager a great manager largely have remained the same. And now managers just have to make more decisions. So instead of maybe one or two big decisions a week, it's like one every single day. And we're hearing this across the board with chief people, officers. Uh, everybody we talk to is feeling this because everything's moving faster. And so the next thing I want to talk about is how does the role of a manager change going forward? And I know there are some interesting thoughts from the panel here. Let's start with you, Brandon. How do you see the manager role evolving here in the next few years?

Brandon Samood: There are a couple scenarios. Let's talk about them. And by the way, leadership teams are going to need to pick the one that makes the best sense for them. I don't think there's going to be a universal like this is the future of the manager role, but I think there are some interesting choices that we're going to need to make. One way this works is that you compress the way the manager work works today, uh, through the help of AI. It synthesizes information and signal on how your people are doing. It helps personalize coaching and feedback and the manager can then manage more people as a result. So that's one formulation which is if in your organization today the average manager manages six, then maybe it's 12, two years from now. That's one possible future. What do you have to believe to choose that scenario? Um, I think you need to believe that the general manager effective like you kind of want to keep the level of manager effectiveness, roughly speaking that exists today. You don't necessarily want to go deeper, Right. But you want more breadth, you just want more scale. Right. That's a reasonable choice that some companies are going to make. A, uh, second option is that in company, especially for companies where managers mostly manage, don't do a lot of just like building, like accountability, delivering stuff to the organization. Sometimes you call that a player coach style manager, someone who does do both people management and building isn't accountable for results that themselves not just their team doing stuff. Uh, in those organizations, uh, there's an opportunity for managers to uh, like the surface area that they're directly accountable for the projects, the products and so on to pick up more. Another scenario for people, managers who Kind of just manage people today because that's a lot of work for a lot of organizations by itself is to, for the first time in a while, become the player coach.

Carmen Amara: Right.

Brandon Samood: Because I think the big idea, part of what we heard from coach Carmen as well is that, um, at least in the traditional ways of doing this work, we're going to get some time back. We're going to get some time back. We kind of have to choose whether we want to use that time to invest in greater scale of people management, a different blend of what the manager does. So more IC work, the player coach, um, and, or, uh, like deeper management, like better quality, like much more talent development and much higher quality talent development than most managers are able to pull off today.

Host: And out of those three options, does Zapier have a view on what that's going to look like for you guys?

Brandon Samood: Roughly speaking, we do, but we're staying curious and humble about the whole thing because we're not that far down the road on this choice yet. Um, I don't think you have to choose just one of the three. Uh, particularly with AI, we're really curious in, attracted to the combination of the second and the third. So the second one, uh, being around like the introduction or reintroduction of more like IC work. It's not really IC work though. It's just like doing stuff. Right. It's like getting stuff done, building things, being accountable to work product. Right. Uh, and the third being like much deeper talent development.

Host: Carmen, Vinny, anything to add?

Carmen Amara: I do think, think the role of the manager is changing faster than the job. Um, and we are asking now our managers and the manager of the future is going to have to be more strategic and the manager of the future is going to have to be able to frame and ask the right questions and integrate context and then interpret potentially ambiguous results. Uh, so it's less about managing time tasks in the future and it's more about making sure we're doing the right work in smart ways. What that looks like structurally. Um, for Yelp, we don't have a point of view yet. Um, I think we too are trying to see and understand, um, how that evolves. But I would echo what you said, Brandon. I do think development becomes more important in an air environment and not less.

Vinny Coelho: I think Carmen and Brandon said beautifully, and I'll give an example of the reality. We live in a time doctor today. It is essential that it doesn't matter your role, it doesn't matter where you sit in the company, that you have to get your Hands dirty and that you have to be in the trenches with people and you have to experiment and you, uh, as a leader, you have to lead the experimentation. You need to get everyone on board with that. So I totally agree. Right now is a very special moment that the leader needs to be part of the whole operational side of things. But as it evolves, I think the next step we're going to see in M, this is definitely the leader that takes full focus on development of people and a leader that designs the strategy while having that IC level responsibility of building their own things for the team. So they're building and they're leading. Right. So there are less of managers and more of true leaders and builders. I think that's where we're going to go over the next few months and years.

Host: So it will definitely be interesting to see how this all plays out. What I'm hearing is there's going to be more player coaches and manager roles. There are also going to be some companies that decide, hey, you know what, we need less managers. And each manager is now going to have 12 direct reports. You see the crazy stories where somebody has 50 direct reports. And I don't think that's the case at most companies, but you're going to have the extremes where some companies decide to do that. All of this leads to the question of, okay, well, if there aren't as many manager opportunities, then how do we create different pathways for our employees that they're really excited about? And so this is the part of the conversation that I'm really excited to get into. Anybody, uh, brave enough to take this?

Brandon Samood: All right, I'll start with something we can make it better. Um, a couple of things. One, um, I'm really interested in, like, leadership. And I think that, uh, a big pivot our organizations can make today, although many of them, I think have already done it, is that this, like, IC manager thing and like, managers are the leaders and ICs are. I don't know what they are, but, like, they do what the managers tell them to do. Like, I think that was kind of over in general. Like, AI didn't change the, uh, advantages of thinking differently about that old way of thinking. But I think now the, um, it is that much more obvious that an individual is capable of even more than we might have imagined. And like, in our organizations, we want every single person, regardless of how many people they might be managing or where they are in the org chart, to be a leader. Right? To hold something of significance in the organization and get great results. Otherwise, I don't know what we're doing. Right. Like, you want to hire people who can, like, think and push and build and struggle and collaborate and put something out into the world on, uh, behalf of the organization that otherwise wouldn't be there. I think that's what we're trying to do. I think this just gets more obvious with AI for lots of reasons. One, because that much more of the toil of traditional work gets automated. Um, but also because what, uh, an individual person is now capable of is getting very expansive pretty quickly. So for all those reasons, like that's my first soapbox, which is like, leadership is kind of the big idea. And then like, some people will end up managing people as part of their leadership accountability. And some people will be, uh, you know, working with a lot of AI to get, I mean, as much as an entire team, you know, could have done in some cases before. Um, a couple of pushes that we could talk about here is think about how our organizations work today in what works against what we're talking about. For example, some of us might work in organizations where the manager pay bans for exactly the same job level. Let's say like a level four job, the manager band pays more. Why does that happen sometimes? Well, because a lot of the market data, uh, in a lot of geographies all over the world tells you that the people manager at level four should get paid more than the individual contributor at that same level. Now that's what the market data said. We get to make decisions. If we work in an organization today where those pay bands are different, that's a choice we made. And maybe we made it just because the market says so. But in this time and place, with things changing as fast as they are, do we want to follow fast aging market data or do we want to go a different way? So that's one structural thing that we could inspect today and make a different choice if we want to run a different kind of organization. And the second one, uh, Daniel, which you alluded to is, uh, how high can you go before you have to start managing humans in our organizations today? Now, I think practically there was a reason why in a lot of organizations there was only so high you could go. Because a lot of these decisions around these senior roles were based on the breadth of your accountability. It wasn't necessarily about managing people, but because managing people was typically needed to produce that level of impact. It just so happened that to have, uh, some of the highest level roles in the company, you had to manage people, entire teams or departments. That's Starting to change too. It's happier today. For example, three of our 10 exec roles are uh, do not involve people management.

Host: What? Okay, tell me more about that.

Brandon Samood: Well, they just do incredibly important high grade things that change the color of the sky for the company and they happen to be able to do that without managing people.

Host: And so it could be like the cmo. They're just a super ic accountable for the marketing department. But they have an outsized impact.

Brandon Samood: It could be. And marketing these days I think would be stretchy for us. We're not ready. I don't think we can do everything we do in marketing with just one person. But uh, like corporate development and like M and A strategy would be a great example. Like in an organization of our size, with the amount of M and A that we're out in the market looking to do, we typically need a team of at least several people. We have one corp dev leader of the future, right. Who does that and they have a seat, you know, at that senior table as a result, without having to manage people.

Vinny Coelho: It's very interesting because we're already applying that as well in the company. So um, my recent promotion to be the VP of Operations means that I'm now an IC as well, but also a manager or a leader. Right. I still have functions that report to me, but the role of the VP of Operations is an IC Robotime Dr. It means that I'm in every single room helping, making decisions, supporting being part of the executive team, but also supporting senior leadership into how things are going to get into the operational mode. Right. So already seeing that and that is enabled by AI. AI is helping me being able to be that uh, executioner that uh, true IC in a role that stills demand me to manage other people and functions, but allowing them to fly, fly solo. Right. And that is a result of a shift in the company that late 2024 we started flattening the organization a lot. And I think we've achieved a good result last year and we continue to achieve. And the biggest challenge we have right now is how do you entice people to grow within the company without having that verticality, without being able to go up. And it's an ugly reality that we have to deal with, which is, and I have to be transparent to people and you have to be careful the words you use as well. If you only think that you can grow in your career, you can be a better professional. If you grow up, if you grow vertically, I might not have a space for you in the company. So being Honest. Being transparent about that is important. And also having a methodology and applying it to make sure you show people, people that by having more, uh, relevance in the role, by having more cross functionality among roles as well, it's a great way of growing. So it's not easy. It's something that I haven't figured out yet. We haven't, but we're learning and I think results are coming positively now. So I'm really excited to see what happens. And that's something on the performance and development side, which is key. It was a key part of my upbringing as an HR professional, um, is that, um, I'm still very closely related to it because if we get that right, we'll be able to keep people much, much longer to cut. We have a good longevity of employees in the company and I really hope that even in this time and age, we continue to do so.

Carmen Amara: So just picking up what Vinny was saying about the ugly reality. I mean, the reality of the ugly reality is we've been trying to break this paradigm for a really long time, right? I mean, I've. Every, every year as we do an engagement survey, we find like, employees say, no, I want more development. And then historically, my approach has been, okay, we'll give you more development, we will roll out a new program, we will talk to you about what that means, and then inevitably we find the uptake not to match with what our, um, employees told us. The hypothesis always being, well, that's because they are equating development with promotion. Um, thanks to AI this year, we were able to get a much deeper and very, very fast analysis in the comments from our employees, which did indeed more clearly tell that story, that while our employees do feel that they have the tools and resources available to them to develop, and they feel that their manager takes the time to develop them. Because we have been operating in a flat headcount environment for several years, and because our retention has more than doubled in the last four years, there are fewer opportunities for vertical promotion. And so they see that and they say, I want to be at the company and what is the future for me at that company? So I chuckle a little at the questions like, how do you get people excited about it? Um, you know, we have been trying to get people excited about it for a long time. I think the reality though, is just going to change the game. And so as we think about what does development look like, how do we equip managers to really be able to have sort of that bespoke development approach and conversation with their employees? And how do we really focus more on skill development, cross functional projects and assignments which have been coming, um, with AI. I mean, that is the way, um, of the future. And I mean, I just think generally speaking, that's probably going to be the trend across industries. And so there's just a shift that's coming that I do think then inevitably changes the paradigm.

Host: And on the development front, what was the main piece of feedback that you found in the engagement survey? Like, is there anything in particular that they were looking for?

Carmen Amara: Like promotion?

Host: M. Just promotion. Okay.

Narrator: When I think about our recent Humans times machines conversations that we're having with Chros, there's one theme that keeps coming up. The vision is clear, the pressure is real, but the roadmap is a little bit less clear. It's one thing to talk about the future of work. It's another to sit down with your CEO and say, here's how work, the workforce and our organization really need to change. But I get it. There are a lot of difficult questions that you need to answer, like, what work should we redesign? How will AI reshape roles and careers? What kind of organization do we need to move faster? And these are exactly the questions explored in Deloitte's latest Human Capital Trends report. There's some interesting findings in there. The report shows that we're no longer balancing tensions. We're at a tipping point. The report brings together insights from thousands of leaders and explores how organizations can build a human edge. It's about moving beyond simply having humans and machines to creating a system where their capabilities multiply. It looks at how companies are redesigning work for this new future. How to shift from a mindset of cost efficiency to one of value creation. And how to move from static plans to dynamic orchestration of talent and technology. In other words, it helps turn big future of work conversations into practical leadership questions for a world that won't sit still. If you're thinking about how your organization evolves in the age of AI, go check it out. It's a great read. I read it a couple of times. So if you want to learn more, you can find the link in the show notes.

Carmen Amara: About 8 out of 10. 8 out of 10 told us that they feel like they have opportunities to develop, but, uh, they don't see the forward career progression. Now, I do think I have really enjoyed this conversation and like, understanding how the two of you are thinking about these super IC paths. I mean, I think that's, uh, the job structure will have to change and so maybe there's a path forward in that vein, but right now they don't see it.

Host: And at Zapier, how do you get people fired up about this? I mean, it sounds like you have. How many executives did you say? 10, um, 10. And how many just have their. Three of them?

Brandon Samood: Three are. Yeah.

Carmen Amara: Okay.

Host: And so I'm guessing that's like the. They're the role models for what you could grow into.

Brandon Samood: People can see it. Um, although, you know, I empathize a lot, I relate a lot with what we're hearing from Carmen too, which is like, yeah, they can see it. And then it's also like, for a lot of folks, just, you know, kind of the middle part of the organization. Like, there's a long way to go right before I'm at that table. So, like, what are my other opportunities as a people manager or otherwise? One thing we're seeing is that, you know, to get the type of results that we are all aspiring to with AI, the jobs have to change too. And so that's one of the biggest opportunities that we see. So we look at our promotion rate as well. And, um, uh, that, you know, that's always a question. It actually really hasn't mattered what our promotion rate has been. We always have a slice of folks that are just like, really looking for their next opportunity. And, uh, one of the best things to happen to us on that topic over the last 24 months is that we need to hire new jobs within the company. One, uh, of the most common needs that we have right now are folks who can, uh, take a problem or opportunity where we can redesign the work and redesign the work and then build the systems that are needed to do the work the new way and then maintain and continuously improve those systems. Right? Including. Because the radio ratio of, like, software or tools that we buy versus build internally is changing. We're doing a lot more of our own building now because it's gotten so much easier and, uh, less costly to do so. So how does, what does that have to do with jobs? We have a new job type in the company and it's really popular and we basically only hire from within for it. It's called the AI Automation Engineer. Who's heard of this job? Okay, probably because I can't stop talking about it. All right. The AI Automation engineer, they do exactly what we just talked about. Uh, the very first one we hired, we actually did it on the people team at Zapier. We had a really talented person we hired years ago on our learning and development team, and they were just passionate about building Things that matter. And they have good acumen, HR acumen. We talked about business knowledge and how important that is for like doing useful stuff with it. They had that and they became a good builder. And then the third school superpower that they have which makes them a great AI automation engineer is they're a great coach and facilitator. Because part of the job isn't just to build stuff, it's also how to teach people how to fish. Otherwise that person just becomes an extension of your IT team in another bottleneck. Right. So this is as much a talent development and capacity building job as it is a builder job. It's the single biggest new investment I think that we've made from a role design perspective in the company. Since our AI Code Red moment. We now have them in many places across the company. 100% of those jobs have been filled internally. And this is one of the ways that we show. And by the way, that job based on what it is, is map to market. And for a lot of folks coming into that internally, it isn't typically a promotion from a job level point of view, but it's a higher paying job. It's a higher paying job and importantly, wow, is it a future facing job. Everyone can see it like you get into that job, you're like, I am, um, living the future like this is great. So it kind of fulfills the underlying need that we hear when we hear kind of an interest in promotion. But just from another angle that's part of our overall AI transformation.

Host: Vinny, anything to add?

Vinny Coelho: I think just on a quick note on that is it's very hard to get people excited about growing laterally. Right. It's very hard to show them the relevance they have. So we have to rely on the leaders to read that and we have to rely also on the fact that people need to be open about their desires. And yes, we have the engagement surveys and ENPs. Ours is just coming up out of the oven. Really excited to see the results in the coming days. But, um, one initiative we've done at time. Dr. I've talked about this before, um, is that because we're smaller in number of people, we're able to be, uh, in our people team, we're able to be very intentional about connecting and being proactive about connecting with people. So we do have an initiative called the People Check, which is basically my team or the people and culture team, reaching out to people. Not to ask how your leading is, you know, how your leader is treating you or what your career expectations may be. But what's happening at the moment with you? What are the roadblocks you have and where do you want to go from here? Basically, the three questions we ask, and we've been doing that for three, almost four years now, and have built a point of trust between the HR team and the rest of the company that we, they're very vocal about either not understanding how they're going to grow laterally or that they really want to grow vertically. So, uh, what we start is when we observe that we open the doors, we let them see what else is happening in the company and where they can start grabbing things. You know, uh, it's easy for someone in support trying to go to product. Right. It's a dream of many people in support or even customer success. Oh. When I go to product, want to change the way we, not only how we interact with the customer, but how we're going to make our product grow. Right. But there's so many other pathways that can happen within your own team. And this is what we're trying to show is there's so much you can do and AI enables that. Right. A job description can be much broader now, and we're starting to do it and starting to see some result, and it's really exciting.

Host: And so I want to make sure we save a lot of time for Q and A. And so if you haven't gotten your questions in, please get them in. We want to save at least 15 minutes. But before we do that, one last question for the crew. So as it relates to the new middle and how we rethink, uh, different pathways in our companies and what the role of the manager looks like going forward for the people here, what's one thing that they should be thinking about next week, next Monday, they come into work and they're rethinking all of these things. What's. What's the final takeaway that you want to leave them with? And I'll start with you, Vinny.

Vinny Coelho: I was actually thinking about this, uh, because my mind changed a bit over the past two days, uh, by talking to people and by listening to a lot of great sessions here as well. To me, it might sound cheesy, but I truly believe that we have to start looking the job of a leader, uh, as a privilege as well. Uh, it's not that not everyone can do it, but if you want to do it now, you have to prepare yourself to do it and you have to coach yourself as well. It's not only you being developed to become one. Um, because those Roles are going to be scarcer, they're going to be less of them. Uh, and I truly believe that not only that IC factor and being that builder, but if you really want to be a leader, you really got to show it. And I think that's something that I've been looking and applying and I think that many other, uh, HR peers and leaders should look at that as well. It is a privilege to lead us. It's challenging and it's hard, it's time consuming, can be exhausting, but it's a privilege. So, so

Brandon Samood: that's incredibly well said. You know, we talked about this notion of choices earlier. There's a lot being written on this topic and we can feel a lot of pressure to just like do something maybe because another company, our competitor's doing it, or CEO sent us something that some company's doing. It's like, why don't we do this? We have to resist that and take that one extra beat to get clear on what is the outcome that we seek. What, what are two places where we think we can be meaningfully better on this topic than we are today? And if we start there, the rest of it is pretty straightforward. You plan back from that, you try some things out and scale what works.

Carmen Amara: Um, I think Vinny and Brandon make excellent points. I think what I would add is we're really finding ourselves in this transitional moment, much like Covid, where we didn't have a playbook and we were having to figure things out really quickly on the fly. And what made companies successful in that moment was when they were able to co create the future with their employees. And so I think we also find ourselves in that moment because I don't think we can sit back and say that we're going to rely on the wisdom of the leadership team only to make those decisions. We really need to be, um, working with the employees at all levels of, of the organization and understanding, um, how these tools impact workflows and what ideas they might have so that we can really create that intentional outcome that we're trying to drive.

Host: Well, love those responses.

Narrator: We're going to go to Q and

Host: A and so if we could get the list of questions over here, we can get right into it. All right, so question one. As there are a limited number of high level people manager roles, what do you think about a culture that develops talent knowing that means they will leave to be people leaders elsewhere?

Brandon Samood: Yes, yes. I mean, it's a great question. It's a great question.

Host: I'll probably be okay with it.

Brandon Samood: And it's not something that most of our organizations do well. It's not something that most of our organizations do well. And I think this applies to any type of key talent in an organization whether they're people manage or otherwise. We just have to know, right. Whatever our industry is, there's a typical tenure and a little bit of variation, but no one's at their company forever. We have to have way. And by the way, one thing that I do think helps as it relates to AI is that it's forcing our organizations to get better at writing things down and writing how the work works. And so the context, I think this helps with transitions, whether it's someone moving into a new role in the organization, onboarding, uh, someone new, uh, whatever, you know, or dealing with an interim period where someone left and maybe it was a bit of a surprise, but a couple folks can come in and you're just not starting from scratch in quite the same way it might feel like so often today. So I think that's great. None of that though is a substitute for doing kind of the common work of people or HR uncommonly well as it relates to like you were saying, like I love what you talked about Vinny in like just checking in.

Carmen Amara: Right.

Brandon Samood: It's not a survey, it's not a stay interview. It's just a human conversation and I'm asking the same three questions every time and I just want to know what's going on and see how you're doing. Like awesome. I'm sure you get signal from that that tells you the difference between someone who's deeply locked in and someone who feels a little shaky and you know, maybe needs a bear hug of some kind.

Vinny Coelho: And I'm going to be complimentary what you said. I'm going to be very honest and I think it's. If someone that you know, you've developed in the company and worked with you and it wants to go some somewhere else to be a people manager, amazing. Go do it. It means that I did my job. It means that you helped the company grow as well and it's time for you to move on. That's fine. We should, it's not about, we should normalize it. It is already normal. It already happens. So let's make the best out of the experience. Right. And um, so I see no shame and I've actually helped people in the past that came to me asking for that level of grace growth and hey, I'm not going to drive you out of the business, but let's find a path Together. And to me it's such an important thing.

Carmen Amara: And I would just add that the transparency around that is important too, because we may have employees that aspire to roles that we don't have. And so it's then talking to them about what will keep you engaged and growing in this role. And if at some point this tops out for you, then that's great. But how do we maximize your growth and development while you're here, as well as the value that you provide to the company?

Host: I like this one a lot. How do you keep management layers lean without overloading managers while still giving them capacity for meaningful one on ones and strong relationships?

Carmen Amara: Uh, for us, it's not a one size fits all. Um, so to me it looks really different across our engineering organization than it does in our sales organization. Um, at Yelp, we have a very strong culture that is quite, I mean, really the crux of, um, the culture is that manager, employee, one on one conversation, and we can't be successful in the remote environment without having those like, very, um, solidly defined. So that's something that we hold pretty sacred. And so if there's a point where, um, teams get too large for those things to happen, then the whole thing breaks down. Like, culture begins to break down, work product begins to break down. But, um, you know, I think for us, organizationally, we have different standards, um, across different orgs.

Vinny Coelho: I second what Carmen said. There's no one size fits all solution for this. And it's. There is. There's a lot of planning that should go into it. But the rule is, if you're a people leader, you're doing one on ones. There's no exception. If you're not doing your one on ones, if you're not talking, if you're not, if you're not building that relationship as leader and direct report, it's not going to work. So if that becomes too much, that's the time that we need to reassess and, uh, understand how things are going to move forward.

Brandon Samood: So clarity. That's what I heard. All right, there's some other good questions. Let's keep going.

Carmen Amara: All right.

Host: Should AI agents get performance reviews? Ooh, I feel like I always see this one on LinkedIn, including peer feedback. Any funky ideas on how to give agents a Persona, uh, during in person engagements?

Narrator: M. Let me ask you something. How often does coaching actually happen? At the moment, it's viewed not in a quarterly review, not after something goes sideways, but right before a tough one on one or right after a meeting where something felt Off. We had Diane Sadowski Joseph on the podcast and she said something that stuck with me. How do we actually change behavior and structure work to take advantage of AI while keeping humans at the center? That's the gap. Because on paper a lot of teams have invested in development, but in practice managers are still guessing. Feedback comes late and most AI coaching tools still feel pretty generic. The real opportunity isn't more advice, it's better timed, more relevant coaching based on how people actually work together. That's where Cloverleaf comes in. Cloverleaf is an AI coaching platform built for how work really happens. It combines behavioral insights like Disc and Clifton strengths with real workplace context. So instead of another destination tool for development, it shows up in the flow of work. Using Cloverleaf, teams can get coaching before key moments like one on ones or feedback conversations. Understand team dynamics, not just individual performance. Turn behavioral data into practical day to day actions. Reinforce development without adding more HR overhead. In other words, it shifts coaching from reactive to built in. Bottom line, if AI coaching is becoming a priority, the question isn't if it's what kind. You can learn more about Cloverleaf @Cloverleaf Me MPL. That's Cloverleaf Me MPL.

Brandon Samood: I think that anything that we are counting on to produce something in our organization should be quality controlled in some way. So with people we can call that a performance review. I don't think I would call it that with an agent. Internally we try not to anthropomorphize, meaning like treat like people. The agents, they work for us, they don't work with us. Uh, and that's a choice that we make. There are other great choices you can make on that topic. So we don't give them human names. Uh, we don't use like human oriented, like talent development terminology to talk about how we make them better. Uh, but the spirit of their question is great because yes, we have to know how effective these things are and we have to have a feedback loop in place whereby we're getting signal on their efficacy and have an opportunity to make them better over time. And that signal should come from any and all stakeholders who are counting on that agent for some type of output. So it's an equivalent of peer feedback or just call it something different.

Vinny Coelho: At the end of the day, the person or the group of people that design that agent or that help the agent come to life should get a performance review. Right. So it's the human behind the agent that needs to be reviewed. Right. And the agent output is going to be managed and designed accordingly.

Host: So all Right. This next question is for Brandon. Curious why you chose to hire an AI automation engineer instead of investing in training and empowering everyone to be their own automation engineering engineer.

Brandon Samood: This is an awesome question because we, we are doing both. So we do AI fluency development for the whole company. The same type of training that we would give to AI, uh, automation engineers is available. Like, there's no gating of development on the topic of AI fluency. The question is still a great question, which is, well, if that's the case, like, why do you even have this job? It's a really good question. Here's the reason why. It's kind of in the spirit of like, when something is everyone's job, it's no one's job. And practically speaking, think about like a request recruiting team of 10 people. I don't want all 10 recruiters spending half of their time building new ways of like, it's like the soccer game or the football game. For those of us outside the us, uh, where like all the folks are like chasing the ball, like we forgot our positions. We're just all like swarming. It's kind of the sensation that you get there. Now, should teams, like Carmen was saying, be actively involved in the iteration of their new way of working, like in the design phase? Oh my gosh, like, absolutely. When it comes to the building and maintaining of the systems, that's where I really want to see standardization, uh, and uh, like just really distinctive accountability. So that's the idea, uh, of the AI automation engineer.

Host: If AI agents become digital employees, doesn't everyone become a manager? How do we help everyone become good managers?

Vinny Coelho: Um, it's a controversial take, I would say on this. Um, no, not everyone becomes a manager. No. And not everyone needs to become a manager. Right. If you build an agent, uh, if you are, it's not the case of you being responsible for building that agent. But if you're in a team that someone built an agent that is helping you, what you need to do is provide enough feedback to get that agent better to perform what you need to perform, but you're not really managing that. Right. I, uh, think that there is a difference between being a technical manager of a tool, of a platform of an agent than to being a people manager. Right. Those are two different things. So, yeah, not everyone becomes, not everyone needs to become a manager. That's how I see it.

Host: Carmen Brennan.

Carmen Amara: It's just interesting. I mean the question makes me think, right? So I agree with you. I don't think everyone needs to become a manager over Even agents. I think what I was kind of pondering in my brain is like what's the role of empathy for just managing AI, ah, agents. Right. Because I think about that being so ingrained in the role of a people manager. And so it just, I don't know the answer. Like, but how does that, how does that change Seems less important if you're only managing um, digital uh, agents. But obviously we all work with people in a people business so we all want to be good and effective collaborators with one another.

Host: And so three very different companies. I think you said 180 employees. Say that again.

Vinny Coelho: 140.

Host: 145,000 and 800. 800. I feel like five, ten years ago everyone had a pretty big focus on entry level early talent like right out of college. Is that still something that you guys are thinking about or has that, have the amount of roles also been cut down for those entry level roles?

Carmen Amara: For us, the number of roles, um, we have a very large sales organization but I think the biggest driver that's cutting down on the number of entry level roles that we hire is less about AI and more about remote work. Just because we tend to attract um, a slightly older demographic than we did when we were an in office company. So um, that for us I think has been really driving the shift. Um, we do still put some focus on early in career talent from our recruiting efforts, but it's not the

Brandon Samood: primary

Carmen Amara: um, driver behind our talent strategy.

Vinny Coelho: Same for us again Bray, as you said a few years ago, about eight to 10 years ago, early uh, talent used to be like the driver for many areas. Like we would really invest in it and go on roadshows and colleges everywhere. And that's not the case anymore. And I think it was an organic shift especially I've been a time doctor for almost four years and time doctor has always been remote and it was never a focus for a time doctor. So naturally did not become a focus for myself on a row. And I don't, I don't foresee it becoming a focus in the future as well.

Brandon Samood: You know, in the broader talent market. I'm very hopeful for early career talent and the reasons are one, increasingly they will be AI native. They will just under, like they'll look at something and they will know the future facing way to do it because they just understand the mechanics. They don't know any other way to think about the problem. And in that way, uh, have an amazing head start in being part of this future of work. And the second is that I think that the traditional knock on early career or one of the traditional challenges for early career talent is building context. You don't have experience, you don't understand the domain, the customer, maybe you have or haven't used the product. I think we should be incredibly ambitious about how effectively we can onboard someone. And by the way, this isn't just early career, but anyone into a domain or area where they don't have any or much expertise. That doesn't mean that deeply held, long standing expertise doesn't matter. What I'm saying is that, you know, it's like the, the amount of time it's going to take someone to get like halfway there I think is going to shrink a ton. There are all kinds of fascinating things you can do with AI. Like first of all, they can query, right their way to like anything in whatever language, whatever time of day, whatever format speaks to them. You want it in a podcast, done. You want it in a slight soliloquy, done like you want it in a video. Fine, right. Like you just really meet people where they are in a personalized way. Uh, and the second is we can create simulated work environments for like next to nothing cost and time wise. Now that really help folks skill up because reading or consuming knowledge about how the work works is only one thing. Being able to apply that in a lower stakes environment is where a lot of that really starts to stick and get feedback on it and coaching like really fast. Um, this was a pipe dream three years ago. It is entirely possible today. And so it's not a replacement for very deep expertise. But in terms of getting like that first huge step into a new domain, I think we're going to be really surprised by what we see. And that's part of what makes me hopeful about early career talent.

Host: So I think we have time for maybe one or two more questions. Um, let's see. When ICs may have such a positive outsized impact and deliver so much value, is their manager still the best person to do their performance review?

Brandon Samood: What a great question. And I'm not answering that one first, but yeah, great question.

Carmen Amara: I think it, I think it depends, um, I think it depends on the structure of the work. I mean even today, without changing the role, um, I think there are a lot of companies who've tried to take a different tack at performance reviews and incorporating cross functional feedback. I mean as I look at the senior leaders across my organization and the amount of cross functional collaboration they need to have, their manager may have a very different view than the leader, um, sitting in another organization that they have to partner closely with. So I guess I just look at that and say we should really be thinking about what is the best way, way in general to get the right level of feedback to drive the, uh, most, um, effective outcomes that we want, um, and provide the best feedback for that person.

Vinny Coelho: Yes, the manager is the person that should run the performance review, but that shouldn't be your direct 180 performance review. They should be broad, they should be open. The areas that specific ICU work with should be involved on the process. So you need yourself, right feedback, you need your manager. Well, uh, what I think about it is in this case, that manager, that person that IC reports to, will look into the career development of that ic, but the output, how that's going to be, um, evaluated should be by a group of people that are involved. So that person is going to, to be able, I think for that I see, to be very, uh, strong and to be delivering very well. They need to be asking those questions ahead of a performance review. But yeah, the manager, that leader, is still the person that should run the process.

Host: Any final thoughts, Brandon?

Brandon Samood: No. Bring us home.

Host: All right, well, thank you guys so much. This is awesome. Uh, thank you for being the first panel that I participated in. Y' all did amazing. And uh, yeah, everybody enjoy the rest of running remote.

Narrator: Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Modern People Leader. We really, really appreciate it. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star rating. It would mean the world to us and connect with us on LinkedIn. We want to know what you think about the show and you can find links to both of our profiles in the show notes. Thanks again for listening and see you on the next episod.