People are the Center of Everything You Do

Welcome to the Talent Empowerment Podcast, where we lift people as leaders so you can lift your organizations. I am your host, Tom Finn, and today we have a very well-respected and innovative guest. Enrique Rubio, Enrique Rubio, Welcome to the show.

My friend, thank you, Tom. Thank you for inviting me. I am excited about the conversation. I always get excited about talking about "cool things" in the world of HR.

Well, if you don't know Enrique, he is one of the top 100 global HR influencers and the proud founder of Hacking HR, which is a global learning community for business and HR leaders with a desire to learn more about the future of work, technology, business strategy, and more. He's got thousands of members.

Before building this fabulous community, he was the founder and CEO of a management consulting firm. This firm specialised in human resources in Venezuela. And he was an advisor to Arrow at the Inter-American Development Bank. Enrique is a very frequent guest and author of numerous publications specializing in HR, innovation, management, and strategies and trends.

He's also a Fulbright scholar and an electronic engineer with an executive master. You have a master's degree in public administration from Syracuse University's Maxwell School, so you've done some work in human resources, my friend. There are a few things that you've done and had under your belt. So how do you view the role of HR in this?

Leadership today, you know, over the past couple of years, with the rise and advent of COVID. One of the gifts of the tragedy of Covid is that HR sort of gained a renewed sense of purpose as a function, and everybody else around HR got a renewed sense of trust in the work that I thought was doing. And I got to say, you know, before COVID, a lot of extra functions were struggling to present themselves as innovative and agile pro-employee experience functions. And I think COVID allowed us to say, hey, we care about the people, we care about business. We can care about these two things at the same time, and we can make them work.

So, I think that today the role of HR as a leader is changing. In making sure that an organization does the work that it needs to do, meaning if it's an impact organization, say a non-profit, it does the work that it needs to do. If it's a for-profit business that creates and sustainably generates profit, it does all of those things while keeping profit at the center of the operation. Keeping the people, the humans who work not only for that organization but the humans that that organization serves, at the center of everything they do. So, I believe in renewal. That is good value, if you will, that HR has gained over the past couple of years. It's a great stepping stone for us to become leaders, to be stronger leaders, and to become the Trail Blazers that I know we'll be talking about today.

Yeah, well, well said.

I love the way you put that the last couple of years has allowed HR teams and organizations to step up and support their people in new ways and be strategic and thoughtful about innovation and new ways of supporting employees around the globe. So well said. Before we get too deep into this, let's find out just a little bit about your background. Tell us how you went from an engineer to HR, because it's not the most traditional path. How did that start and how did you get into HR?

Yeah, well, I will. I am an electronic engineer. I worked for over 10 years in the telecommunications sector as a project engineer for both small and multinational corporations, and I loved working with technology. I mean, it was just fascinating.

But there was a point in my career as an engineer where I realized that I wanted something different. I didn't just want to work with technology, I also wanted to work with people, so I briefly worked in sales, but I was like, "This is not for me”. I know some people are very successful in this field. And they love that it's not me. And I looked around and they said, "You know what other area that works with people where I can add some value and learn?"

And I found HR. We switched from working in telecommunications as an engineer to working as a consultant, then working in the corporate world in HR, and now, of course, leading this community. But it's sort of the evolution that transition happened because, you know, I like learning from different fields, and to me, what I am generally the most passionate about is when I can be in one field of expertise but connect the dots between that field and all the other things that I have learned from all the other fields that I have worked on in the past, I connect the dots.

So, what I'm saying is that in the work that I do in HR today, I connect the dots between HR and what I did as an engineer, so they are different fields. But it still has very strong bridges. That goes across each of those fields.

So, do you feel like HR people today have to understand this balance of technology and human resources?

Yes, yes, they do, but they don't have to become an engineer, though they don't have to be an artificial intelligence expert. They don't have to be blockchain miners. They do not have to be programmers for us to say, oh, HR is technologically savvy. But it's not the case. What I am arguing here, I'm proposing here is to understand the impact of technology in the workplace, in the future of work in the workforce, and the applications of technology so that we can better use the tools that we have available for us.

That understanding that HR has to sort of improve, if you will, its capabilities and skills is more about applications and opportunities than the core functionality of each of those technologies. If you are a curious geek and want to delve deeper into the lines of code that define each of those technologies, fantastic. But that's not exactly what I think we should be doing. What should we be doing with our already very limited amount of time?

Well, in most places, HR roles are leadership roles, and they don't have to necessarily be the coder or the project manager for a particular domain. And in technology and emerging markets, they have to be a leader that others can follow. How does one in HR become this type of leader? What does that look like in an optimal organization or in an optimal way of leadership today?

Yeah, well, maybe out of the many things that I can say to respond to this question, I'm going to focus on the obvious. You said, which is: the role of a leader, and in this case, a natural leader, is to facilitate the conversation between the experts that are involved in the organization in some kind of, you know, troubleshooting or opportunity-seeking kind of endeavor in the organization.

So, as an HR professional, in my view, one of the most underutilized powers that we can embrace and put forward is the power of bringing people together to problem solve. It's the power of bringing people together from different, you know, realms of experience and expertise and fields of expertise. Bring them together and say we are dealing with this issue here. How do we solve it? And then, having everybody together, you know, sort of like hammering that problem and finding the solutions they need to find to, well, you know, continue creating value for the organization.

That, to me, is a role very often in the hands of, say, the CEO of an organization, but I think we are very well positioned in HR to be able to do that. Bringing all those people together now, you know.

This is true at a broad level in the organization, but it's also true internally in HR. Because very often, what happens is that we don't bring people from other functions to HR as experts to give advice. We need wise help to figure out some of the stuff that we may be dealing with, so let me give you one example right away. So many companies are struggling right now to bring great talent to their organizations, so you know, you may have the head of engineering, and the head of engineering is a guy or a woman who ends up going to universities. So, I am talking to other engineers and peers from other companies, so maybe they have an insight into why it is so difficult for companies to hire engineers. Why is it such a competitive field? You know what they are looking for and whatnot. So instead of also in HR saying, "Let's see what the solution to this problem is. So, the role of a facilitator is one of the most important to me. We have incredible superpowers in HR, but they are underutilized, to be honest, and I hope we embrace and use them.

You're asking a lot of him.

I am.

You're asking for them to be not only incredibly aware of the business and incredibly aware of how the operation should run, but you're also expecting them to be really good leaders. Good thinkers.  You're expecting them to be integrators of products and processes. These are typically not skills found in one person. They're skills that are found across multiple people.

Oh well, that is correct.

And by the way, I feel that every time I either speak on a podcast or put together one of my events. But I feel that your people are like, "I'm never going to listen to this guy again because he's asking me to do so much work and I'm trying to get him to tell me how to not do so much work.

But this is a reality, Tom. I'm not asking one person to be the one actor, the CSR, or the one person to have all of these roles in one. What I am asking them to do is to have the ability to see the talents in other people in the organization, to see these skills, to see the capabilities in other functions in the organization, and to bring them together.

I don't know if anybody here, uh, listens to this podcast. Watch the movie Apollo 13. There's a part in the movie Apollo 13 when the guys have all these issues out there in space. And there's a group of engineers that come together and they say the guys up there only have these five things and we need to bring them a filter for carbon dioxide. If you only had these five things, and if you were a natural person in the middle of that conversation, you probably would say, "I have no idea how to do this. What would be your role there? Just bring together the people who can help you see how to solve those problems.

Now, if you do, that means you will be using less time than if you were trying to solve the problem by yourself. It seems that it's more work to bring people together, but in the long run, you are taking away some of the activities that are consuming your time because you have no idea how to do them, and you're bringing the people who can give you insights on how to do that. Yes, it seems like a lot, but in the long run, it's way more powerful and valuable to bring together the people that can help you solve those problems, and I'm hoping to see HR rise to the challenge of the complexity of the problems that we have in the world today and rise to the level of saying “You know what? You know, engineers are working hard to solve this minor issue. The people from operations are trying to solve this little problem. Right, what if we bring everybody together and start solving the problems that pertain to everybody in the organization?”

So, I think. It's not only more beautiful, again, but it’s also much more valuable for the organization, and I think HR can play that role.

HR's role is to connect people.

Among other things, yeah.

How do you create the right mindset to pull in folks from around the organization to solve problems? If you're an HR person that's been very tactical, maybe you're focused on the payroll. Maybe you're focused on benefits. Maybe you're in the hiring space. You're in these different sorts of verticals. How do you know? Do you create that mindset to pivot into this type of modern role?

Well, I want to say a couple of things there.

The first one is, and this first one is very difficult for me to even say because I try not to believe that that's true, but this is not for everybody, right?

There are leaders and there are followers, and that's the nature of, I think, humanity. Yes, and some people are willing to say, "I am going to take on this role and I'm going to make it happen. I'm going to learn how to do it” and other people prefer to play it a little safer. They are more at ease with what they know, with what is familiar to them, and they simply wait for others to be the trailblazers, paving the way forward.

And I think in HR, and I think this is true, by the way, for probably all fields of expertise. I don't think more than 5% of any field of expertise has the kind of people that are going to be leading the way. I think most people end up being followers, so the number one thing is that we have to be OK with the fact that not everybody in HR will be doing this.

This is very hard for me, by the way, because I want everybody to be doing this. But that's not going to happen, and I'm going to be very disappointed at the end of my life… whenever that happens… If I come to the store with this realization that not everybody will be leading the way, that's number one.

So the second thing is, is it those who have not just the capacity but the willingness to lead the way they have to believe in that power? And I feel that one of the reasons that things happen a lot in HR is that we have been so tactical and transactional in HR for such a long time. That we lost, the muscle of believing in ourselves, the muscle of believing that we can be the leaders, is so weak right now. You know, it's like it's fluffy. You know, it's like hanging in there, not doing anything. We have to go back to the gym with a new mindset. We have to go back and start training our muscles again and believe that, you know, yes, it's a week now, but after a couple of months of hard work, I feel a little stronger. You know, now I feel a little bit more confident about myself, so I think it starts by saying maybe I don't have the tools right now. Maybe the people around me don't trust me or don't believe that I can do this, but I'm going to go to the gym. I'm going to go to the gym and get those muscles very strong because I believe that I can do it. I believe that I can lead the way.

And that, to me, it's such an important factor that will determine whether we can lead the way or not, and that's not easy to change, by the way, but it's way easier. Don't listen to this. It's way easier to teach somebody else analytics than to teach somebody analytics that can become a business leader. Those are two very different things.

You know you can learn the skills of people and analytics and you can do it very well, but you may not believe what you're doing with analytics is making a change in the sustainability of profitability. The longevity of the organization and I'm trying to focus more on the second part, which is believing that what you're learning while you're doing that going to the gym is actually making you that leader and then you learn the skills.

Are you talking about confidence? Because I am listening to this. And I'm hearing” Be confident and trust yourself.” The lessons you've gone through in life and utilize those tools. Does it come down to confidence?

Yes, absolutely, in my opinion. And you know, you hear this thing, which by the way, I say it only when I am like bashing that concept because I don't like it. This idea of, you know, HR getting a seat at the table. And I think we talked a little bit about this.

It feels as if we have to wait for someone to invite us to a table just to be there for the sake of being there. With us being at that table, I see it a little differently. You may have all the skills that you need to have to sit at the table, but that doesn't mean that people will listen to you. That doesn't mean that they trust you. That doesn't mean that they believe in what you're saying.

The alternative path to getting a seat at the table here is to have permission to sit at the table. You create such an incredible amount of value that nobody in the organization can ignore you. That, to me, is the most beautiful path.

Imagine if you had the confidence to say, "I'm going to be that leader. I'm going to do what 's necessary not just to lead my HR function, but to create value for the organization through the work that I do in HR. As I am doing that, people will start noticing and they will say, "Well, this Tom guy. Man, that guy is really into something now, and you know what we want to hear from him in the meeting that we have next week about our next five-year plan?

Or whatever technology we need to bring on board or about how to solve these issues that we have right now. So now they are inviting you, not just because they want to have somebody from HR sitting at that table, but because they know that you have something to say. They believe in what you have to say. But it starts with HR saying, with confidence, “I can be there”, not because they are giving information, but because they are. I'm adding so much value that there's no way that they can ignore me anymore.

Yeah, adding value from an HR seat can be a real game changer for any organization because that role is a big role across the company and in larger companies, in particular, it can influence thousands and thousands of employees and their productivity, their well-being, and the way they come to work and show up.

It has an opportunity to influence culture in the organization and outside of it. If you do it right, so I think what I'm hearing from you is, don't wait for your seat at the table. Go take that seat at the table with your sense of creativity and value.

Get sorry, sorry for this, but get **** done right. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, everything in the organization has to do with people. Whether they're external customers or internal customers, your processes, everything has to do with people.

The dots that I'm connecting in my mind If everything has to do with people, how come HR isn't involved in everything? That's what makes me think there's got to be something. Some missing links here are preventing HR from being involved in those high-level, very strategic, very powerful, and valuable conversations.

Maybe one of the things is that the senior leader of our organization says, "You know what? We don't want to bring HR to this table because all we hear from them is "no. No, you cannot do that. This or that. You know all these obstacles. Instead of saying, "You know, we're going to figure it out from the people’s side, we're going to see how we can make that happen. We're going to see how we can work this out”.

So, the opportunities for HR to build value through the people function are just so amazing to me. You know, it's so amazing and I don't know. I think it's an untapped domain of value that I'm hoping HR can sort of access. Take advantage of the opportunity if you will. We'll have to create value through people because I think we're going to do something meaningful for the organization and ourselves of course, in HR.

Yeah, I think you're 100% right. HR must understand how to take their career and their organization to the next level, which is really what you're saying. And many are already doing that, and there are some, quite frankly, that may not be quite there yet, which I think is what you're saying.

A lot of parts of organizations become tactical. We tend to get bogged down in tactical approaches to our day. And you know, we've got the payroll issue that we've. It must be repaired. We've got this system that's broken. We've got this burning fire with an employee issue that we have to solve.

How do you get out of that noise? elevated above it and become this connector within the organization.

Yeah, that's a great question. By the way, it's a very difficult thing to do, for many reasons, all of them important, but perhaps the most important one is that, generally, HR is understaffed and under-resourced. And therefore, there's less of an opportunity to say, "Oh yeah, I'm going to be the connector. I'm going to be the facilitator. I'm going to be the trailblazer” because you are involved in a day-to-day operation, out of which you can barely. You know, like lift your head to see what else is going on. I mean, you are in the middle of all that.

I'm going to say a couple of things here. I remember I had a boss who said being busy doesn't mean that you're doing something valuable, right? And I'm not saying that it is. I don't want to accuse HR here of not doing valuable stuff. But what I'm saying is, maybe taking a little bit of a step back and saying, "Let me put on the table post-it notes with everything that I'm doing, everything that I'm doing on a daily basis.

I am calling people and recruiting and planning the scheduling of the interviews. I'm talking about this and doing that and all of those things that you're sort of laying down on the table in your post. He says: Consider what you can either put into the hands of technology or put on your mind, he says. Maybe technology can help you do better, and maybe someone younger in the organization can help you take over some of those roles, or you can find ways to say, "You know what out of these 100 things is consuming 100% of my time, there are these five things here that I don't think are adding that much value. They need to happen… They have to be done, but they don't have to be done by me, you know, and I don't have to be the one manually doing those things.

So, when you get to that level, you say, "You know what I am taking out?" There are five things that I'm doing, and maybe those five things are, I don't know, 1% of my time. Let's not even say five percent of my time. So now what do I do with that 1% of my time? So now you have to start putting down the next sort of layer of post-it notes, which is What can I do about that? That's an incredible, ridiculous amount of value for this organization that I can use that 1% for. And maybe you get... you know you brainstorm, and you get down to a list. For example, I want to use that 1% of my time, which ends up being one hour of my entire week, to have power conversations with my senior leader peers about what they need in the organization, and I spend only one hour a week talking to your CFO, talking to your CIO, talking to your CMO, and asking them. What's going on? Guys, do you know what you need from me? And then you start saying, "These guys are telling me this. I am doing all these activities alone. I will go back to my map post notes and I am going to say, you know what? I thought that this one posting note was such a valuable activity, and after talking to my senior leaders, I discovered that maybe it was not that valuable. Maybe I can release or free even a little bit more time by not even doing this at all.

So, you go into that iteration process, that iterative process. In this manner, you enter a spiral. Less transaction, less administration, knowing that it's all important, but you have to do it yourself and get into the more strategic, connecting, facilitating kinds of conversations.

To me, that's how I would do it. That's how I would begin, sort of that journey because otherwise, you will never stop the day-to-day operation. You will always be doing those things without even knowing it. if they are adding value or not.

Well, you heard it here first from Enrique.

Take inventory with sticky notes.

Get all that out on the table and we can all visualize it. When you say it, we can visualize, you know, taking our pen and writing on the sticky note and putting down the activities that we're doing throughout the day and throughout the week.

And then what I think I heard was, "Take inventory with those other senior leaders, whether it's division leaders across the organization or the C-Suite or global organizations. We have leaders in other countries. How do you connect with those folks and find out what they need? And I think that question should not be understated.

We should double-underline it and make sure that we are asking others within the organization how we can help and how we can provide value from their perspective because that's how you start to bring people to work together in an organization.

Let me ask you this. Let's sort of go to the other side of this. You talked originally about tactical leaders being in HR, focusing on lifting the company and taking them forward. What about the other side of this, folks that work with HR that may think you know what? I'm not ready to follow this HR leader. Perhaps they haven't, you know, stepped up in a way that made an impact in that particular person's area yet? Or maybe they've been a little quieter. Maybe that's their personality. How do you get the rest of the company to follow these new leaders?

That's a great question, and I think it's, uh, perhaps it is mostly about trust. I'm going to say, uh, because you are leading them sometimes in the forest, and there's no trail, no marking, or nothing. You are leading them in the forest, and they trust that you're not leading them through a cliff or anything dangerous. animals, right? They trust that you have an idea, maybe not about how you're going to get there, but at least about where you're going. And then you have the tools to figure it out as you're going.

So I'm going to say that to me, it all begins with If you're a natural leader, you know how important it is to gain the trust of those on your team as well as those in other areas of the company. And that doesn't happen overnight, and it doesn't happen just by miracle, right? You have to work hard. To make that happen

That means that you're going to have to go back to this idea of the exercise with the posting notes, you know, if you get that 1% of your time back, maybe one of the things that you want to do is, you know because it's only 1% and it's only one hour every week. Perhaps you may want to say, you know, based on my current knowledge of this organization, the 1 area where it seems that most support from my field is needed, maybe sales, for example, just making it up. You know it's sales. So let me spend this power hour with people in sales to make sure that we are either guiding them or working with them to go to wherever they need to be, and then knowing that HR is there for them, requires, you know, having those conversations, building that trust with them, so that they know that when you suggest something to them when you tell them, you know what, Tom, For the past 10 years, we've been looking for salespeople in the same five schools. Would you be willing to expand it to five additional schools? And we did the research. By the way, Tom, you know, we find that these five schools have some of the top 20.

You know, we have the highest-ranked salespeople in the world or America, and they are good. As you know, we went to LinkedIn and found out that graduate students from that university where they work are working in great organizations, including some of our competitors. Would you guys be open to saying that instead of just looking like salespeople or engineers? Or whatever in these five schools, we expand the pipeline to these other schools as well. But you can only do that, and they will say yes to that because you build trust with them.

They may say, "Well, we don't know how that's going to go, Enrique, but try it out. Let's give it a try, right? That's different from just combing without that trust being built before I say something that people will say, we will probably think, you know, this is not going to work.

So, I think once again, I think it's all about building trust with your team and across teams as well, and that requires some time. If you haven't done that exercise before.

I know you use sales. As an off-the-cuff Enrique, that was an off-the-cuff example, but it's a really good point. Salespeople can be the most vocal in an organization, and sales leaders can have enormous political capital within a company based on how much revenue they bring in.

So, if you sort of back into that and say, "Where do I start in HR? To build relationships with sales leaders if you can support the sales function differently first. Likely, you will gain the political capital within the organization to grow not only your career but your influence and value within an organization.

I know you said it off the cuff, but there's always meaning behind what you say. I've gotten to know you a little bit. It probably wasn't off the cuff, even though it might have looked that way.

Sales function I think this can be a real lever for HR professionals and leaders to go build relationships. Let those folks that are naturally the voice of the organization be your voice as well.

And you know, one thing that happens here is, and I'm going to sort of use this example to add another level to the conversation. People frequently ask, "Where do I start on this journey?" How do I build trust? Do you know? How do I propose something if they don't trust me?

Don't try to move the world with just, you know, just one push, right? You must begin small, and what occurs is that you may wish to have So you could talk to the salespeople and propose that you find out if these guys have a higher turnover rate because that's generally the case for sales functions. They have a high turnover, because, well, you know, they are looking for salespeople everywhere, and the time to acquire sales talent is longer than perhaps in other functions, and maybe you have a relationship with them, and then at the end of that process, you have a story to tell, and the story to tell is that you know what the timeline for hiring people in sales used to be 20 weeks. We decreased that down to 10 weeks by doing this, this, and that together with people in sales. So now you have a very powerful story of how partnering begins with trust, but partnering with those functions leading the way, together with those functions, is creating and adding value to the organization, and that hopefully will give you more trust, and they will give you more resources, and it will give you more opportunities to do Even more than that, that's just one little kind of example.

Yeah, well, well said. You've done a lot. For HR leaders around the world, you run an organization called Hacking HR. We haven't even touched on it. Could you tell us a little bit about what you do at hacking? How are you influencing people around the globe?

We are Hacking Choice, a global learning community composed of actual technology leaders and professionals, consultants, and entrepreneurs.

We bring together the entire community to learn, collaborate, and share about everything happening at the intersection of the future of work, technology, innovation, and people transformation. organizations, and the impact that HR has at that intersection and that intersection has on HR.

And the way we do it is through events, learning programs, learning activities, and bringing the community together.

I feel that there are two very powerful ways to advance HR and help it become that leader that we're talking about. One of them is building community and connecting people because very often when you're connecting with people, what you're going to find is that there are some of those people who are further along the road, and they can tell you what they did and what worked and what didn't. And some people are behind in that journey. You can help sort of navigate some of the next steps in that journey so that the building of community is very powerful.

The second piece of that is the collaboration piece. You know, we bring together all of these speakers. All of these people, and it's great to hear the stories that they don't get to hear often, but you know, now and then they tell me, "Hey Enrique, I connected with this. one person, or with that other person. And now we're working on a project together. They helped me get this job or they did this for me. Or I did this for them”

All of those stories of collaboration to me are part of the essence of what we do, and ultimately, the essence of or the spirit of what's needed. For HR to become that leader, that trailblazer, that's what I do with Hacking HR. Bringing all these people together, helping them learn, but also connecting and collaborating.

Yeah, beautifully said, and if somebody wanted to get a hold of you or was interested in learning more about Hacking HR. How would they go about doing that?

They can go to our LinkedIn page and hack in, hacking intern LinkedIn. They can go to my LinkedIn page and see Enrique Rubio posting all the content all the time, or they can go to our website and hack it. Are you that IO? We post a lot of great stuff on there all the time. great content and opportunities and all that. All that.

Well, Enrique, I think we've learned a lot today from trailblazing to understanding the mindset of the modern HR leader, to understanding how to remove obstacles and be more tactical to leaning into this new way of thinking and organizing around people and function and supporting HR. I think that the way that you do it is a terrific model, and I'm grateful for the work that you do in HR. I know that you probably don't get a lot of thank you along the way, but it's people like you that are trying to change the game, trying to uplift others, which is so. It's important, and you said 5% of people earlier. Maybe 5% of people are going to lead the way. Well, my friend, you're one of that 5%, so thank you for taking that leadership role. I appreciate it very much.

Thank you, Tom. Thank you so much for inviting me to the podcast; it was a great conversation. Thank you.

Absolutely, and thank you for joining the Talent Empowerment podcast. I hope this conversation has lifted you so you can lift your teams and organizations. my friends Let's get back to people and culture together. We'll see you next time.

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