Evan Wittenberg | Chief People Officer, VuMedi | What HR Really Thinks About Marketing

0:00The CMO Confidential Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit IHearEverything.com. Welcome to CMO Confidential, the podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions, and choices that go with being the head of marketing. Hosted by five-time CMO Mike Linton. Welcome, marketers, advertisers, and those who love them to Chief Marketing Officer Confidential. CMO Confidential is a show that takes you inside the drama, the decisions, and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite.

0:54I'm Mike Linton, the former Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy, eBay, Farmers Insurance, and Ancestry.com. I'm here today with my guest, Evan Wittenberg. Today's topic, what HR really thinks about marketing. Now, Evan is a four-time chief people officer who recently started as the chief people officer, or CPO, as ViewMedi, the largest peer-to-peer medical knowledge sharing platform in the world. Previously, he served as a CPO at Pivot Bio, Ancestry, and Box, which he helped take public in 2015. He was also the chief town officer for Hewlett Packard. Earlier in his career, he headed leadership development at Google, and he ran the leadership development program at Wharton.

1:44This is a very long intro, but it's worth it. Stick with me. One of his earliest jobs was working for Saturday Night Live. And I know there are some great stories from that. Now, full disclosure, Evan and I worked together at Ancestry, and I found it to be really a great HR leader. I mean, with all that experience, what would you expect? So welcome, Evan. Well, thank you, Mike. It's a pleasure to be here. And let's be honest, I helped hire you at Ancestry and then had the pleasure of working with you there for quite a while. But it's my pleasure to be here for sure. We'll talk about that and mistakes HR people have.

2:21So let's start with an overview of really the whole function. I mean, I will say, I think over the last five years, it's been one of the hardest functions to lead probably in the world. There's so much going on. COVID, remote work, DEI, then no DEI, quiet, quitting, politics into the workplace, return from work, AI reducing jobs and more. Tell us what it's like to be in the seat. I can't because now I'm too depressed by that list you just. So go to the dentist for an uplift after this. Well, look, I mean, for years early in my career, HR needs a seat at the table, right? Meaning the executive table.

3:02I don't think that's a question anymore and it hasn't been for a while. But once you're at the big kid table, then you have to deal with the big problems, right? And so that's been the experience. Certainly, a lot of colleagues have burned out over the last couple of years dealing with pretty much intractable problems. Right. These were not did not start as business problems. Right. Dealing with a pandemic was not on anybody's menu of here's a business problem that is owned by a specific function. And so the chief people officer role has always been a little bit of a grab bag, hopefully a strategic one.

3:36But over the last couple of years has taken on a whole bunch of curveballs because there's nowhere else really for those things to fit in organizational life. And I remember specifically at Ancestry, it was late February. Was it 2019 or 2020 when COVID started? It was late February. February 20, yeah. Yeah. And I remember sending a text to our CEO as she was traveling and saying, hey, I think I should send an email to the company about this coronavirus thing. And she's like, really? Why? And I said, I just I'm hearing people are worried about it. And I don't think it's a thing, but, you know, they should just know that we're thinking about it so they don't have to worry about it.

4:14And she's like, oh, OK. And so I sent the first email to the company like late February, privately saying to myself, we're never going to wear masks. We're never going to shut down, of course. And then by the time it got to early March, the world changed. So we've been dealing with all of that and lots of other things for quite a while now. This stuff, almost all of it, in my little opening question, has gone to the HR table. Is that the right place for it in your mind? So yes and no. I mean, I think it's got to go somewhere. So what function do those big strategic issues sit in? I will say for for covid, for example, I sent an email to the executive team and said, hey, I'm going to be running lead on this covid thing for now.

5:01But I'm happy to hand it off to anybody if you don't think I'm the right place for it. And everybody was more than happy to say, no, that's good. I did not say thank you for that. You did not. I know. I haven't supported you. I appreciated it. And I also remembered you didn't volunteer. So, you know, I think if things are primarily issues dealing with the talent in a company or location, et cetera, they tend to fall into the people space. I don't think that's necessarily true. And I love when things like that are owned by a business leader as well, because I think it shows coordination and collaboration across the – but many of these things have fallen into the chief people officer's lab.

5:46And I remember watching this particular kind of run through, but then also the whole HR thing, where I was thinking the HR job has become a lot like the marketing job. The HR folks or chief people officers are in charge of it, but everyone has an opinion and there isn't a right answer. And I thought this job is morphed into a lot like the CMO job. What do you think about that? I think that's right. I think certainly true for HR function, right? Everybody's been hired. They might have been fired or fired somebody. They've been managed. They might have managed somebody. So everybody thinks they know the space.

6:29Nobody's going to go to the general counsel and say, you should do your legal briefs in a different way. And nobody's going to go to the head of engineering and say, I don't like the way you're coding. But the people space, similar to the marketing space, I think, right? Everybody's seen an ad. Everybody watches TV. Like everybody thinks they're having a big deal. Oh, yeah. They're consumers, so they know marketing. Yeah. And actually, one of the companies I was at as a chief people officer, I came back to my desk one day and there was the head of engineering kind of sitting over the shoulder of my head of total rewards, kind of yelling at him.

7:00And I said, I pulled him aside. I said, what are you doing? He's like, well, I don't like the way he calculates equity, so I'm trying to give him a better way. And I said, come here, come here. And I pulled him into a side room and I said, what would you do if you went back to the engineering area? And I was sitting over the shoulder of one of your engineers saying, that code doesn't look right. He's like, I would kick you the hell out. And I said, exactly. Goodbye. He got the point and walked away. Right? I mean, I'm a New Yorker. I can figuratively punch people in the nose if I need to. I almost never do.

7:29And that was the only time I ever have in a professional environment. But it's like, hey, get back to your space. Right? We all have our areas. You should collaborate. Also, as COVID and return to work and remote and everything kind of took over, there was actually even no real data in the marketplace. It was all new creator, which is a lot like marketing. So I put you in this seat, and then you can look, what's coming down the road? How are things going to shake out over the next couple of years? Is it going to continue this way, or are we going back to a little more stability? or does AI just create a whole new set of CPO challenges?

8:10I think yes, yes, yes, yes to your four questions. So look, there's a couple of major shifts or movements that are going on, as you're well aware. The first one you mentioned earlier, DEI, right? There's an attack against DEI. All the corporate programs seem to be going away. I have a view on that, which is that whatever you call it, the reasons, the fundamental reasons why all of these DEI efforts were created in the first place was because there is inequity in the workplace in lots of ways. And so whether you make the DEI programs go away or not, you have to address that, right? Every employee needs to, it needs to be true that everyone feels valued, that everyone feels a sense of belonging, and that everyone can do great work and have an impact that gets recognized.

9:02Those are the fundamental things that every employee needs to work and stay in the company. And if those are not true, or if they are not true for certain parts of your population, you're going to have a problem, right? You're going to have a talent problem, or you're going to have a decision-making problem where you don't have enough diversity of ideas. So I firmly believe that while you make the words or the letters DEI may be going away or under attack, the fundamental problem that those efforts we're trying to solve still has to be worked on and still is not true. We still don't have pay parity in companies for men and women, for example.

9:37There's just a lot of areas that we're not there yet, and they're going to need to continue. So that's one. I think on the AI front, what's interesting there, and AI is amazing for a day. I think what I'm most concerned about there is not the computer apocalypse where it takes over and decides we're not needed anymore. I'm more concerned about the fact that what it does best today, at least, is a lot of the work that typically entry-level jobs do in order to build experience and learn about the function. If you take my function, a talent acquisition coordinator, a recruiting coordinator, or an HR coordinator, that's an entry-level job to get somebody smart into a function to start learning what it means to be a professional in that function.

10:24Nobody among my peers yet has figured out that I'm aware of, how do you get that same experience so you can start to build a professional career if you're jumping over that full set of work? right and so if we can empower people to do all that stuff and we don't need an hr coordinator anymore you're not going to enter as an hr manager you don't have the experience or even an hr generalist and so that's the trick i think a lot of us are trying to figure out how they look and this is happening in marketing as well you're blowing up a huge amount of the entry-level jobs and in marketing and agencies and not only will you not learn the function you won't learn corporations.

11:03That's right. And so you will be really poorly trained to operate in all the skills required in a company. So what else? What else? Let's put two trends together. The work from home trend. I'm sitting in my house, luckily at Vumetti. We are in the office three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. But since we're recording on a Tuesday, I'm here at home. if you have people who don't have the entry-level jobs to get experience in, and it's really hard to get mentorship when you're not in a shared space and you can't pull somebody aside after immediately and say, hey, what you just did, that was great, or that didn't work.

11:43And so you don't have the mentorship slash apprenticeship that's always been important in almost every role, because people aren't co-located as much as they used to be in the workplace. And you have AI taking away some of the entry-level work that somebody would have learned from by working with others on it and getting feedback. Those are two trends that is a bit of a train wreck for creating professionals down the line. And we'll figure it out. I have no doubt that we'll figure it out. I just don't know that anybody has yet. I agree. I think that is really, you could have a whole lost generation here in the skillset building.

12:21And that will be, I think, really challenging for a lot of folks from a career standpoint, but also hiring managers. Hey, let me flip over to every company always says people are our most important asset. I've never been with a company that didn't say something like that, but it's clear a lot of them don't really believe it. How do you function in that kind of space where people say they're our most important asset, but then clearly they're not? And then how should people figure out if it really is, if companies really care about people when they're interviewing or looking, especially at the start of their career?

13:05Yeah. So I'm fortunate at this point in my career where I can choose for companies that that's really true. Although earlier in my career, I may have been in some that that wasn't true. Look, I think people's BS antenna are very well tuned. And if you tell people something's true, but their lived experience is different, they know. There's people pulling the wool over the eyes of employees. And so I think there's a couple of things. I already told you how people need to feel in the company, right? Feel valued, feel a sense of belonging, and be able to have an impact that gets recognized. And if those are true, then typically it's an environment that values its people.

13:44Where it sometimes gets tricky is I've worked with managers who thinks their job is to make their team member happy and do what's right for the person. That's not correct, actually. And I'll tell you why in a second. It's wrong for the person, actually. Yes. And then I've been at many companies and most companies are built so that you make decisions only based on what the company needs. And that's not right either. And nobody wants to work at those companies, obviously. And what I tell my people teams is like HR nirvana is finding a solution that works for both the person and the company, not one or the other.

14:17Because every time you find a solution that works for only one or the other, you're suboptimizing. And so if we continually have the goal being how do we help our people be great and get what they need to be engaged, et cetera, but in a way that helps the company succeed, because frankly, if there's no company, none of us have jobs anyway, then I think that's pretty much the right tuning. And, you know, you know, again, you know, if you're in a company that's trying to do that, you may not know only from your own personal experience, but you can see it in the world, right? Are people moving internally?

14:48Is there internal mobility? Are people being rewarded for things that are the same two people always being rewarded or do a lot of people get rewarded if they do well, right? Is it fair? Is it equal opportunity within the company to do like this cool assignment came up? Can I do that? Or does this other person always get that role? And if so, why? There may be a reason. Maybe they're demonstrating our values and getting stuff done. But, you know, people know if that's going on. Got it. Let's flip over into marketing now. You know, and we talked earlier about how HR and marketing are what I'm going to call inconsistent functions, meaning their remit can vary significantly from one company to the next.

15:33If so, so let's just we'll put on the oven hat. If there's one to two ways to encapsulate how HR actually sees marketing or three ways, what would those be? Yeah. So I think the first is sees it as a similar function in terms of it's almost a grab bag, depending on the company. Right. I mean, marketers need such a range of skills from deep data to, you know, artistic, creative and everything in between. I think that people function is similar. Like you need to figure out in many jobs, like you need to know real estate through talent, you know, compensation, total warrants, equity. So so similar to that.

16:22I think, you know, I never thought of marketing as a service organization per se. I always think of it more as part of the business, but I think some people are doing that right. It's like, and that's similar to the people function as well, right? We are, the people function actually is a service. We're trying to help the business succeed and do what's right for the business. And so in that way, you have many stakeholders who are solving for different things and you have to somehow make them all happy or at least not too strongly disappointed. That's a similar approach. And then finally, I think marketers understand that their job is to help the business succeed.

17:02And the best people leaders understand the same thing. The worst people leaders think their job is to do what HR does and they don't connect it to sort of business outcomes that are needed. I say the best marketers understand their job is to make the company win. And some marketers think they're just supposed to do the marketing functions and don't connect it to the bigger picture of the business. Yeah. I hear saying, look, you have to drive the business. You can't just do marketing. And it's not, look, marketing is a business driver, but that driving is in service to the company, not in service to the marketing measures.

17:36Absolutely. And I think that's what you're saying about HR as well. And I'll use another example, Mike.

17:46Every company I've been at does an employee engagement survey, but somebody needs to ask, why? Why do we do it? If we just do it because everybody does it, that's not a reason to do it. If we do it because we're actually going to take the results and drive meaningful change for the people in the company to get better business results, that's a great reason. But don't do a survey and then don't do anything with the results or don't even tell people what the results were, which I mean before too. If you don't do it, don't do it because everybody else does it. Do it because it's driving a business outcome.

18:18And we should always ask those first principle questions about everything we do in the people function, in the marketing function, and frankly, in every function in the company. And also people do it for the score and the score is something that is important for the survey, but it's really the actions that come out of the That's right. What makes the company better? That matters. But you can see an awful lot of people stop at the score. That's right. Totally. Hey, so you've been in a lot of situations where you can see the company dynamics from a different seat than the marketing department. And also back to the last question we just had, you got to hire the right kind of marketing person if they think it's a service versus a business driver.

19:05share some of your observations on how the best marketing departments work in interface with their company. Like best practices and Hall of Fame worst practices. I know you're a Yankee fan, so you'll spark the Hall of Fame there. Well, let's see. So one of the reasons I liked working with you so much and you were such a great hire for us at Ancestry was you had that demonstrated skillset across that range from deep data to the creative side, right? And that's rare, but that's how you show up. And I can't remember if you yourself have a math degree, but I know your parents are involved in math.

19:50You just deepen the numbers you always have in that's always there, but you can also lean into the brand and the creative side. So having that range of skill set and experience and knowledge, I think, really allows for somebody to do that broadband of stuff. And I think it's the same on the people side. People leaders need to be deep in analytics and data now as well. I think the best marketers, in my experience, and you were one of them for sure. I've been having you on the show, Evan. Yeah, yeah. Let me keep talking about how great you are, Mike. are they can come to the executive table. They can clearly state a problem.

20:33They can clearly state the data behind both the problem and why it informs a solution. And then they can clearly state a solution that they think will address the problem for the business. That, by the way, I don't think that's unique to marketing. I think that's good for any leader at that senior table, but it's especially important for marketing, which some leaders in my past life have seen from other functions have seen as a little bit squishy. And so to make sure it's not squishy, you have to show up the same way that the business shows up to that table. Here's the problem. Here's my analysis of the data behind it and why the problem's true.

21:09Here's some data that shows what a possible solution would be. Here's a solution and here's how we might implement it. That thinking pattern has not always been kind of tied with some of the seemingly softer functions like people or marketing. And I think the best marketers absolutely show up like the best business leaders because they are and can have that conversation very smoothly across all those different pieces. And I want to try this back to the point we were talking about earlier, which is in a function where everybody has an opinion, if you can't put the problem out clearly, whether it's in HR or marketing, they are giving you to an answer of what they think is the problem, which may or may not be the problem, which can send you down a rabbit hole in both the functions we're talking about.

22:00Absolutely true. So let's move over. No, said another way, Mike, the burden of proof is higher for our functions. Oh, that is really a good line. I like that. I think that's right. And also, if you don't have the burden of proof, I like how you put that. Your answer comes even under more, the burden of proof of the problem, your answer comes under more scrutiny. That's right. Hey, so, you know, should a marketing department have a dedicated HR resource supporting it or not? Well, I think my model at some kind of reasonable scale is that every function should have a dedicated people team resource.

22:40In my experience, it typically is a people partner, sometimes called HRBPs, because I don't call it HR, I call it people partners. Every org should have a people partner associated with it. And smaller companies like mine, that person will do multiple leaders and multiple functions. But having somebody who's, quote unquote, embedded, who's attending the staff meetings of the leader of that function, who's driving the calibration sessions for performance reasons, who really understands the issues involved and the org design and can help the leader with that, I think it's critical. And then the centralized people function supports that person.

23:20We'll create in a centralized way programs that work for 80 % of the company. And then each function needs to tweak it about 20%. And usually that's done with the people partner who's kind of embedded in the function. And I have to say, I think this is a super important distinction you're making, which is if I'm hiring some specialist into my group, like market research or something, a lot of times the traditional recruiting paths won't work. And you want your HRBP or your PP or whatever you want to call them to be, to understand that right away versus just give you the, all right, this is what we always do.

24:01We always run ads here or we do it this way. And so I think that is a super important thing, which brings me a little bit to recruiting and I want to flip the recruiting thing. You've already talked about what you look for in senior executives. What questions should CMOs or marketers expect to get from folks like you when they're running the panel? I mean, you've been in some great places that HR is looking for when the marketer comes through. Yeah. Well, the first thing I think is consistent with any role, right? So HR is probably not doing the deep dive into the specific marketing skillset. Let's just be clear.

24:46There are people who are more expert in that. So the general things that I look for of everybody to hire senior or kind of mid career or more junior is learning agility. So can you demonstrate to me not that, and I've actually She had an executive do that, that I hired and came in and said, oh, here's a folder. I'm like, what is that? This was years ago before. What is that? Oh, that's my five best presentations from my last five companies. Uh-oh, we have made a serious error. Like, I didn't hire you to do the same thing you did before. I hired you to leverage that great experience to do what makes sense for us at this unique period of time, with this unique product, with this unique set of employees, right?

25:27And this unique customer set. So can you learn? Can you learn? Do you have high learning at least? It's always been important. Certainly important now with all the AI stuff going on. Like it's a whole new set of things you need to figure out. And that's number one always. And that gets harder to measure as you get more senior, to be honest, because once you're so expert in something, most people don't put themselves in that beginner's mindset again. And so I'll ask questions about like, tell me about the last skill that you learned. Right. Right. And, you know, somebody might say and somebody else might say, oh, you know, my wife and I just took a ballroom dancing and terrible at it.

26:05But we laugh and I step on her feet and it's right. Right. Just are you willing to be a beginner again in something is is often a proxy for that. So that's one. Two is anybody's going to ask about AI these days. Yeah. Because every company is either trying to transform or they're late to transform or they already are fully integrated. but somewhere on that spectrum. And you wouldn't want to hire somebody today that has no idea how to start, thinks it's scary, or has never even played around with it. So in my view, and I'm not an expert in the theory, but in my view, most of my learning has come just from playing around, right?