324 - The GRIT Performance Framework: Patsy Mangan (Chief People Officer, Scribd)

0:00Patsy Mangan: That felt very arbitrary to us. We didn't want to require people to come to an office just so they could say they came to the office or just so they could swipe their badge one, two or three times a week. We wanted there to be a reason that being together made the experience better. There's a lot of people that think being able to see someone working equals performance and we, you know, visibility does not equal performance to us around expectations is what we believe drives performance. And so, you know, we don't think that there is a tradeoff between freedom and autonomy and accountability and high performance.

0:41We feel like those two can really enable each other. 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

1:04this is episode four of five that we're recording this week is that right steven This is like our little recording marathon. And yeah, so I feel like we're like in the groove in a good little rhythm with this. And so you're catching us at a good time. I feel like Monday and Tuesday were great. Wednesday was even better. And I think this one's going to be the best so far. And so. Wow, no pressure. No pressure. So welcome to the show, Patsy. We start every episode the same way. And that's with something that we call good news stories. and we all share something either personal or work-related just to start with some positivity and we like for our guests to go first so if you have something please kick us off.

1:50Okay I'd say that my good news is that I just recently got back from a week in Chicago. I am based in San Francisco but I'm a die-hard born and raised Chicagoan so I try to get back there quite often, but for sure, I always try to make a trip in the summertime because Chicago summers are just the best. So got to see all my people, eat at all my favorite restaurants, do all of the things that I love. So my cup is very full coming off of that week. What's your sports team? Is there one that you favor over the rest in Chicago? Oh, well, you know, Chicago is like a diehard, you know, sports town. I prefer the Cubs over the Sox, but I, you know, I'm a fan of all Chicago teams.

2:35Yeah. The bears, the bulls, you know, we like it all. Yeah. Steven, you and you are next.

2:42Patsy Mangan: Yeah. Sorry to sigh like that. We, when you record back to back to back podcasts, it gets hard to, hard to have fresh good news, but I guess my good news will be a continuation of I think a couple of my recent good news stories we've made an offer on a house we have completed an inspection on that house and there were no like red flags a couple of amber things you know I mean in Texas like certain things especially where we live are kind of a given like foundation like just the soil that I guess we're built on here and this house is like more than 100 years old. So that's, you know, part of the issue.

3:26Patsy Mangan: But we're one step closer. We're not quite there yet. But I think everything is pointing to like green light. So that's super exciting. Congratulations. Thank you. My good news is that tonight, I'm gonna get to see a friend that I haven't seen in a while. And that's not true. I saw him like maybe a couple months ago. But And, you know, visits probably two or three times a year. And every time he comes to town, him and his wife and me and my wife, we all get together. And this will be the first time that they're meeting our daughter, Lena. And so I'm excited for them to see her and know her. And we're going to have some bomb Chinese food.

4:10His family owns this spot here in Austin. And I haven't had it in like 10, 15 years, maybe like even since high school. and so he's going to bring over all of his favorite things from the restaurant and yeah it should be a good time nice amazing shout out china dynasty if you've never been there steven

4:29Patsy Mangan: you should check it out i've never we will definitely check it out i'll put it on my list too and so patsy give us like the career story so you start in chicago i think you you start in accounting at an accounting firm and then you go into advertising and then now you're at Scribd, like connect all the dots for me. Walk us through the career story. You know, we hear all kinds of stories in the podcast. And I'll never forget the story that was told about a Mexico Beach FMLA backfire. One of their employees was out on approved medical leave. And then somebody spots them on Instagram. Feet up on the beach looking a little too okay for someone supposedly recovering.

5:14So cue the call from the CEO wanting to pull their leave and all of the panic that followed. But here's the thing. There's actual legal precedent that says a photo isn't proof of anything. You can't just yank somebody's protected leave because of how a vacation pic looks. You need real evidence. And that's a trap a lot of HR teams fall into. Making a compliance call based on gut instinct instead of actually knowing the law. And that's exactly the gap 650 is built to close. 650 helps teams manage compliance across the full life cycle, from handbooks and policies to agreements, legal updates, and research.

5:50And their AI-powered research center gives you a way to ask employment law questions in plain English so you can better understand what applies and where. Because compliance calls shouldn't be made on gut instinct. They should be grounded in real legal clarity. For those of you that want to learn more about 650, go to the link in the show notes and let them know we sent you. Let me give you kind of the 101. one. So yep, grew up in Chicago. I was actually the youngest of eight kids, so really big family. And I think that setting is where I learned to how to find calm in chaos, and how to navigate a lot of different personalities.

6:29I actually very early on became fascinated by what makes people tick, why different people are motivated by different things, why people respond differently to the same situation and how to find the connection through all of those differences. So as you said, I started my career off very traditional. I work in HR at one of the big five accounting firms. I would say I am very thankful that I started in that traditional of a setting because it gave me a fantastic foundation of the mechanics and the discipline that comes with working in HR. After that, I did move into media and advertising and spent a good chunk of my career in media and advertising of well over a decade.

7:17Very different world in media and advertising. I wouldn't say that it was exactly like the show Mad Men, but it wasn't not like Mad Men either, if you know what I mean. So suddenly I was exposed to very different set of personalities, different ways of working. And I think that's where I started to question some of the more traditional assumptions that I had learned earlier in my career around how you manage people. And so I started to develop this belief that if you just treated people like adults, more often than not, they will show up and act like adults. If you give people freedom and be clear about expectations, people will usually do the right thing.

7:59And you shouldn't design frameworks around the people that break the rules. So I've always kind of believed like set the standard, treat people with trust, treat people with respect, and then manage exceptions as what they are, exceptions. I think I shared with you when we chatted before that I just, I don't love doing what everyone else is doing. So if someone is, if I see a lot of companies. I think you said you're allergic to it. Yeah, I think I am. I think I am. If everyone's running in one direction, you'll usually see me going the opposite direction, looking for a different path. And I think that I could tie that back to being the youngest of eight kids, like wanting to establish my own identity.

8:44So I think throughout my career, I think my biggest unlocks have come from being willing to question the more conventional way of doing things. So about a decade ago, I moved to San Francisco, hopped into the world of tech, joined Scribd. What attracted me to Scribd was it did feel like a place where I could actually build around some of those core philosophies that are kind of my north stars of how things should work. We could try different things at Scribd. I could challenge ways of traditional thinking and really start to build culture as the competitive advantage. And that's what I've been doing there for the last seven years.

9:27And it's a big part of what keeps me there.

9:30Patsy Mangan: And so tell us a little bit about what you do at Scribd. Like what if you're at a party and someone's like, hey, you know, what do you do, Patsy? Like, how do you describe kind of the product and, you know, the brand? Yeah. So Scribd is a really interesting company. We are a tech company. We've been around for almost 20 years now. And we actually think of ourselves as a knowledge company. So our mission at Scribd Inc. is to advance human understanding. And we do that across four products that are part of our portfolio. What's interesting about our portfolio is that we have more than 400 million pieces of human created content.

10:15So if I break it down to those four product lines, like so Scribd is one of our products. that's where people go for documents. It's a big document repository. It's where people go for research, applied knowledge. We have a product that's called SlideShare. That's where people go for presentations, more professional learning. Everand is a product where people go for eBooks and audiobooks. And then Fable is our fourth product, which is like a social reading community where people can join book clubs and connect with other readers. So four very distinct products, but with one shared purpose, helping people not only just find information, but helping people understand the information that they are researching.

11:02So Scribd Inc. actually just hit a really cool milestone not too long ago. We surpassed 1 billion users across our four portfolios over the last couple of decades, which is 1 billion users is a pretty incredible number when you stop and think about it. So yeah, it's pretty cool stuff. How many people are on earth these days? Like 7 billion? That's crazy. Well, congrats on that. Take us back to the pandemic days. I think you said that around this time, Scribd was 80 % in the Bay Area, in the office five days a week, COVID hits. And for the first time ever, you start hiring outside of just the Bay Area.

11:47And I think the way you put it to me was you couldn't unscramble the egg. The egg had been unscrambled. You had gone through this one-way door and there was no going back. So let's just start there. What did opening up the hiring show you about the talent that you've been missing out on. Yeah, that's exactly it. Like we were very traditional, like in the office five days a week, majority of our employees in the Bay Area. You know, the pandemic hit the pandemic that was supposed to last two weeks. And, you know, we a couple of years in, you know, we found ourselves, we had leaned into expanding our talent pool.

12:24We started looking for talent in locations that we simply hadn't looked in before. And we found that it opened up this incredible pool of talent. And so we decided to go with it. You know, the San Francisco Bay Area being a small tech company in San Francisco, there's a lot of competition for talent. And when you're willing to look broader than San Francisco, there's a lot of really great people out there. And so it kind of really opened our eyes to building a really mature workforce outside, you know, beyond San Francisco. So then, you know, the conversation across all companies started to turn to, okay, now what do we do?

13:07Are we going back to the office? Are we going to be fully remote company? Are we going to be a hybrid company? What are we going to be? And that was like the big future of work was the hot topic those days. And at Scribd, you know, we were asking ourselves that same question, but we had known, we had built during the pandemic, this newly distributed workforce that was actually functioning quite well. And we had hired all these incredible people across the US, Canada and beyond. And we knew we couldn't just simply unscramble that egg, right? We can't be like, okay, thanks everyone outside of San Francisco, we're going to go back to in the office.

13:45And you know, that just doesn't work when we kind of built this distributed model. And I'd say more importantly, we didn't want to unscramble it. We saw that it actually could be fundamentally better operating model for us. And so that's where Scribd Flex came in. So I was very intentional about not putting a label on what we were calling our future of work. So those traditional buckets of fully remote or hybrid or in office, I hated all the labels, which I kind of like hinted at before is like, I just don't like what everyone else is doing. I wanted to build something that was really intentionally ours, not some like off the shelf policy that everyone else was following.

14:29We wanted flexibility to be the key that, and I love a branding moment. So we decided to kind of brand our future of work plan as Scribd Flex. and the idea behind Scribflex was it was quite simple. Give people the freedom to do the best work wherever they do it best and trust that they will make good decisions on how and where they work. And more importantly, we wanted it to be viewed as a benefit, a benefit to our employees, a benefit to candidates. It wasn't just kind of a way of working. It was like this is something that we are intentionally investing in because it's important to us. And then I would say one key facet of Scribflex, that this is a very important tenant of Scribflex, is that we were upfront very clear that Scribflex did not mean fully remote.

15:32What it meant was there would be occasional, required, intentional moments of in-person connection. So there would be times that you needed to put on shoes and show up, but those moments were going to be very intentional.

15:48Patsy Mangan: Wow. It is amazing how much time can change in just a few years. It was like listening to you and just thinking about this story and like immediately being taken back, like having a visceral kind of reaction, going back to the time where we were solving this. And like, there was a day, Patsy, where we would have taken this conversation. We would have probably just talked to you about like what we would have dug into everything you just shared with us. And we would have, you know, drafted a post on LinkedIn, we would have shared a playbook on LinkedIn, it would have gone viral, like, and viral and viral and viral.

16:30Patsy Mangan: And today, it's we live in a starkly different world today. And as I, I stand behind the merits, like I'm hearing you talk about kind of this mind blowing experience that my words, not yours that you and the leadership team probably had. And realizing like, wow, we were limiting ourselves to a talent pool here, like literally the most competitive place in the world and we could have had like great talent like in all these places we now do like I get why like you want to why remote is just ideal in a lot of different ways since then since in the last couple years I do recognize that there are situations maybe stage of company like i'm working with an early stage startup and i can see like i don't think we would be able to do the things we're doing like right now at this stage if we're remote so i often ask myself like why like why are some companies still well and another interesting kind of reflection you don't hear about any of the companies that nailed remote working or you know flex working hybrid the companies that absolutely nailed it you don't hear any of those companies saying they're trying to unscramble the egg right they're not they're committed like zapier dropbox like all these companies airbnb and mind you they probably had to tweak their policies you know to react to kind of the the current market and so for me i think a huge part of the success rate and like who today is known as a as a remote first company and who today is known as kind of an in-office company comes down to execution and execution and ability to stick to kind of the vision at the leadership level because a lot of leaders kind of wavered when times got tough and so I'm just curious like did you you know I gotta imagine conversations came up like hey everyone else seems to be like changing their mind like should we and and so like a what conversations like what do you think you did uniquely different to everyone else that got you to a point where you're like this is where you're at and b in the moments where you could have wavered like what aspects of your program like definitely kept you on this path yeah really great questions and all very true.

19:06We went through all of those phases and stages of kind of thinking through, is this sustainable? I mentioned intentionality being a kind of a key facet of what we were trying to design. And, you know, a lot of the companies, when people started to say, okay, we're going to require you to be back in the office one day a week, two days a week, three days a week, that felt very arbitrary to us. We didn't want to require people to come to an office just so they could say they came to the office or just so they could swipe their badge one, two, or three times a week. We wanted there to be a reason that being together made the experience better.

19:44And so when we first rolled out Scribd Flex, you know, we, it was kind of those, those in-person moments were a little bit more organic. They were being organized by managers and teams when they felt that it would be helpful to kind of like get together and whiteboard something, but it probably wasn't happening large scale. And so we quickly learned that flexibility alone, while all of our employees loved the flexibility, it didn't create the connection and the culture. It wasn't sustainable from a connection and culture standpoint. And we knew we had to design for that element of it. So that's when we, early 2024, so just about two and years and two and a half years ago now, we decided to start formalizing moments, those intentional moments around concentration of attendance instead of frequency of attendance.

20:41So what we do now is on the third Wednesday of every month, everyone that lives within commuting distance of one of our hub cities gets together and works together on that day. So every third Wednesday of every month, regardless of where you are located in the world, you're going to get away together with your local co-workers and colleagues and spend the day together. And we call these hub days. One important thing is these hub days are required. They are not optional. And that's a really important distinction because we are giving people a ton of flexibility the rest of the month. But this is one of those moments where we have decided, hey, this is the moment where you put on your shoes and show up moment, right?

21:25And because we have everyone there on the same day, we get this concentrated benefit of being together. And we ask people to keep those days meeting light, we encourage people to use them for the things that are genuinely better in person. So whether it's that kind of whiteboarding, you know, the in person meetings, the, you know, just having a shared meal and the hallway conversations and kind of building relationships, building connections. The point wouldn't be, this wouldn't work if everyone just came into the office that one day a month and sat behind a closed door on video calls or Google Meets all day long.

22:05We know they can do that from home. So we designed these days to really be about that in-person connection with kind of your local crew, so to speak. What's really interesting is that we did get a little resistance when we rolled out Hub Days initially, and that's understandable. We had given people a ton of flexibility and then we introduced a requirement. But once people experience what Hub Days were about, what they were designed to do, and how much they enjoyed them and how much value they got out of them, we actually now have employees asking us for more Hub Days. We have quite a few people saying, hey, I'd love to do this more than once a month.

22:45And so I think that's the validation for us. We focus less on how often people are together and more on making the time they are together the most valuable, making sure it matters as much as possible. What I'm hearing is, one, treat people like adults and give them flexibility. Two, find ways to connect them if they're not going to be in office and with each other every day. The third part, and I think this is where you get like a lot of board members objecting and saying like, hey, we need people in the office. We need them more productive. We need a high performance culture. And the only way we can do that is that we have people in the office every day.

23:26Like, I feel like that's the big objection that you hear from whether it's executives or board members or all over X and LinkedIn. And so I'm going to skip ahead to the grit system. I find this part like super, super interesting. I'll just stop right there. Like, first off, tell us a bit more about like where this grit system came from and how that has turned into a performance framework that everybody at the company is using. Yeah, I'd love to. We really see grit as the kind of like interlocking puzzle piece with Scribflex. And that's the two together are really the secret to our success. I there's a lot of people that think being able to see someone working equals performance and we you know visibility does not equal performance to us.

24:15Clarity around expectations is what we believe drives performance. And so, you know, we don't think that there is a tradeoff between freedom and autonomy and accountability and high performance. We feel like those two can really enable each other. So a couple of years ago, we took a look at our performance philosophy. Given that ScribFlex was up and running, we had all of this flexibility that we had granted to our employees. Now, how then does that tie into expectations, accountability, how we manage performance? I have heard many times throughout my career, but even more so when I joined tech and started working with a large population of engineers, is often performance management feels like a black box to people.

25:06So you work all year long. At the end of the year, your manager gives you a rating and they say, you know, you're meeting expectations, you're exceeding expectations or whatever it may be. But it's just this one big averaged out diluted rating at the end of the year. And we found that our employees, like they wanted to know the formula. They wanted to understand the inputs that went into that ultimate rating at the end of the year. because every single one of us excels at some things. Some parts of our jobs, we do great. Other parts of our jobs, we could do better. But when you average all of that at the end of the year into just one rating, you lose all this important nuance of like, okay, I got that rating, but what am I really good at?

25:49What do I need to get better at? What are my levers? Where should I hit the gas pedal? Where should I hit the brake? So when we built Grit, we really started with a blank piece of paper. We asked our leaders, think about the people that are most successful at Scribd. What are the characteristics? What are the behaviors? What are those markers of success that distinguish the people that really thrive here? And we kept coming back to four things or four buckets of our four concepts, if you will. And those successful employees we found were, they were goal-oriented. They were results-driven. They were innovative.

26:28and team-focused. And since I shared earlier that I love a branding moment, we did a little word scrambling and we realized that we had an acronym. Those four markers of success spelled GRIT. And we really liked that. We felt like it was culturally relevant to us. We started researching the concept of GRIT further. We discovered that Angela Duckworth had written a book on GRIT. Her definition of GRIT was the intersection of passion and perseverance. And that really resonated with us too. That really validated our thinking and gave the framework an even richer foundation. I think the biggest piece of grit and why it was so useful and why it is so useful to our employees, it's not just giving it a clever name and an acronym that people remember.

27:17It's that every role at Scribd now has expectations across those four dimensions. So managers translate for each employee what it means to be goal-oriented, what it means to be results-driven, innovative, what it means to be team-focused, and what that performance looks like in each and every role at Scribd. So throughout the year, employees get feedback against those four G, R, I, and T dimensions. And then at year end, they are actually evaluated across each one. And so, and this is the big unlock. They receive, every employee receives a rating for each of the four grit dimensions. So rather than only receiving one broad rating that might obscure some of that nuance, employees understand kind of where they're doing well, where they're doing, where they could, where there's room for improvement.

28:12So we essentially opened up the black box. So someone can now understand, okay, I'm really strong on results and innovation, but I have an opportunity to grow with how I am showing up for the team, or maybe it's the reverse. It can be really any combination of those four components. People see, they know what great looks like. They know what they're doing against it. They have this level of granularity where there's no question about what the expectations are and how they are going to be rated. And then that's like, the reason that I said it's kind of this tie in with ScribFlex is when we think about like, ScribFlex is what gives employees the freedom, and then grit gives employees the clarity.

28:57And so that's why we don't think that autonomy and accountability are in opposition. We really feel like they are able to enable each other through these two programs.

29:06Patsy Mangan: I love this. And so, so grit was internally developed. Is this like a software or just a framework or a framework plus software? One thing keeps coming up on the podcast and that's leave. It's one of those processes that everybody has, but very few get right. And we just talked about this the other week with Kim Smith from Tilt and she framed it in a way that really clicked for me. Not every employee experiences leave the same way. Some want every detail up front, others feel overwhelmed, and just want you to simply tell them what to do next. But most companies deliver the exact same experience to everyone.

29:46It's one thing to have a compliant leave program. It's another to have one that actually works for the human going through it. And that's where Tilt comes in. Tilt is a leave experience platform that helps teams move beyond one-size-fits-all processes. Using Tilt, companies can tailor the leave experience to each employee's needs, keep managers aligned on coverage and return to work, automate complex workflows like pay and compliance, and give HR the space to focus on support and not spreadsheets. In other words, the tech handles the complexity so that the people team can show up where it matters most as a human.

30:23Leave isn't just an HR process. these are life-changing moments that can make or break the employee experience. If you want to learn more about Tilt, go to hellotilt.com slash MPL. That's hellotilt.com slash MPL. It's a framework plus software. The software is actually, we do have a performance platform where we house some of the grit information. It's pretty basic. It's meant to be like super simple because we don't want employees focusing so much, employees and managers focusing so much on documentation, right? Like our whole philosophy around grit is like, it's more about just having this constant dialogue and conversation and, you know, kind of jotting down some touch points and progress along the way.

31:17But we really kind of take the focus away from like, write a 10-page long self-review. And then the manager's biggest burden is writing all of the employee reviews at the end of the year. So our focus is really on the connections and the conversations between managers and that clear understanding around what GRIT stands for. I will tell you behind the scenes, while we do have a platform where this information is housed, we're actually actively exploring ways to integrate these grit conversations and the way that employees talk about grit with their managers through probably one of our AI platforms going forward.

32:02So more to come up. Thank you.

32:04Patsy Mangan: You like teed it up right for me because I, you know, and how often just real last question before I take us to kind of the next area we want to talk about. But how often are your employees engaging in the grit process? So employees and managers have conversations at least once a quarter. And we call those connection conversations where an employee and a manager sits down, just has a conversation about how things are going, their progress against their grit goals. Those conversations are meant to be different than your weekly one-on-one that you have with your manager. It's more about like, okay, let's take a moment, hit pause and talk about you, your career, your connection to the work, what your roadblocks might be, and how you're progressing against your goals.

32:52So those happen quarterly. And then at the end of the year, the employee will receive kind of their evaluation against each of the grit components. So nothing should be a surprise.

33:05Patsy Mangan: So you have rich data, like there's a good amount quarterly, probably not 100 % completion, but you know i don't 70 80 90 if you're doing great if it's a great quarter and you know you are it's structured as well which was going to be my next comment was going to be like with you know great data sources active that are actively being populated that are also structured it's like the perfect environment for for ai and i in my research for this conversation I saw I just tried to find it again and I couldn't but I think it was like a LinkedIn post that talked about how like polls and survey results on how people are feeling about the importance of knowing where data is coming from, you know, and as a company who's focused on human knowledge, you know, I'm just curious and it could be grit and what you're exploring, you know, to build the tooling, the AI tooling for grit.

34:09Patsy Mangan: or maybe it's something completely different. But I'm curious how, you know, one of the world's preeminent human knowledge companies approaches and even thinks about, because I have to imagine you're probably pretty deliberate in how you use data, where you use data. And so can you share with us a little bit? Because to me, this is like the gold standard. Like, you know, you probably care a lot more than others. Like data is very important, but this is like, you're part of your mission and who you are. So I'm just curious what that looks like. Yeah, I would say we definitely have very rich data around performance ever since we rolled out Grit.

34:52It's funny because, you know, there's a lot of people in my profession that are going the opposite way. You'll hear a lot of companies that have done away with performance reviews and are kind of, you know, just throwing everything out the window. And we actually, while that sounds really attractive to the people that, you know, get daunted.

35:14Patsy Mangan: If you've ever done one. Yeah. We actually found that creating that clarity and that fairness around how people are held accountable and how they are evaluated was easier to do with, frankly, a more complex system. So our performance philosophy and our performance mechanics actually became more complex. But we, the reaction from our employees was extremely positive because of what I said earlier about it unlocked kind of that black box for them. Like all of a sudden, it wasn't a mystery what their manager was evaluating them against. They knew exactly what it was. We have these kind of performance rubrics where it's very clear under each element of grit, like what the expectations are for every role and for every level.

36:11And so no employee is left wondering, I wonder what I'm supposed to be doing. I wonder what good looks like. They have a very clear picture of that. And they know exactly kind of what their manager is calibrating them against. And I do think the calibration piece is important as well, because we also know that just by human nature, that managers evaluate people differently. You know, there are, we have tougher graders and easier graders. And so we do have a very thorough calibration process where our managers and leaders will go through. And this is part of some of the things we're going to start to automate with AI going forward.

36:53Because our managers and leaders go through every element of grit. They will look at all the G scores and make sure they're calibrated. And nobody has an outlier score for no reason. They look at all the R scores, the I scores, the T scores. So it's a very thorough process. But I think because we invest so much time in making sure that we're getting it right and that it's fair and we're using all of the data that we have, our employees then trust the process, right? They trust that it is fair and they appreciate the level of granularity and specificity around how their rating came to be. Sounds like you guys have put a lot of time and energy and probably money into getting this right.

37:38But if I know an engineer, like engineers are always going to be skeptical even if you take all this time to try to get it right for them and I'm just curious so like you said the reception's been really positive for the skeptics like what's some of the feedback that you're still getting how are you guys thinking about improving this even more going forward I think the pieces that are probably where there's an opportunity to continue to evolve is you know within within Within Grit, we have goal setting that is set. The goal setting is up to the employee and the manager or partnership between them about how they set goals.

38:22I think that there are probably different levels of intensity related to the goals that each manager sets for their employees. And I think there's probably opportunity there to make sure that we're holding everyone kind of to that same bar so that when it comes time for evaluation against goals that, you know, it does feel fair to employees.

38:50Patsy Mangan: What is like, you know, as we, and it's crazy, I can't believe we're already mid-August, like we're burning into the fall. And, you know, before we know it, we're going to be kind of in that planning, the planning process for next year. And, you know, I'm just curious, like, are there, what is the next grit that you and the team are kind of thinking up in terms of kind of like the next major, major thing that you're looking to build from a people team perspective? So right now we are really focused on becoming an AI native organization. And we have, we feel really good about our progress and where we are in that journey.

39:37We have successfully kind of passed through the adoption phase. We kind of look at becoming an AI native company and kind of in three phases. The first one is like, just get the tools in the people's hands and encourage them to use them. And we are well past that. We are fully past adoption and we are now in what we're calling a redesign phase where we need to start redesigning workflows. and we know that with the addition of AI tools, every role is changing at Scribd, right? Expectations and how work gets done and what output looks like is fundamentally different than it was a year ago. And so that is the next big evolution is we are going back and taking a hard look at not only grit and what does like AI application and fluency and output look like.

40:35How does that change our expectations for employees across the grit model? But we're also going back and looking at how does it change how we hire? How does it change our career journeys and our career paths internally? Like, so that's probably the next really big undertaking for the people team is kind of taking that layer of AI application and AI redesign and applying it to kind of how we look at our ways of working and how we evaluate people, how we promote people, how we hire people, and what our expectations, what our performance standards are for people, given that work has changed so significantly.

41:19And so if we think forward to 2028, January 2028. And Scribd is now an AI native company. Like what, I know it's hard to imagine, but like, what does the organization look like and feel like? I think what the organization looks like, you know, once we are at that stage is, I think we will be a combination of humans and agents. We are very, right now we're kind of in a phase where we are very intentionally, we are still hiring, we are still growing at Scribd, but we are being very intentional about how we think about headcount. We don't see AI application as a headcount exercise. It's not a reason to reduce headcount.

42:15But instead, as we think about how we're growing, Every new role that we add, we ask ourselves, is this role adding a specialty? Would this individual bring us something that we can't do today? What does this add in terms of skill set versus is this role just adding capacity? So I believe that going forward, when we start to think about hiring and headcount, if it is simply a bandwidth and capacity issue, then we will look at AI and using those dollars towards token usage versus hiring another full-time employee. And we'll focus our full-time employee hires on kind of technical specialists, people that actually bring a skillset that is new and different than what we already have.

43:06And I think once we are AI native, our workflows will just look very different, right? Everything will, the first reflex will be, you know, where can this be done and how can this be done more efficiently through AI? And so on the net new skills piece, so only bringing people on if they're truly bringing a specialty, it sounds like that's technical expertise. How are you thinking about that for the people team? Like what are some new types of roles you envision hiring for in the next couple of years? I think across the people team, I'm very proud to say that my team is quite AI fluent and we are building some really cool things in the people space that I'm really excited about.

44:04I think that from a people team perspective, our tools are going to start to look very different. Because right now we are in a moment at Scribd where a lot of the work that's getting done across the organization is rooted in Claude. And people are becoming more and more hesitant to go to other tools to do their work. And so we are starting to build for like, how do we kind of, whether it's through MCPs or other, start to connect everything to kind of the base where the work is being done. So don't ask your employees to go to a performance management tool to write out all their stuff about grit.

44:52Let them do it straight and clawed where all of their other work is being done and start to connect those tools kind of on the back end. So it's kind of a one-stop shop for employees. So those are just like some of the things that we're thinking about. I actually had a conversation with my head of HR yesterday where she said to me, she was like, I think we're going to need a software engineer in HR one of these days just to start building some of the things that we want to build. And so I think that's an interesting idea of how roles are going to start to bleed across functions. I mean, we're already seeing it.

45:26We have people outside of engineering doing coding work all across the organization now because it's more accessible to them. And so I think we'll start to see that some of the more traditional roles that used to be siloed in functions are going to start to bleed into other functions as people have access to tools and are able to start building things on their own.

45:50Patsy Mangan: So I'll make this as quick as I can, because I just realized we should be actually bringing the call to a close. So we'll treat this as like last question. But in 2023, after a nine year run, I sold an engagement survey company that I had founded that Daniel had helped grow. He was part of the team that got to like half a million in revenue. We got to like 1.5 million in ARR, and then we sold it in a really tough market. And, you know, an exit is great. And today you see a smile for those, you know, like y 'all can see me. I'm like, you know, I recognize that an exit was really, really positive, but it didn't really feel that way at the time.

46:29Patsy Mangan: And I went into like this, like dark place as it related to like my career and what I would do next. And Daniel would be, you know, Daniel and I, like, obviously we talk every day, we're business partners. And he, I remember telling him, like, I just feel like I want to be an individual contributor. Like, I just feel like I can't explain it. And like, fast forward, you know, to, to me, like, you know, realizing about a year ago that I needed a new chapter. And, and again, I still couldn't like describe I looked for jobs. And I would explain to Daniel, like what I thought I was looking for, like, at one point, I thought it would be AI transformation in a in HR, because I have an 25 years I've spent in HR.

47:20Patsy Mangan: But I still couldn't find it. And I would talk to people about it. And they're like, yeah, what you're looking for is there. But like, you know, there are not a lot of job descriptions for that. And then fast forward to like the last couple weeks and the trend of the high performing IC. And I'm absolutely obsessed with it's a post from Elena Verna. Alaina runs the growth team at Lovable. And I came across, I've just started a new job. I shared this good news yesterday, but today is like my first full day. And I'm a sales leader. I run a revenue team for an AI first company. And so like I've been doing my due diligence and I'm going deep into like sales type of stuff.

48:02Patsy Mangan: And I find this post from Alaina Verna where she like announces two months ago that she has become an IC. and she calls it high C, high impact IC. And so I'm just curious, like, what are your, since we were, you know, as a continuation of the conversation of the answer you just gave, like, what are your views? I know all of this is still being formalized and this is like, you know, this is a hypothesis. I don't know, you know, it's probably partially right, but it feels relevant to kind of the world we're operating in today. And I'm just curious, like, Like, you know, do you subscribe to this high-impact IC concept?

48:42Patsy Mangan: If not, like, do you have another, you know, belief or idea of, like, what, you know, what jobs may start looking like in the future? How much compensation risk do you think is hiding in your spreadsheets right now? For a lot of people teams, comp has gotten way more complex than the system supporting it. You got merit cycles, bonuses, incentive plans, approvals, benchmarking, pay equity, transparency requirements. And somehow, a lot of it is still being managed through Excel, manual uploads, or HRIS modules that weren't really built for this level of complexity. And you know, that's all fine and dandy until there are three versions of the same comp file.

49:23Or one person becomes the single source of truth. or leadership asks why a pay decision was made and the answer is harder and harder to explain. That's where BCom comes in. BCom is a purpose-built compensation platform for organizations managing complex pay programs, especially those teams that I was just referring to that have outgrown what spreadsheets can comfortably handle. It helps people in total rewards leaders run complex comp cycles at the speed of business, connect compensation, performance, and pay equity in one place, create clear governance with clear audit trails, and use AI responsibly with humans still in control of the decisions.

50:05If your comp strategy is getting harder and harder to manage, Be Calm is worth checking out. You can learn more at be calm.com slash MPL. That's B-E-Q-O-M dot com slash MPL. I think it's interesting. The high C concept is an interesting one. And I do think that that will become more prevalent. I mean, we believe that this shift to becoming an AI native organization is as much of a cultural and people shift as it is a technical one, right? Just going to change ways of working across the board. But where I think, you know, kind of the structure of managers and employees is still going to be extremely valid is around judgment, right?

50:55So it's like the roles and expectations and responsibilities are going to be more focused on what one's judgment and how, because that's the one thing that the AI can't do, right? AI cannot apply human judgment. And so that's still going to be super important. And we're going to have to, And that's one of the things I mentioned when we said we're going to be rewriting job descriptions, rewriting career journeys, rewriting the responsibilities of the managers and helping them understand how they start to evaluate against judgment versus just output. Right. Because output is going to become easy, but it's like making sure that people have applied that human judgment.

51:38So I don't think the manager layer is going to be just like become obsolete. I think it's still going to be important, but I do think that you may see teams start to flatten and more IC, more like super senior technical ICs start to emerge. I feel like there's a, you're going to have to add a J somewhere in the great framework. I don't know where you're going to fit it in, but that's the third time we've heard that this week. So yesterday we spoke with Brandon Roberts, who I forget his exact title, but he's the transformation person at ServiceNow. And he said more or less what you just said. And I think Molly Graham, who we had on earlier this week, had very, very similar thoughts.

52:24Well, we've only got a couple of minutes. I'm going to take us to rapid fire questions. We ask the same set of questions every guest. and first question is what's one piece of advice that you'd give to somebody who is starting their career in HR today? So the one thing I always say is don't be afraid to break the rules. I mean, first learn the rules, understand the playbook, understand the foundation, but then give yourself the permission to start rewriting things. So once you understand the why, you can start to question and the how. Love it.

52:58Patsy Mangan: Next question. If your team gave you a superpower nickname, what would it be? So I think that they would probably call me the strategic troublemaker. So simply because I really love challenging conventional ways of thinking. I like to break things intentionally so that I can rebuild them. I love workshopping new concepts and ideas with my team. and you know I also love to have like a little fun along the way I make sure that we are laughing more than we are crying no I mean I'm just kidding ideally no one is crying but I but I think they know that I'm not afraid to ruffle feathers for the right reasons every time we ask that sometimes tears are shed true every time we ask that question we get like a little chuckle it's like the silliest question we have on here but everybody seems to have fun with it all right next question.

53:51What's a strategy or practice for another company that you'd love to steal? So kind of tying back to what we were just talking about around the AI space, one of the companies that I am watching closely that I'd probably steal a little bit from right now is Shopify. So I really admire how they are, you know, they've been very successful in pushing beyond AI just being a tool and having it become more of a reflex and how people work. And so because we're so focused on that work ourselves at Scribd, like that's just one of the companies that that I think has is doing it well and is one that we keep an eye on.

54:34Patsy Mangan: Dang. I think, you know, that may answer the next question, which is who should we have on the show next. And I will not let you respond with Shopify because we, Molly, you're the second person. You're just like, are you listening in to our recordings? Patsy? Yeah. Because Molly was like, yeah, like literally if you can get them anyway, I forget his name, but I think it's the head of HR, but she was like so-and-so at Shopify. But who should we have on the show next? We've been able to have such amazing guests largely because we, uh, this question. And so if like Like you think of someone who's really kind of innovating or deserves a spotlight, who would that be?

55:15So I knew you were going to ask this question and I had like a short list of people that I wanted to recommend. And then I looked through your archives and realized that you've talked to almost everyone on my list. So I'm going to give you a slightly unconventional answer simply because this person is not HR people practitioner himself, but very embedded in our world. And that is Joseph Kwan, the founder and CEO of Noetic and the person behind CPOHQ. I'm sure you both know him or know of him already. I think he understands the challenges facing chief people officers and people leaders better than most.

55:57Like he has built this incredible community of CPOs and he is just like an incredibly generous person and generous with his, his, um, intelligence, generous with his time, generous with his connections and his community. So I feel fortunate to have him in my corner. And I think you'd have a fascinating conversation with him. He's usually the one asking the questions. It'd be interesting to have somebody interview him. He has absolutely no idea. I'm mentioning his name by the way, But I don't think he would mind. I think that's the first time he's been recommended. But we know of Joseph. We know of him and CPOHQ and Noetic.

56:34So great recommendation. Last tradition on the show, one word or phrase closed. So anything that's coming to mind for you as we wrap this thing up? I would say kind of just to keep in line with everything we've talked about today and what you know about me now is question the default. And I'm going to follow that with break the rules.

56:58Patsy Mangan: I'm going to go. I love I'm a sucker for a good framework. I'm going to go with grit. Oh, love it. Well, y 'all, Patsy, that was amazing. I can't believe the hour just flew by like that. We had a lot of fun. You're now part of the NPL fam. So we we like to have our guests back sometimes. If you're open to that sort of thing, it would be an honor to have you again. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you both. really enjoyed the conversation. Would love to chat again sometime. Bye, y 'all. Bye, guys. Bye. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Modern People Leader. We really, really appreciate it.

57:36And 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 episode. We're welcome.

58:01See you next week.