321. Is HR the Loneliest Job in the Building? With Tom Emery

0:00Tom Emery spent 20 years in corporate HR. The last few years as a Chief People Officer, surrounded by people all day, every day. And he said at times he felt really lonely. The book People, People was written for HR leaders because I thought that there was a gap in the market. You know, I didn't have anything when I was a Chief People Officer and I found it really lonely when I first started in that role because it was just me and the CEO really that I could talk to.

0:25Leanne:Lonely. In the most people job in the entire building. Tom's got a theory for why and it starts an unlikely comparison. HR leaders and vets. Vets go into the profession because they really love work. They love animals. But what they find is when they go into being a vet is that they're seeing animals at their weakest, at their illest, their most aggressive, just their most difficult. And they have to do things with animals, which are, you know, we don't really want to do and we don't really want to be in that situation. And I think there are some parallels with HR leaders because lots of the HR leaders that I know, and I think Unfortunately, you know, in the role of HR, just by its nature, you sadly come across people when they're often really backed into a corner or they're really at their worst.

1:14So you take the job because you love people and you spend your career watching them at their lowest point. That's hard enough on its own.

1:20Leanne:But here's the part that really makes you think. The person whose entire job is supporting everyone else in the building doesn't always have anyone supporting them. Today we're asking, if HR is the people centre of a business, how is it the loneliest job in the building? Hello and welcome to Truth, Lives and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture. Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne, I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist. My name is Al, I'm a business owner. We're founders of people and culture consultancy Oblong, and together we're here to help you simplify the science of work.

1:59Our guest today, Tom Emery, spent two decades in corporate HR, most of it at HSBC, before becoming Chief People Officer at a Wealth Manager in the City of London. He's now built a whole consultancy and a book around what he learned in that seat, including things he said he really only understood once he'd left it.

2:16Leanne:If you're a leader who's ever felt like you can't ask for help without looking bad, this episode is probably going to hit close to home. Tom's got a theory about why senior people stop reaching out right when they need it most. So after this short break, we'll get into the vet analogy properly, why HR sometimes puts itself on the outside looking in and what actually needs to change. Don't go anywhere. My name is Tom Emery. I am, well, I style myself as a people performance consultant. So my background was in corporate HR. I did a 20 year career working across several different industries, but mainly in financial services, working for a big global bank, HSBC, and then for a wealth manager in the city of London, where I was the chief people officer.

2:57And then I set up my own consultancy, which is called Hex Development. We focus on helping individuals, teams and organisations to be at their very best and reach their full potential. And we do that through supporting leaders, essentially through individual coaching, team coaching and broader leadership development work. I suppose I think I have a relatively unique experience of having been a chief people officer working on the C-suite in both PLC and private equity backed firms. and I also have, I suppose, an interesting lived experience, you know, sort of growing up in the Northwest and then going into working in the city of London in a very sort of traditional and I suppose quite an elite world.

3:51Being a Northerner, going to work in London probably about 15 years ago, is that the timeline? Something like that, yeah. How did you find that? Because you can't just say hello to people in the street in London, can you? Yeah, I mean, you don't do a lot of that in Manchester either, to be honest. But, you know, I think that the experience of working in the city, I think, is quite interesting. And I definitely, I think, learn to tone down a bit of the northerness. Whether that was the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do, I don't know. So I sort of do think that you have to shapeshift really into your surroundings if you want to be successful.

4:32But I think it's important that you do that without losing the sense of who you really are, because that's really what my work is all about. It's about helping people to find confidence in who they are and being able to use that confidence and use their strengths to achieve great things. Let's talk about HR leaders. the feedback we get is that they feel like they're almost on the outside looking in. Is that something you've come across? Yes, definitely. I mean, I think there's a mindset thing about working in HR. And I think sometimes that means that we perhaps in HR, we sometimes inadvertently put ourselves on the outside looking in, whereas we might be more effective actually on the inside.

5:18So I suppose like how does that manifest itself? I suppose by believing that because we have more access to perhaps personal information or perhaps more sensitive information, that that puts us in a position of not power necessarily, but that puts us in a position where we can't really connect with the people that we work with. I think there's also something else about us sticking in our swim lane too much. And we're just the people person. And we don't stray outside that. And we don't really give an opinion or we don't get curious about what's going on outside of our natural skill set area, if you like.

6:05and I think all these things are mistakes because I don't think this is what organizations are asking from HR people and I don't think this is what organizations need from HR people. I think they need HR people that really are on the inside and build those connections with their C-suite colleagues, with their ex-cos, with their boards, with their investors so that they are really a fundamental part of the success of the business. um so you know there are lots of ways that that i think you can you can do that as an hr professional which i suppose we might get into as we as we go through our conversation we definitely will and i like to get into a little bit of that now actually if we can um i sense that i mean particularly in a lot of sort of tv stuff the hr is seen as the bad guys because all they do is fire or you get sent to hr feels like going to the head headmaster's teacher headmaster's office doesn't it So is that actually the reality in something like HSBC or some of the clients that you work with?

7:05I think it can be the reality, depending on how the organisation is set up. But I think it's fundamentally down to the way that the HR teams operate. So if you believe that that's your role, the role of the police person, the role that does the hiring and firing, and that's all you're there for, then that's the role probably that you'll end up taking and that's the image that you will give out. I think there's a different way of doing HR. I used an analogy recently. I spoke at an event where I was talking about a parallel between being an HR leader and being a vet. So just bear with me on this one.

7:48Vets often go into the profession because they really love work. They love animals. But what they find is when they go into being a vet is that they're seeing animals up there like weakest, up there illest, up there most aggressive, up there, you know, just their most difficult. And they have to do things with animals which are, you know, which we don't really want to do and we don't really want to be in that situation. And I think there are some parallels with HR leaders because lots of the HR leaders that I know, and I think I was one of these, go into HR because we really like working with people.

8:22but unfortunately you know in in the role of hr you just just by it by its nature you sadly come across people when they're often really backed into a corner or they're really at their worst so you know maybe they're in a disciplinary hearing maybe they've just you know they're just about to lose their job or they've put a grievance in over something very very upsetting for them um and i think you know we have to you know we have to go into um the you know the profession with our eyes open. And there will be some of that really difficult, horrible stuff. And we won't be the best thought of people in the organisation.

8:59And we have to live with that. But saying that, I think we can be something different as well. And we can be really building capability. We can be building engagement. We can be building business performance. And we can be really curious about what's going on in our operations and our wider organizations that mean we can pull some different levers around business performance and making the organization better. So you've used the word curious a couple of times now in the last few minutes. Talk to me, what does it actually look like? When I wrote my book, People, People, I built a model, which you mentioned in the intro called the CHRO Impact Framework.

9:35And one of the skills in that framework is that of being a commercial explorer. And this really is about the idea of being curious about how your business works and how your business makes money, how it pulls cost levers, how it works with its customers, how it funds itself. And yeah, what's important to it. And I think only by doing that and only by having that curiosity can you be a really effective HR leader. and I think to be honest I think that's one of the reasons why I perhaps wasn't as effective as I could be because you know I don't I wasn't actually that interested in financial services you know it didn't you know money money's not a big thing for me it just doesn't it doesn't really float my boat and so I think that sometimes held me back and that meant that sometimes I stayed too much in my lane because I just wasn't interested enough in what was what was going on around me.

10:35And so that's what I always talk about when I'm working with HR leaders is that you do have to be really curious about your business and about your organisation. If you want to be a successful HR leader, it's not enough to just be interested in people and to say, well, people are people wherever you go, because that's true. But the context that people are working in and the priorities that they're working to are also really important if you want to provide the best enablement if you like that you can offer as an HR professional. I suspect some HR professionals listening to this have just realized why they haven't been quite as passionate about their job because they're not as curious about the general business so should they be looking for another company they're more in an industry more curious on or is there something else they can do?

11:27Well I mean i think that's a luxury right um i think yeah if you can go into an organization that you're really passionate about what they're delivering uh what their values are the way they work passionate about the people that you work with passionate about the product um or the service that they're um that they're selling then that is you know that's brilliant right you know because that that's going to get you up in the morning much more than just going in and doing your job um I think you can do a decent enough job, to be honest, if you're not like super passionate about, you know, banking, for example, I still think you can do a good job.

12:06But I don't think you're going to blow the lights out. And I don't necessarily think you're going to enjoy it that much either. And I think sometimes, going back to that point you made about HR being outside looking in, sometimes I think that there's sort of this sort of slightly undertone of resentment amongst HR people, that they're not able to quite do what they want to do. They're not quite in the right conversations or in the right rooms and things. And I think if you get more curious, and I think if you're able to push yourself into some of those different conversations that might feel uncomfortable, and you might have to be courageous to do it, and you might have to ask a few questions that you think might sound a bit silly on the way.

12:45I think if you can do that, then I think you will, you know, you will be better. Well, let's talk about the other functions, because some of the people I hear from, they say that people like, for example, the CFO struggle to see why HR should either, not exist necessarily, but why it should be at the same level as a CFO. You talk about the CHRO. Talk to me more about that. They're bringing very, very different skill sets into an organisation. And I think that actually having those two roles as peers, albeit, I mean, the CFO will always get paid a lot more than the CHRO, I can tell you that for nothing.

13:27But, you know, having those two roles as peers, I think can be a really helpful, almost, you know, almost dissonance, if you like, in an organization. Because, you know, I know that the CFO I worked with most in my last organization before I set my business up, we shared some very, very different views on the world and on business. And so I was obviously often gunning to invest more in people and he was often gunning for let's not spend as much so that we can maximise our profit and maximise our shareholder return. Now, what we were able to do because we got on well and we were able to disagree well was we were able to use that to the organisation's advantage because it meant that we had really robust conversations where we made good decisions because we were able to really kick the tyres on that.

14:27And he was able to bring his perspective and I was very much able to bring my perspective. And out of that, you probably got some balanced decisions, which are, yes, it'll take care of the profit. It'll take care of the EBITDA. It'll take care of the shareholder return. But at the same time, it's also going to take care of your engagement. It's going to take care of your well-being and you're going to balance your performance on that basis. If you've got a CFO who doesn't want your HR leader in the room, then I think, well, that's incumbent on HR leaders to show their mettle, show what they're worth.

15:05and back to the conversation that we had previously you do that i think by being really curious because by being really curious you start to build your credibility around what this business is trying to do and how it's going to operate best and you can then start to tailor your expertise and your expertise around people and how to deploy resources and how to engage people motivate people, build their capability in service of an aligned goal, which is the same as the CFOs. And I think what can sometimes happen is that both roles can get into a bit too much navel gazing and the CFO can get into, this is just about the numbers and the people person gets into, this is just about the people.

15:51and you know we're not really being sophisticated enough to bring those two um two two sometimes conflicting elements of the organization together you used a lovely phrase then tom disagree well i think is what you said in fact i'm sure you can't give us a specific example maybe from your life but can you just generally explain what disagreeing well looks like well i mean this is a real area of interest for me at the moment actually and i've literally just finished writing an article for um for ceo world which i've just sent off which is about um the importance of being able to have really great conversations and the whole article was basically about it was it was about ripping up your people strategy because it's a waste of time where you've got to focus on how people are collaborating and how people are communicating together and disagreeing well is really important.

16:43So many people that are listening will know about the Tuckman model of team evolution, which people know as the forming, storming, norming, performing model. And when I work with teams, so we do a lot of work with exec teams, particularly exec teams that are forming, just coming together, or perhaps have had a lot of change or perhaps almost in crisis, just not getting on very well, not able to agree well. And we talk about Tuchman and we talk about the storming phase. And what this is all about is teaching teams to storm well. And the way that we do that is by we basically surface challenges rather than push them down.

17:27We give people frameworks to be able to express themselves and to express their views in a way that is non-judgmental, that is basically talking about the business and not about individuals. We teach people to accept challenge graciously and to recognize when they're being triggered and maybe behaving defensively or angrily around feedback or challenge because those are all elements of disagreeing badly. Now, every organization has to be able to disagree well. It's an absolutely fundamental part of a high performing culture that you can say what you need to say. If you don't, you miss opportunities, you add risk to your organisations.

18:18There's always the classic examples that people talk about that, you know, at some point, you know, Blockbuster Video had the opportunity to buy Netflix for 50 million quid or whatever and said no, because there was just this groupthink on their, you know, on their board, which said like, no, we're just going to go down this one route, I suspect that some of them thought, this is a good idea, we should be buying this, but they couldn't say it, they couldn't disagree, just didn't have the tools or didn't have the culture to do it. So how you agree well and how you create the conditions and the container for agreeing well, I think is absolutely fundamental to any team in any organisation.

18:58And I think if we focused on that more, actually, not only in the professional context, but also if we were taught how to disagree well at school, if we were taught how to disagree well at home, then, you know, we'd probably have a much more productive society as well that wasn't so polarised because, you know, we'd be able to talk about these things without getting triggered and without getting really wound up about things. So, yeah, agreeing well, I'm all about that. I think it's so important all that sounds lovely but the what's coming into my head is leanne's voice saying psychological safety psychological safety like the whole story about blockbuster you suspect someone who are a couple of people on the board gun this is a good idea but they didn't feel that they could step they could step up talk to me more about that what needs to happen so we can start to disagree well i mean i think with psychological safety um psychological safety is built through disagreeing and disagreeing well and building trust.

19:57The other model that we use when we talk about psychological safety in teams, as well as the Tuchman model is Patrick Lencioni's five dysfunctions, which is that basically he says that if you don't have trust as the basis of your team, you can't have challenge, you can't get commitment, you can't get accountability, and you can't get results. And so we talk a lot about, okay, let's fundamentally, let's build trust. That is the foundation of a psychologically safe and high-performing team. Well, how do you build trust? You surface challenges in a safe container. You get a team to storm well. And the more disagreement that you have that you successfully get through and you successfully resolve, the more trust is actually built.

20:41So it's like a virtuous circle, if you like. And what happens is you build more trust, then you get more challenge and that builds more trust and you get more challenge. And then it's not like you're just challenging all the time for challenges sake, but you get to a point where you really kick the tires on your decisions. And you build that culture of like just automatically we critique, but we don't critique in a way that's judgmental or critical or that blames people. We do it in a way that is safe. And that's really always where we start with when we're trying to build psychological safety.

21:23The other thing about psychological safety, and this particularly, I recognise this with senior teams, is that often in senior teams, the more senior we get, the less that we feel able to ask for help. and actually one of the best ways that you build trust and psychological safety in my experience is you encourage people to ask for help and you encourage people to take that interpersonal risk of saying I don't have all the answers here so I need your help and we love to help people you know we love people asking us questions we love people to ask our advice on things and we're always really happy to give it yet for some reason we feel nervous when we get more senior that that's going to look bad on us if we don't ask for help.

22:10So in all the work that we do, we're all about setting containers where people feel safe to do things that perhaps they wouldn't feel safe outside the container. And then we set the container so that they can then continue and make that sustainable without having an external person there to do it. But it takes effort. It It takes real behaviour change and it's difficult behaviour change. So it's not always something that teams manage to do successfully. And I don't really think I've ever seen a team get to a point where they're sustainably really brilliant at it. They always slip back and always have to take action to move themselves towards that safety again.

22:49What about the other end of this? We had a guest on who said that him and he was like the, I think it was the chief marketing officer and him and the chief financial officer would be at a boardroom table screaming at each other and really, really disagreeing. Then when the meeting ends, they go for a pint and have a chat and they'd be like best mates. Is that unhealthy? Have we gone too far with that? I don't think necessarily. I think if the contract in the room says that that sort of behavior is okay, and that is not, you know, intimidating, uncomfortable for either those two people that are involved in that conversation or those around, then, you know, I don't think there's probably a big problem with that because they know that it's done from a position of trust.

23:37I mean, you know, if I think about the biggest arguments that I've had in my life, they've usually been with like, you know, maybe my brother, my partner, you know, and the reason that you can have those big arguments and you can get over them very quickly is because you have a lot of trust. So if two people are able to scream at each other in a meeting, albeit, you know, screaming is probably not going to be appropriate in a workplace environment, probably be sort of saying, let's tone it down a bit, shall we? but if you can do that and then you can go for a pint and have a laugh and there's no lasting damage to that relationship and there's not been any like inappropriate insults fired at the other person then I think that shows real trust and that probably shows real safety I suppose we would just need to be quite careful about just anything under the surface that you know that that might be going on um and it's not uncommon i think for people to look like they're okay with that sort of behavior and then all of a sudden them to say actually you know this is really you know i'm going to go off sick now i can't cope with this anymore um and that goes back to like i need to have the safety to be able to say can we just tone this down a bit like this isn't really working for me i'm not very comfortable with this let's talk about your book people people brilliant title by the way love it um i've got a note down here that the this following um um joanna i think is that the name of what protagonist yeah um and she's dealing with imposter syndrome and burnout now i've got to ask you is is there any part of joanna that's a little bit like tom mostly um yeah most of her yeah so i mean the book was inspired by um so i had a business coach guy called robin weight who's an awesome awesome chap and um he he'd written a book called take your shot which is um about golf pro that um this coach this business coach goes and coaches a golf pro and coaches him on his prices and all this sort of stuff to get him you know to build his business and i thought robin had said to me you should write a book it's really great asset to have and you know i was like great i'll i think i've got a book in here didn't write didn't write it because i wanted anybody to read it i just wanted something to give to people you know to give to clients and you know and i wanted to build a model as well for for HR leadership, which was part of it.

25:55So I decided to write it in a similar way to Take Your Shot, which is as a story of a chief people officer, a chief HR officer who is struggling. So yes, there was a lot of me in that. And there was a lot of other people that I was observing and working with at the time. So what they were really struggling with in the role. And yeah, there was a bit of imposter syndrome, if that's the right word. So, um, for Joanna, who's like, say the main protagonist in that, you know, she was really struggling maybe a bit on that. Like she was external sort of facing in instead of being in there. There was something about how she really got in there, how she built those relationships.

26:34Um, the burnout thing was really around, you know, she was a people pleaser, um, but at heart, which is a bit like I am. And, you didn't really like saying no to people had an identity that was really tied up in I can get stuff done I can do stuff for people I can you know I can be the one who sorts things out even when it's not my problem or it's not my emotional labor um to take on and so um yeah there was quite a lot of of her in me I was on another podcast and somebody asked me um who it was that would play Joanna in a film and I still I'm terrible at answering questions like that um both off the who, Fanner, still, after all this time, can't work out who it would be.

27:17But there was a transformation in Joanna as she went through and she worked through this model. And she went from being somebody who lacked a bit of confidence and lacked the sort of ability to step into her strengths to somebody who had really set up really clear boundaries and was really working to her strengths and was therefore being much more impactful. Might be a difficult question for you to answer, Tom, but what do you think were some of the toughest moments of being in HR when you were back in HR? I suppose there were two sort of sets or two categories. And one was, like I spoke about before, I went into HR because I like people and I had to operate at times in a way which I found very difficult because I was, you know, planning, giving people news that, you know, really, you know, like just went to the core of their being, their identity, you know, their ability to put food on the table for their family.

28:19family. And, you know, had to do that in a, you know, in a professional and pragmatic way, because it wasn't about me, it was about them. And so I couldn't let myself to get, you know, get pulled into the emotion and the drama of it too much. And that was really tiring for me. And something that after 20 years of it, I'd, you know, pretty much had enough of doing, I didn't really want to do anymore. The second bit, which was even harder in some ways, I think, was managing really senior relationships. And that's one of the reasons I'm so interested in this now and why so much of my work now focuses on helping senior executives manage relationships that they have with other senior executives or with investors or with regulators or with the board.

29:09And so I found being on an Exco, particularly when I was dealing with issues of compensation, I found that quite a challenge to manage all those different relationships, not only their relationships with me, but their relationships with others, which I think is a really core part of an HR leader, is how you really operate as the glue on your Exco and you help the CEO to really make sure that those relationships are working well. And often I would end up in some quite interesting power dynamics, maybe between the chair with the Remco chair, with the CEO, with the CFO. And by my nature, I wanted to be all things to everybody.

29:52And I wanted to have all the answers. And I wanted everybody to walk away from every interaction with me feeling that I was on their side and that I was able to help them and that I was committed to sorting out their problems and making them feel better. and it was a steep learning curve to realise that that wasn't my job. And the ability to walk away from a conversation with the other person not happy was a big thing for me. I found it really, really difficult. And to be honest, in my work now, I still find that's the most challenging part. I want to do good work. I want to be a brilliant coach for people.