One Road Less Traveled

Nineteen years ago next month, I took a chance. I left a good job working at AIRS, an ADP company , a company I had helped launch a few years earlier with my old friend Michael Foster , to take a job with a new organization he had recently founded.

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what the Human Capital Institute was all about. I am not even sure that the small handful of new colleagues I would be joining knew either. But it was clear that Mike had a vision; I was soon to be married and hoped to start a family, and it seemed like the right time to try to build something for the future.

I started as the Director of HCI's Talent Acquisition Community of Interest and, within a few months, was leading the Communities business line. Like most startups, HCI was a whirlwind of activity, but revenue in our business line tripled in my first year and then tripled again the year after that. Soon after, I was asked to run our Education business, too.

The next few years represented a period of transformational growth for HCI Education and the Human Capital Institute as a whole. Under the direction of my longtime friend and human capital guru David C. Forman , we launched HCI's first certification program – the Human Capital Strategist. Our Strategic Workforce Planning certification followed soon after. Three years later, at Dave’s prescient urging, he wrote and we introduced the seminal Strategic HR Business Partner course. I believe that the latter two courses remain among HCI’s best sellers today.

In the meantime, my job had changed again. When we started, HCI had four distinct business units. I've mentioned Communities and Education, but we also had an Events business and commissioned research. I was asked to lead an effort to combine all of them into One HCI, organized around two topical practice areas. Five years after joining the organization, I was responsible for the entire product side of the company.

But a funny thing happened to my career trajectory on the road to corporate glory. I was sitting in the back of a darkened room at our annual Employee Engagement conference and listening to one of the keynotes talking about Daniel Pink 's groundbreaking book Drive -? It might have been Dan himself – he presented for us a few times over the years. The gist of the book (read it – and then progress to the rest of his books if you can) is that while paying people more is something of a motivator, it is not nearly as influential as most people think. Instead, the book theorizes that it comes down to three things that have long since been etched into my brain: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.

I began to realize that I didn't have nearly as much as I wanted of any of those things, particularly the first and third, so in 2015, I gave up my executive role and salary to try to address a societal problem that I saw as increasingly problematic, I tried to explain the causes of, and potential solutions to, partisanship in the United States Congress. Saying that my efforts were inconsequential would be accurate, but I felt better about trying to do something.

To keep the lights on, I became the emcee of all of HCI's (then seven) annual conferences and a member of HCI's distinguished faculty. Since then, I have listened to hundreds of keynote presentations across the full lifecycle of strategic talent management. I have also delivered hundreds of our training courses and quite a few keynote presentations of my own. But what I have mostly done in the last several years is learn.

I have learned from some of the best minds in our industry in case studies at HCI conferences. I should list dozens of these, but a few: Lacey All (then at Starbucks) and Tracey Smith (then at FedEx) on the topic of Strategic Workforce Planning. Brian Ong at Google and Tom Davenport of Babson College on people analytics. Jennifer Carpenter (then at Accenture) and Jill Macri (then at Airbnb) on Strategic Talent Acquisition, and Sarah Devereaux (then at Google) and Dr. David Rock , CEO of the NeuroLeadership Institute on learning and leadership development. As importantly, I also learned why it is critical to understand external factors and how to think about the future from Tim Ryan (then at PwC) and Sheryl Connelly , Chief Futurist at Ford Motor Company. If you have been through one of my classes over the years it ls likely you heard me reference the work of some, if not all of these people.

I have also learned from my corporate clients, some of whom I have had the honor to work with for many years. My longest-running engagement is with Jessica Buechli and John Galley at UPMC, but I also spent a lot of time with Teresa Determan , Mike Kidwell and Sarah Fahey at United Health Group, Michael Davis, M.Div., SWP, sHRBP, CMHR at the TSA, Stella Cannon at Glanbia and many many others. These client relationships are all wildly different, and it has been a fun challenge to try to adapt what one organization has successfully applied to the context of another. I have also benefited greatly from the collective wisdom of the hundreds of students in my open-enrollment classes.

I have learned a ton from my fellow faculty members, including the aforementioned David C. Forman of course, but also Bruce Walton , Mark Allen , Glen Kallas , Joy Kosta ,, Ron Thomas and Mark Hacker among a long list of very smart people and gifted facilitators.

Finally, I've learned from many of my HCI brethren over the years. I've already listed several, but I need to add Shane York ★ , without whom that long list of keynotes would never have been presented. Amy Lewis, RN, IBCLC , Jenna Filipkowski, PhD , Nigel Leeming , Shane T R Lennon and Brandon Bernzott, MBA, SPHR . And, of course, there is Mike Foster who, a very long time ago, gave a chance to a young man who might otherwise still be hawking burritos outside Dave Matthews shows.

If this sounds like the acknowledgments page in a book, it may be because I recently wrote one of those—on a completely unrelated topic during the hiatus dropped on all of us by COVID-19. I've been told that I should write another, about talent management this time. But, while that is flattering, I don't want to write a book about what I've learned in this space, at least not yet. I want to apply it. I hope there is an organization out there, maybe yours, that could benefit from the leadership, communication and human capital expertise that has come from the hodgepodge of my experiences. If you know of one, I hope you will point me in the right direction.

The Human Capital Institute was born 20 years ago out of a unique idea, at least at the time: Business performance is driven by human performance. Because business performance can and must be measured, it is also critical to measure the impact of human capital on business performance and systematically work to improve it.

I often ask a three-part question in my classes and should no longer be surprised at how infrequently the answer to all three parts is yes. 1. Do you know what your business leader's key initiatives are and how their success is being measured? 2. Have you aligned human capital metrics to those measures? 3. Are you systematically working to improve those metrics, and can you correlate the impact of those efforts? In short, I am looking for full time or contract opportunities to help an organization consistently answer each question with yes.