S06 E19
From Cost Center to Catalyst: How CPOs Turn People Strategy Into Business Advantage, with L. David Kingsley
L. David Kingsley has been a Chief People Officer five times over, at MuleSoft, Vlocity, Alteryx, Intercom and now Illumio. He joins CultureClub X to argue that people teams should stop fighting the cost center label and start working like one: three jobs in order, the shortest possible version of everything, and a single question that surfaces the capacity your organization is quietly missing.
TL;DR
What you need to know from this episode
- Accept the cost center label, then act on it. David's three jobs of HR run in order: keep the company out of jail, keep it out of the headlines for the wrong reasons, then everything else that helps the company achieve its mission. Once the first two are handled, the question for every G and A function is how close it can get to delivering customer value with the minimum calories deployed.
- Most organizations are already 75 percent ready to treat HR as a trusted advisor. The gap between necessary evil and trusted advisor is usually permission rather than capability. Ask your internal clients how they perceive the function, what they use it for and where it drives value, and most will answer plainly.
- Simplicity is the expensive version, which is why it earns attention. AI made the long document free to produce and left the short one costing exactly what it always did. A distilled position tells the stakeholder you spent the time so they would not have to.
- HR stays at the kids' table until it speaks the language of the business. An outside observer can usually pick out the HR person in a room, because HR people speak on HR topics and go quiet on everything else. The fix is a score you run on yourself: how often do you contribute on something that is not explicitly HR?
- Watch participation before sentiment. On manager effectiveness surveys, David goes to the response rate first, because participation is energy and energy can be redirected. A quiet survey is the harder problem, not the safer one.
L. David Kingsley has been a Chief People Officer five times over, at MuleSoft, Vlocity, Alteryx, Intercom and now Illumio, where he leads global people strategy across talent acquisition, learning and development, total rewards, engagement and DEIB. He did not start in HR. He began as a systems integrator at Andersen Consulting, which later became Accenture, implementing PeopleSoft systems for organizations in the middle of technology transformations. That route in is the reason his language sounds more like an operator's than a practitioner's.
The premise of this episode is one most people in HR spend their careers arguing against. David says HR is a cost center, not a profit center, and that people teams which keep fighting that description are spending energy in the wrong place. Accepting it, in his telling, is what makes the function useful.
Across the conversation with host Darcy Mehta, he lays out the three jobs of a people function in order, explains why most organizations are far closer to treating HR as a trusted advisor than HR realizes, and gives one question he would have every leader ask their team in the next 90 days.
The three jobs of HR, in order
David's framing is deliberately unglamorous. Job one is to keep the company out of jail. Job two is to keep it out of the headlines, at least for the wrong reasons. Job three through X is everything else that helps the company achieve its mission. The first two are table stakes, and his point is that people teams forget the order rather than the list.
Job number one, keep the company out of jail. Job number two, keep the company out of the headlines in the newspaper, at least for the wrong reasons. And then job number three through X is everything that helps that company achieve the mission.
What follows from accepting cost center status is a discipline about effort. Product, sales, marketing and customer success all have a legible line to a customer. The G and A functions, which he lists as finance, accounting, HR, IT, legal, real estate and workplace services, do not. So their question becomes how close they can get to delivering that same customer value with, in his words, the minimum amount of calories deployed.
The failure mode he names is doing HR for HR's sake. His phrase for it is doing what the dusty binder tab three says you are supposed to do. He includes himself and points out that customers never feel the benefit of work done that way.
Necessary evil, critical enabler, trusted advisor
David describes every people function as sitting somewhere on a three-point continuum. Necessary evil at one end. Critical enabler in the middle. Trusted advisor at the far end, which he defines not by title but by whether the room waits for you before it starts.
When he joins a company, he says the function is usually somewhere between the first two. The more interesting claim is what sits underneath that. Most of the time, he argues, the organization is already about 75 percent of the way to treating the people team as a trusted advisor. It simply has not issued the invitation, or the team has not yet shown up in a way that made the invitation obvious.
His example comes from Illumio, where the chief product officer told him that at a previous company he always felt he was having to chase HR, putting things on the table he wanted them to think about.
I want HR to chase me. I want you to bring me ideas, observations, data, insights, perspectives.
When the demand signal is already there, he says, the job is simply to show up and meet it. His practical advice for finding out where you stand is to ask directly. He mentions using a Gartner assessment of HR function maturity, and adds that you do not need an analyst firm to do it. Ask your internal clients how they perceive you, what they use you for and where you drive value, and most will tell you plainly.
Simplicity is expensive, which is why it wins
Asked why the best organizations simplify while most add process, David reaches for the line usually attributed to either Mark Twain or Blaise Pascal: I wrote you a long letter because I did not have time to write a short one. With AI in the room, he notes, producing the long version costs almost nothing. Producing the short one still costs what it always did.
His argument is that a tight, distilled position earns airtime because of what it signals. It tells the stakeholder that you put in the time to make this simple so they would not have to. The alternative, in his description, is a complex word salad policy that feels impressively HR and wins internal praise while nobody reads it.
He makes the same point twice through design rather than policy. The first is a night in Tokyo, walking a mile to dinner with an empty water bottle he could not throw away because there was no bin anywhere in sight.
If we don't have a place for you to put garbage, you just won't make garbage. Therefore, we won't have garbage on our streets. How brilliantly simple.
The second is getting up from a Southwest Airlines seat and finding himself folding the seatbelt across it the way the cabin crew do, because the culture had a way of doing things and he had absorbed it inside one flight. Both stories point the same direction: design that removes a problem beats process that manages one.
Why HR gets seated at the kids' table
This is the section most likely to sting, and David puts himself inside it. His observation is that an outside observer can usually pick out the HR person in a room, because HR people speak on HR topics and go quiet on everything else. Product development lifecycle, customer maturation, the marketing approach: no view offered.
His self-test is a score he runs on meetings. In any executive or board meeting, how often is he contributing on something that is not explicitly HR? He asks his colleagues to engage on culture, talent and retention, so the same expectation has to run in reverse.
We're gonna stay at the little kids' table until we speak the language of the business.
In publicly traded and venture-backed companies he means that literally. If you cannot discern one financial acronym from another, cannot connect people work to net-new ARR, NACV or GRR, you will not be heard. He extends the point to how HR teams are developed: the first time someone encounters these business concepts should not be when they land their first CPO role, and too often it is. He sees teaching them earlier as the job of whoever currently holds the executive seat.
Mental wellbeing as capacity, not a benefit
David sits on the board of Nivati, a mental health platform, while running people strategy at a high-growth cybersecurity company, so he has had to make this case to business audiences rather than HR ones. He does it with an analogy rather than a statistic.
Tie your dominant hand behind your back for a day and type with the other one. You would get through the day. Your emails would go out slower, your responses would lag, you would accomplish less and finish with a cramp. That, he argues, is what turning up to work without mental wellbeing looks like: not absence, not underperformance you could name in a review, just working with one hand.
He backs it with something he heard from a neuroscientist. Under threat, with cortisol spiking, people drop into fight or flight and functional IQ falls. Someone who normally operates at 130 or 150 might be working at 105 or 110, unable to do their best work because they are not psychologically safe in that moment. If you want people at the height of their game, you have to set them up for it.
The 90-day non-negotiable
Asked for the single action every Chief People Officer should take in the next 90 days, David did not name a project. He named a question, and said it should be asked of every person in the organization.
How are we doing as a company at getting you what you thought you bought here?
His claim is that most organizations run at roughly 80 percent of the capacity they believe they have. Not because people are disengaged in a way an engagement report would flag, but because some are under-engaged, under-equipped, under-informed or under-empowered in ways that never surface unless somebody asks directly. Most people will say they are fine. A few will tell you they came to do one thing and have not been able to, and that is the answer worth having.
His name for the alternative is crockpot management.
You can do crockpot cooking, you can't do crockpot management.
Set it and forget it works on beef stew. It does not work on people, and the fix is a moment in your skip levels, your one-to-ones and your coffee chats rather than a new program. If you want the phrasing that gets useful answers, our guide to engagement survey questions covers how to ask without leading the witness.
What asking actually communicates
Asked how real-time listening platforms help build the business case for people strategy, David put the signal ahead of the data. When an organization stops and asks in a way the employee believes is sincere, the message received is simple.
Your voice matters. You have impact and import here in this organization.
That, he says, is the most important thing engagement efforts do. A very close second is the insight itself: the feedback that tells leadership the thing they believe is working is not working, or not in the way they think. Both require the asking to be genuine, which is the part that cannot be automated.
Participation before sentiment
The most practical idea in the episode is also the least intuitive. When David looks at manager effectiveness surveys, the first number he goes to is not the score. It is the participation rate.
I actually care about that more than I care about what people say in the survey. I care about are they speaking up? Because when they're speaking up, they care.
He borrows the physics to explain it. Vector is direction, valence is energy. If there is no valence, you cannot re-vector things. So on a 360 survey, what he wants to know first is how many people gave feedback about their manager at all, good, bad or indifferent. People who tell you what would make them more effective are people who believe their voice is valued, and a group that has gone quiet is the harder problem, not the safer one.
That is where manager effectiveness surveys and continuous listening earn their place in his argument. If participation is the leading indicator he says it is, the number worth watching is whether people still think it is worth answering, and that moves long before anything shows up in your attrition data.
For a broader look at what this means for the people at the top of the organization, our piece on leadership engagement covers how senior teams stay connected to the work they are accountable for.
About the guest
L. David Kingsley
Chief People Officer, Illumio
L. David Kingsley is Chief People Officer at Illumio, where he leads global people strategy across talent acquisition, learning and development, total rewards, employee engagement and diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. He has held the Chief People Officer role five times, previously at MuleSoft, Vlocity, Alteryx and Intercom, and has more than 20 years of leadership experience scaling high-growth technology companies through periods of rapid change.
He began his career as a systems integrator at Andersen Consulting, later Accenture, implementing PeopleSoft systems for organizations in the middle of technology transformations, which is where his business-first view of the people function was formed. He also serves on the board of Nivati, a mental health platform, and argues that mental wellbeing belongs in business strategy as a question of capacity rather than benefits.
Full episode transcript
Season 06, Episode 19 · L. David Kingsley with Darcy Mehta · 48 min
Hello everyone, and welcome to season six of CultureClub X, powered by CultureMonkey. I'm your host, Darcy Mehta. CultureMonkey is an AI-powered employee engagement platform that helps people leaders listen to their employees and build stronger workplace cultures. CultureClub X is our global thought leadership forum where CHROs, business leaders, and workplace experts share practical insights, discuss emerging trends, and exchange proven strategies for building high performing organizations.
Today we're delighted to welcome L. David Kingsley, Chief People Officer at Illumio. David, welcome. It's a pleasure to have you here with us.
Darcy, thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. It's great to be with you.
Yes, absolutely. So David leads Illumio's global people strategy, overseeing talent acquisition, learning and development, total rewards, employee engagement and diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. With more than 20 years of leadership experience, he has helped scale high growth technology companies including Intercom, Alteryx, Vlocity, MuleSoft, and Salesforce. Throughout his career, David has focused.
I'm building people strategies that strengthen culture while directly supporting business growth and transformation. David, your career has been defined by helping fast-growing organizations transform their people function into a true business partner. Having led people strategy across multiple high-growth companies and major business transformations, you've seen firsthand how HR can create measurable business impact. And that's why we're so excited to have you join us for today's conversation.
From cost center to catalyst, how the best CPOs turn people strategy into a business competitive advantage.
And so before we dive into our discussion, could you just share a little bit about your own leadership journey?
Well, Darcy, I really appreciate that. And as I said, it's great to be with you one part of introduction I think I need to make sure is clear is my first and most important job is as my as a husband and spouse and partner to my wife Erin and father to our three kids, to Jack and Kate and Maddie that is my first and most important job. And you're absolutely right. I have had the honor and the benefit and the pleasure to serve as the chief people officer at number of companies that really is related to the mission that I believe I'm on this earth for.
And that is to help people self-actualize. And I believe that work is one of the greatest ways that we can help people become their most fully human selves. And so when I think about why HR, and I didn't and I didn't start out here, I ended up here, but I didn't start out here in my career the people function, I think, humbly submitted, is one of the most important ways that we can contribute to that mission of helping people become their most fully human selves by having meaningful work where they're feel like they're contributing to the world in a positive way.
Wow. I love that. Well, first of all, amazing shout out to your family and how amazing that you know your mission, like you said, and that you get to that's your career and work in it. So it's not work when it's your mission, right?
It is. It is it is my purpose. And I think that, you know, when I breathe my last breath on this earth, and you know, none of us really knows when that's gonna be, I want to feel like I achieve something during my time here and hopefully that comes in the form of being of service to my fellow humans, and doing that in the form of organizations and corporate world, which is where I found myself.
Wow, that's so inspiring. Well, thank you so much. I'm looking forward to getting your thoughts and talking with you today. So let's just dive right into our first question.
My pleasure. And Darcy, I gotta say this. When you said Culture Club, I was like, okay, do I have to wear like my Boy George hat and are we gonna sing some, you know, Karma Chameleon? which I'm up to if you really need that.
But otherwise, thank you and thank you to the whole CultureClub X team for what you all do to put these dialogues out in the world. I think you're covering some really important topics and helping give us all brain food for things to think about as we are of service to the organizations that we all serve.
Absolutely. Thank you so much. I mean, I am the host of this podcast and I'm really enjoying it because I get to meet so many interesting people like yourself and from all walks of life and different backgrounds. So, you know, I get to learn from this as well.
So I definitely appreciate that.
So all right, let's dive into our first question. So you started your career as a systems integrator at Accenture, not in HR. How did that business first lens fundamentally change the
Way you think about people strategy? Yeah, well I'll rewind the clock a little bit even further than that so I was a senior in college at Catholic University undergrad in DC. And I was coming back from the sociology department. It was, I think it was a Thursday or Friday afternoon, and I was out of meals on my meal card, you know, you know, of like fifteen, twenty meals a week, and I had eaten all of them that week.
And I saw a sign that said Andersen Consulting Info Session, free dinner. And the only thing, Darcy, that I really saw on that sign was free dinner. And so I stumbled into that room going, okay, who's gonna feed me? And I started hearing about Andersen Consulting, which ultimately became Accenture.
I had no idea about the consulting industry, just to be very candid. And what I heard when I was in there, they were talking about working with clients, solving hard problems, helping drive change in organizations in the face of technology. And I was thinking about the work I was doing i in my undergraduate studies, which was around international politics and sociology with a little wing of theology if you believe that and really thinking about how do humans make sense of themselves in the world really and does that manifest itself in political affiliations, in sociological movements, etc. And so interestingly I stumbled into this info session and all of a sudden I was going, wow, this really resonates with me.
And I got the free dinner, most importantly. So I ended up ended up applying to Andersen Consulting and lo and behold, I think I was the only one that year who got an offer from the firm coming out of my graduating class, which surprised a lot of the business school kids because they're like, Who's this kid coming out of the politics department getting the job offer from consulting? but what I loved about the opportunity was it gave me a chance to tackle these hard problems in organizations that were trying to solve some difficult things in the face of organization change and technology change. And that really inspired me because it was really all about, again, helping people make sense of their world, which I was then starting my first steps on my journey of connecting to the mission that I think was always inside of me.
I just had to discover that and so that's kind of where it where it all began. But when I got into to Accenture, Andersen Consulting and then Accenture as we rebranded and went public, we were implementing at the time PeopleSoft systems, which is now owned by Oracle. And these were organizations and companies coming to us and saying, hey, look, I'm facing a business challenge and I have this solution in technology that's going to help me meet the business challenge or overcome a technological hurdle that I have. And can Accenture help us do that?
And so my part of the world was organization and human performance. So I was in charge of helping to analyze the current state of the workforce in terms of capability, technology, skill, comfort, etc. And then help them get to the to be state, which was the new world that they would live in with this new technology to do their job now those were the days when not everybody, you know, had certainly a laptop, and not everybody even had a desktop. Sometimes people were sharing desktop computers, you know, et cetera, in organizations.
This was late 90s, early 2000s. And so that was a time of really great change. I mean, the internet was still, you know, not nascent, but certainly early days we were still using we call code on clients. We were loading CD-ROMs on our clients' computers in the CD drive to load the software and then booting that up and teaching them how to use this stuff and change the way they did their work.
So I was right at the call face of helping people confront technology change in their own job, their own personal identity with regard to their work. And sure I was a little, you know, 22 year old little analyst in the consulting world. I didn't really know that I was connecting to that very important mission at the same time I really was and I really honor that. So I was in consulting for about the first thirteen years of my career, something like that, before I moved over into HR proper.
Wow. I love that it all started from a free dinner.
You they say there's no such thing as a free lunch. There was not a free dinner 'cause it required me to donate thirteen years of my life to that industry, which I'm super grateful for.
I mean, hey, it was meant to be. And I mean, I was the same in college too. And that's exactly the time when you should be exploring and discovering and you don't know where it's going to end, right? And us liberal arts majorI think can bring a unique perspective to the business world for sure.
I was a poli sci major, so
There you go. Yeah. And I was talking to our interns, our summer interns at Illumio earlier this week, and I said to them, you know, I was supposed to be a neurosurgeon. Yeah.
I can promise you there's a lot of neurosurgery patients out there that are glad that I'm not at the other end of that that knife right now. But that was what I thought I was going to be, you know, early in my career and that took a very different turn, you know, over time. And that's okay we I think we generally end up where we're meant to be.
That's so true. Well, you were motivated,
That's for sure. So okay, you've been Chief People Officer at MuleSoft, Vlocity, Alteryx, Intercom and now, Illumio. What is the single most common reason people functions fail to become true business catalysts and what separates the ones that do?
You know, I think it's a couple fold and I'll say that there are three jobs in HR. Job number one, keep the company out of jail. Job number two, keep the company out of the headlines in the newspaper, at least for the wrong reasons. And then job number three through X is everything that helps that company achieve the mission.
What's interesting is when you think about HR, we're a cost center. We're not a profit center. And so most CEOs, most boards of directors, they want to make sure that the people function is staffed in such a way that it does its job with minimal amount of noise and drama. That's table stakes.
I think sometimes HR teams, people teams, forget that our first job is to help the company run and run smoothly. It's not to administer HR policies and do all the things on our little HR checklist. Our first and most important job is help the company run smoothly. And then once that's happening, and again, no one's going to jail, no one's in the newspaper for the wrong reasons, it's what's the mission of the organization?
What do the customers expect from this company? What do they define as success for that organization that's serving them? And then the people team's job is to say, how close can we get to that mission? Now, if you're in the product organization, that's super simple.
You're building a product that's delivering value to a customer. Hopefully, pretty straightforward. You talk to the customer, you hear what they need, you go build something, you improve it, you deliver value back to the organization if you're a salesperson, marketing, Customer success, all pretty straightforward missions. You're getting close to the customer.
For the G&A functions, so finance, accounting, HR, IT, legal, real estate, workplace services, all of us, we've got to figure out how can we get as close as we can to delivering value to the customer. And that means we've got to understand what is the end product or goal or service that we provide. And then how are we as a G&A function of service to that with the minimum amount of calories that we can deploy to make that happen? So it's not HR for HR's sake, right?
There's a lot of people teams, maybe myself included at some points in my career, where we've been doing HR for HR's sake because we think that's what the dusty binder tab three says we're supposed to do that's not when organizations find value in it. And that's certainly not when customers are feeling it, when we're that disconnected. So again, the key critical thing there is how do we define how we support the mission and then how close are we to it?
Hmm, that's a great breakdown and I like how you said the first thing is keep out of jail, so
You know, it's funny that's table stakes and I think that, you know, anytime something goes sideways in a company, and I even look at this myself in the newspaper, when you see, you know, such and such an organization you know, is being prosecuted for malfeasance or, you know, noncompliance or, you know, poor performance or whatever it is, the first place I go is who was running HR? Like who was looking after the people pieces and either were they listened to in the organization or were they not. You know, did they have a seat at the table? and were they paying attention?
Were they paying attention to the right things? And were they having the courage to speak up if something, you know, were going awry? And so I think it's a big one also is making sure that we as people leaders are aligning ourselves with organizations and leaders and clients that we enjoy serving. I like to say that I only now in my career, I only work with fully grown adults.
Mm-hmm and there are organizations out there that, you know, you got leaders who maybe are not quite sure yet who they are as leaders, maybe even as people and so in some cases, the job is to help them get across that hurdle. That's okay that's not that's not my job. I've left that stage of my career but my job now is to work with folks that are fully formed leaders who are looking to accelerate their business.
Hmm, that's a good distinction, but yeah, maybe it's perfect. And know the difference, right? And know the difference and be selective about that.
Yes, absolutely. So okay, most CPOs inherit HR functions that are built for compliance and administration. What is the first thing you change when you walk into a new organization to start repositioning people strategy as a competitive advantage?
Yeah, I like to think about the people function on a continuum. And my mother back in the seventies, she was in the banking industry, as was my father my father was on the lending mortgage side, my mother was actually on what they th then called personnel. So she was interestingly in her career in HR as well. And when we think back to the before times, if you will, back then, the personnel department was really the function of a necessary evil, right?
And that's at this end of the spectrum, necessary evil. Mm-hmm. As you move along that spectrum, you can go from necessary evil to critical enabler, which is kind of in the middle. And then over here on this side of the spectrum is trusted advisor.
Every organization perceives of its HR function in one way. And I would submit broadly one of those three categories. Is HR a necessary evil? Is HR a critical enabler or is HR a trusted advisor?
The HR as a necessary evil looks like this hey, we're gonna have a meeting and we're gonna make some decisions. And hey, can somebody let the HR team know once we're done? and just tell them what we need. Don't bring them in until after we're done making the decisions.
Mm-hmm. The critical enabler is the, hey, we need HR to do these couple of things. So let's bring them in, you know, in part two of the meeting. Let's bring them in.
Okay, now we're ready to talk about these things, so bring them on in the room. Trusted advisor looks like, Darcy, hey, we can't start the meeting. My people partner is not yet in the room. No Most organizations aren't there.
Many people organizations have not earned the right to be there. Because they're not seen as business critical. They're seen as either a necessary evil, maybe a critical enabler, but not the trusted advisor. Not, hey, I gotta have them in the room when we're making important decisions.
And they gotta be in here the whole time because they have important business relevant things to say. So oftentimes when I enter an organization, we're somewhere on that journey, and it's usually somewhere between necessary evil and critical enabler. Then My job, the way I perceive where I can add value is to help bring to light where the value that the people function can add. And most of the time, like, you know, the organization is somewhere of 75% of the way there and ready to serve as a trusted advisor.
They just haven't been invited to do that yet, or they haven't really been able to show up in their best way to be able to do that. So my job is to really activate that and bring that to light. Which is a kind of a fun place to be, knowing that most of the time the key critical things are resident in the organization and already resonate with the leaders and the clients. We just have to make sure to earn that right to prove that case.
Hmm, that's fascinating. That that's such a difference, isn't it, from necessary evil to trusted advisor but I like the way you break that down. But such a difference that would make, right? Once you view them as trusted advisor.
Yeah. And asking the clients, you know, how do you perceive us? I'm a I'm a Gartner customer and client, unpaid salesperson the Gartner has a really good HR analytics tool that can come in and do an assessment of the HR function that says across these different dimensions, how mature are you in each of these different areas? And even if you don't use Gartner to do that, you can still ask the clients, how do you perceive us?
What do you use us for? Where do we drive value for you? And most of the time they'll tell you pretty clearly. I had a client, actually at Illumio, our chief product officer, Mario, who's a fantastic colleague and client of mine, and he said, David, previously here at the company, I felt like I was having to chase HR.
And I said, What do you mean by that? And he said, I was having to put things on the table that I wanted them to think about. He said, I want HR to chase me. I want you to bring me ideas, observations, data, insights, perspectives.
And again, he was he was inviting that. He was asking for it. He was saying, I don't want you to be a necessary evil. I want you to be a trusted advisor.
I want you to be a partner. And so that's great when the client actually articulates that, the demand signal is already there. Then our job as a people team is just simply to show up and meet that need or even exceed those expectations.
That's huge if the demand is already there, like you said, but even identifying, is it not there? Why isn't it? You know, obviously initially too.
So okay, switching gears a little bit, as companies grow, they often add layers of process, policies, and complexity. You've argued that the best organizations simplify instead. So why is simplicity such a competitive advantage? And what role should the CPO play in protecting it?
Yeah, I think it was it's either Mark Twain or Blaise Pascal.
There seems be some debate over who the who the originator of this quote was. But the quote is something along the lines of, I wrote you a long letter because I didn't have time to write a short one. Mm. It's a lot easier, especially nowadays with AI, to write war and peace, right?
You can write this monolithic tome of anything, just keep hammering away at this word salad that you're pushing out it's a lot easier to do that than to write something super concise, very tight, very focused that takes time to distill and refine things down to their most basic, simple fundamental parts. And given the complexity of the world today that's getting even more complex and even faster moving than ever before. The teams and the organizations who come to the table, whether it's the table or the market, that have something very crisp, very tight, very simple, very thoughtful, that they've really put time into whittling down and honing and distilling, those are the teams and the organizations and the companies that think they get airtime. Because it says to the stakeholder, we've put in the time to make this simple so you don't have to.
Uh-huh. I can write a really complex word salad policy. That feels really HR y and I get like HR executive of the year award for it because everyone's like, Great job. You wrote a really thick policy, right?
HR people don't actually talk like that, but you know, in my head, Yeah it it's easy to do that. It's hard to say, what are the bare basics that are needed here to meet the moment, to meet the need to serve this mission? And only that. Nobody ever, and Darcy, I'm sure you're the same way.
Nobody ever in the morning woke up and went, gosh, I sure get to hope. I get to spend an hour with HR today. It's the best part of my day. Said no one ever, right?
Nobody gets up and goes, I'm gonna pencil in half my day for HR stuff. They don't. And they shouldn't. They should be focusing on the mission of their function in the organization.
And then the G&A functions, us, the cost centers, we should be enabling that and empowering that to go as fast as possible. And that requires very thoughtfully designed, very carefully tailored. Policies, programs, words, initiatives, ideas, interactions, engagements. And that takes time and focus.
Because again, it's easy to do something that's big and monolithic. It's hard to do something that is tight and streamlined.
Absolutely. I mean that's a great quote to start with, right? And it's so true that especially in the age of AI now, right, that makes things even more complex and some organizations tend to just add more things and we gotta add this and do this. So simplicity I think is gonna stand out even more, isn't it?
It is. And if you think about, you know, clean design, right? Anybody who's ever traveled to Japan, one of my favorite places in the world, just what an amazing culture and place to be things are just so very purposely built and clean in every sense of the word. Right.
You walk down Tokyo,
I remember I left the office one night in Tokyo and I had a water bottle and I had a few more sips in it, so I didn't want to throw it out and So I'm going down the elevator, I drink the rest of my water, and I had to walk to a dinner with my team. And it was probably about a mile walk away. So it's a decent clip. And I'm looking for a garbage can to throw or a recycling bin to throw my plastic water bottle out.
There was not one in sight. And I'm going, I I'm just supposed to carry this piece of garbage with me. And if I can put some words in the Japanese culture's mouth of, well, if we don't have a place for you to put garbage, you just won't make garbage. Therefore, we won't have garbage on our streets.
How brilliantly simple. Let's just let's leave the leave the bottle where it's supposed to be. Finish your finish your d beverage. Leave it in the office, you s silly American there I was walking through the streets of Tokyo with my little empty water bottle because they've been so thoughtful in their design about keeping things straightforward and simple and purpose built so the design ethos that is so resonant in Japanese society and Japanese architecture and Japanese product and design you know, I think we have an opportunity to apply some of that inside of our organizations as well.
I love that you brought up Japan because my husband and I love that same concept. We've been there and we just love it. And everything that you see when you're there is you do think, of course they figured out how to do something better, how to make it and it's everything is so purposeful from things like the bathroom door is like a sliding, curved out door. You know, for women.
You normally have a bag or you have suitcase and you're just like, Why didn't you know, why didn't anyone else think of that? Or They change the little towels on the train, you know, just regular thing they do, every stop and just there's so much and the garbage thing and I don't know if you saw the World Cup, you know, when the Japanese fans were cleaning the stands. Did you see that at all?
I did not see that. I did not see that.
Yeah, they and brought their own bags and they were cleaning up cleaning up after themselves, cleaning the stadium and I just thought, Well, I hope the rest of the world takes note of that.
So You know, it's interesting. I I'll stay on that analogy just for a second. I was flying Southwest Airlines and I travel a lot for work and I was flying Southwest Airlines the other day. And anybody who's flown Southwest, when you get off the plane, the entire cabin crew, the pilots, the flight attendants, everybody, they go and they put the seat belts kind of one over the other inside of the seats as they clean.
And they're all kind of super they turn the plane super fast. Everybody pitches and they have this methodology. And I got up from my seat and I found myself Actually folding the seatbelt as a passenger over my seat, getting up from it. I was like, so there I was in this organizational culture that had a way of doing things, and I just almost instinctively did the thing that they do.
So bringing it back to organizations, how do we set up and create and curate, cultivate cultures who set those expectations for good design, for thoughtful and purposeful action that meets the need? but doesn't go beyond it. So bringing that Japanese ethos with the example of Southwest Airlines, and then how do we apply that into organizations where we're delivering just enough HR to meet the moment that allows us to meet the mission in the most effective way possible.
That's so true. And the Southwest, you know, is an example of, you know, leading by example too, right? So because you've seen it or it's around you. I mean, I do that with, you know, if I see garbage on the sidewalk that's not mine, you think you don't want to touch it, but then I think, what would the Japanese do?
They would pick it up and
Darcy, you're a you're better person than I am, but yeah, if we all did that, we'd have a lot cleaner streets with
I don't always but I but I I think about it and then the worst iI think if I've stopped to think about it now I have to pick it up. You have to. You're like if grandma were here, she would tell me to do it. So it's good.
They're making us better people. Exactly.
So okay, only twelve percent of HR leaders report having a strong seat at the executive table, which is like what we were talking about before. What is the one thing CPOs consistently do or fail to do that determines whether they remain strategic business partners or get pushed back into
A more administrative role? Yeah, I think it the key critical thing is do we speak the language of the business? And if you go around a leadership team table and you are an outside observer, I think most of the time an outside observer could probably pick out the H per HR person in the room. Because generally we the HR people speak on HR topics.
We don't often chime in on non people related things. And I would say that's an area of opportunity for us, myself included, I could get better at this as well. Of how proficient am I at speaking on business topics? Whether it's the state of the product development lifecycle, whether it's our, you know, customer development maturation, whether it's our marketing approach, you know, can I have an articulate point of view on that?
And do I speak enough the language of the business to be relevant? the entire meeting? Or am I really only relevant when it's like, okay, now it's time for the HR update. David, over to you.
And I everyone kind of goes to their phone for five minutes and then I'm done and they go back to the rest of the meeting, right? hopefully not, but sometimes, you know, that happens. And so I think the challenge I would put out there to all of my colleagues and myself as well is if I kind of score any meeting, any an executive meeting or a board meeting, how often am I chiming in on topics that are not explicitly HR related? Am I showing up as an executive at the table?
Equal and equivalent to my colleagues. Just the same as I ask them also to engage in topics of culture and talent acquisition and retention and engagement. I want the whole leadership team to be involved in that. So shouldn't I expect of myself that I'm engaged in their parts of the business as well?
That I'm speaking their language. Much of the time we the people fail to speak the language of the business. I think when we do that, that's when we either don't get a seat at the table or our seat at the table like the chairs a little bit lower. Or maybe worse yet, we're at the little kids' table, you know, at Thanksgiving where I have to still sit in my family but we're gonna stay at the little kids table until we speak the language of the business.
And a lot of times, especially in publicly traded companies or venture backed pre-public companies, you've got to understand the financials. You have to. So if you can't discern, you know, acronym A from acronym B and you don't speak in that language and connect, why does what I'm doing over here in the talent business, in the people business, connect to net-new ARR or NACV or GRR or what have you, I'm not going to be heard because it's, well, David's only able to speak to this one small area of the business, and we'll wait for his turn and he'll say his thing and then we'll move on the person who speaks the language of the business the entire meeting
Is the one that gets invited back and whose seat is at the same height as everybody else's. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. It seems so clear, doesn't it?
But it's such a valid point. So I mean HR leaders need to take it upon themselves to become more well versed in all the different departments. And like you said, if they expect others to be interested in theirs and know what's going on. So it works both ways too.
So Yeah,
It does. And I think it's also an incumbency on those of us in leadership positions in the HR function of how are we teaching our teams to come up through the business? So the first time that someone hears these business related concepts as an HR person should not be when they get their first CHRO or CPO job. And unfortunately, I think it is.
So I think it's incumbent upon us to carry that back from the executive table back into the organization to talk to those early and mid-career professionals about these topics. So they're getting well versed in those by the time that they're, you know, twenty to twenty-five plus years in their career, they're an executive in their own right, not just the HR person who happened to be next when the music stopped and they got called up.
Mm-hmm. It's accumulates, doesn't it? The experience and exactly everything.
So, David, you serve on the board of Nivati, hope I said that right, a mental health platform while leading people strategy at a high growth cybersecurity company. So how do you build mental health and well-being into business strategy without it becoming a like tick the box exercise?
Yeah, I think that what's I'm honored to serve on Nivati's board and I love how you articulated. That was a great articulation of the of the name of the company so Nivati mental health and mental well being that underpin is underpinned by the concept of we can only do the best work of our careers if we are bringing our whole selves to the table to work. And you can think about this let's say someone were to say to you, Hey Darcy, are you I'm sorry, are you right or left handed, Darcy? I'm left handed.
Left handed. Okay. So let's say someone came to you tomorrow morning, they said, Darcy, we're gonna have you hold your left hand behind your back and all day long you're gonna type with your right hand only. Mm-hmm.
You'd probably get through the day, right? You'd get there, your emails would go out slower, your responses would be would be slower, you wouldn't get as much accomplished, you'd probably have a cramp in your right hand and right arm 'cause you're not used to using it the whole keyboard. Because you weren't able to use your left hand that day, your dominant hand. I think about that same thing in terms of mental health.
If we're not mentally healthy and whole when we come to work, we're not able to do our best work. So whereas some people might think of mental health and mental well-being and mental fitness as a nice to have or an optional, how many people in our world that we know that we work with, maybe we ourselves, are showing up every day and we aren't fully present because we haven't attended to our mental well being. And so I'm honored to serve on the board of Nivati that that's helping the world focus on that. And I believe then pairing that up with my role as a chief people officer, it just reminds me to be mindful of that, that everyone comes to the table from their own journey.
Every morning, when we all wake up and we show up at our office, either virtual or in person, we've dealt with a bunch of stuff earlier that day. And most people in the office don't know a thing about that. They don't know if we've got a child with special needs. An aging parent needed help, a friend who's in crisis, a pet or an animal in the house who's not doing well, or we ourselves just having a tough morning for some other reason.
We just kind of show up at the office and we assume that everyone is 10 out of 10. We're just like right there. Boop, everyone's there, and you just kind of go into your day. And what if we as humans show up in a way that says, I don't know what my colleague went through this morning, and I want to make space for that as I engage with them.
And if I just make space for that, they may share something or may be comfortable sharing something that allows them to get something off their chest or to tell me, hey, David, you know what? I'm like an eight out of ten today. So I know you want to have this really important discussion. Can we wait until tomorrow?
I've got something on my mind right now that I'm working through and I want to give you my whole focus and attention. How powerful is that if we make that space? And then, by the way, we get maximum input from that person into whatever we're trying to do or output for that task because we made space for the idea that not everybody every day is okay. And that is in and of itself okay.
When we assume that everybody is, we're sort of starting off on a foot of folly, I would say, because some days someone may have one hand behind their back trying to type the keyboard with just one hand and we didn't know it because we didn't ask. Or we didn't create a culture in the organization where it's okay to say that of, hey, I need a beat here. Can we talk in an hour? I'm still kind of processing some things I dealt with this morning.
Mm that's where we're gonna get maximum output from each other as colleagues and maximum benefit back to the mission.
Definitely. And that's a great analogy with the hand behind the back. And I think that's the thing about mental health, right? Is it something you can't see, which is why it often gets you know sidelined.
So I mean, I think conversation has evolved a lot and gotten obviously a lot better in, you know, current years than it, you know, used to be way back when but it's still making sure that there's an important safe space to, you know, let people know you're not okay or what's going on and it's okay to not be okay all of the time, but it's also Being, you know, safe to communicate, right? Yeah. We're human beings, and think that's we've got to start there.
I mean that that's the that's the that's the H in human resources, the human part. And we've got to remember that as HR leaders ourselves, but also as organizations and cultures. I was listening to a neuroscientist and they were talking about how when we're under threat and the cortisol is spiking, the adrenaline is running, we go into our reptilian brain. It's fight or flight, and our IQ, our functional IQ actually drops.
So if someone's IQ is normally, I don't know, whatever, 130, 150, whatever it is, and they're operating at a functional IQ of 105 or 110, they're unable to do their best work because they're not psychologically safe in that moment, whether it's something going on inside of them or outside of them, whatever it is. So again, back to the idea, but we want people to do their best work. We've got to set them up to be able to do that. We want to give them all the tools and capabilities.
We want them to operate at their highest IQ they can. So when they're when they're doing their work, they're operating at the height of the game.
Yes, definitely. I couldn't agree more.
And okay, so this question, I love this because it makes you think of one thing. So what is the one non-negotiable action every chief people officer should take in the next ninety days to move their people function from a cost center to a genuine business catalyst?
This is probably gonna not be an answer you've gotten before. Okay, I'm ready for it. It's the one thing go to each of your people in the organization and ask them, How are we doing as a company at getting you what you thought you bought here? Much of the time we assume that all the people on our team are fully dialed in, that they're right where they wanna be, they're giving us their best work, and we're rocking and rolling.
I would offer a provocative idea that that's probably not true. Mm-hmm. And unless we ask, we'll never know. And so most likely our organization is only operating at call it 80% of the capacity that we think we are, because there's some amount of value that our people are leaving on the table because they are under-engaged, under-equipped, under-informed, under-empowered, whatever it is, that there's something that there's they're lacking in their own role in their job.
That means they can't contribute fully to what the organization is trying to accomplish. I call it crockpot management. We set it and forget it, right? You just put the beef and the carrots and the potatoes in the morning, you turn it up to whatever, you put the lid on, you go to work, you come home, the house smells nice, and you have a nice beef stew.
You can do crockpot cooking, you can't do crockpot management. And so taking a moment across the team and your skip levels and your one-on-ones and your coffee chats of just saying, How are we doing it getting you what you thought you bought here? And people will tell you. And, you know, most of them will say, I'm rocking and rolling.
I'm really liking it. This is great. I feel good about my job. I really like what I'm doing, et cetera.
There will be at least a few people who will tell you, know, I feel like I came here to do this and I haven't been able to do that fully. Or I kind of feel like I got one hand behind my back when I'm trying to accomplish what you've asked me to do, and here's why. And that then will expose what are those roadblocks that you as a senior leader, what we as senior leaders can do to contribute in a place of service to our organizations that then helps our people function show up a ten out of ten versus an eight or a nine out of ten. And how opening that would be, right?
To ask that question and you don't know until you ask. And I'm gonna remember that crockpot management,
That was another great analogy. You're full of the good analogies, but it makes perfect sense, right?
And not only was that a great answer, that pretty much segues into my final question of the day. So, how can real-time employee listening? So, you know, you're talking about asking, how can real-time employee listening platforms like CultureMonkey Help CPOs build a stronger business case for people strategy and demonstrate ROI in the language of the boardroom.
Yeah, I think the first and most important thing there is when we ask and we use a platform like yours to ask the question, there's a message in that. And the message is this it's very simple. You matter. You matter.
And how often in organizations do we work and toil away and we're thinking, Do I matter here? Does my work matter? Does my opinion matter? Do I matter as a person?
And when we take the time as an organization to truly stop and ask the question and ask it in a meaningful way where the employee knows that we're sincere, it delivers that first important most important message that you matter to us. Your voice matters. You have impact and import here in this organization. That's, I think, actually the most important thing that employee engagement efforts do.
A very close second, very close second, is we derive a lot of really valuable insights from the feedback we get around, hey, You know, you, the management, up in your ivory tower, you think this thing is working, and guess what? It's not, or it's not working in the way that you think it is. And if it could work this way, it could be even better. So the feedback that we get is super important.
And making sure that we're reading those comments that come back in these engagement avenues people take the time to write their words to you know put their heart into it, and provided, you know, they feel comfortable that they're able to submit it in a way that, you know, is anonymous, not attributable or they feel comfortable, even to maybe to put their name against it, that they know that their words are going to be heard and honored. There's a lot of value that's in there. It's truly the wisdom of the crowd. I think that, you know, in the before times, the leadership cadre, the management of an organization, had the best knowledge of the organization.
They were kind of overseeing the factory floor. They could look down from their little window and see all the widgets moving along the production line that has completely changed. The wisdom is with the team members. They're the ones seeing it every day with the customers at the coal face.
Now, maybe that actually never has changed. It's always been the people, you know, on the production line have the greatest wisdom. We just now understand that and we have vehicles and mechanisms to access that and derive value from it. So I think that's shifted a lot.
And candidly, our colleagues, our team members, expect that now. If you think about what our, what our experiences as a consumer, as a customer out in the world, we have a Consumer expectation of having an independent relationship with every brand that we're part of. You know, think about your favorite store or shop or app that you use. You want to be able to provide feedback and be heard and be listened to as an individual by that brand, by that company, by that organization.
So too do our employees want to feel that way at work as well. And so when we match the company experience with the consumer experience, we're speaking to people where they are today. And I think that avoids the need for people to context switch of like, that's in my personal life and this is in my work life. And those are two different things.
I don't know about you, Darcy, but my work life and my personal life, I call it work-life integration it's not work-life balance because that balance was gone out the window a long time ago. My work and my life are integrated. And so I like to show up at work in the same way I show up in life as my whole true authentic self. And I want to be heard and listened to and valued as a person in both ways.
Well, that's a great phrase, work life integration. And you're working and living your mission, so it makes perfect sense. Absolutely.
So and I like just you matter. That'd be a great way just to end this episode,
Wouldn't it? And but I do have one more question for you. Last one I promised. So how can manager effectiveness surveys like those built into CultureMonkey help CPOs identify which leaders are driving culture and business performance and which ones may be unintentionally holding the organization back.
Yeah, I think there's a couple different avenues for that one. The first that I pay a lot of attention to is what is the participation rate in the engagement surveys themselves. I actually care about that more than I care about what people say in the survey. I care about are they speaking up?
Because when they're speaking up, they care. Mm-hmm. And when they care, there's energy there. If we go back to you know high school physics, you have your vector and your valence, right?
And your valence is the energy, the movement, your vector is the direction that's heading. If there is no valence, you can't re-vector things. And so the first place I'm looking when I'm looking at manager effectiveness surveys is how many people in a 360 survey are giving feedback about their manager. Good, bad, or indifferent, just do people care.
I've got people who have worked with me and for me I know for years, and they would say, Hey, I wish David would do this and this and this, and now it'd help me be more effective. If they're able to articulate that and feeling comfortable articulate that, that means that I've created a space in our work group that they know their voice is valued and that I'm going to listen to them. It doesn't mean I'm always going to do what they're asking or what they're saying. It does mean though I've created the conditions for engagement in the organization.
So that's the first kind of meta data point that I think is there. And then the second one is when that feedback comes in, how does that manager respond to it? If the manager takes it on board and you sit down with that manager and their manager effectiveness feedback. And the manager has every defense under the sun of why this said that.
Well, you know, these people that and they've been working overtime and it was a really hard project. And they just they have every excuse under the sun of why the data went that way. Versus, you know what? I really appreciate people sharing that.
Some of it was hard to read. Some of it was hard to hear. And there's definitely something in there for me to work on because My job is to be of service to this work group. If that's the orientation and the mindset of the leader when they're getting the feedback, whether it's constructive or affirmative, it's telling you that you've got the right leader in place.
Because even a leader who's receiving a lot of constructive feedback, if they receive it in the right way and they're receiving it with a pure heart, they're going to be able to take it on board and they're going to address it. None of us is a perfect leader, not one, right? We're all human beings. We are all flawed and some of us fatally so then and I'd like to tell my teams that all of us are somewhere on our journey.
It's a question of do I acknowledge that I'm on my journey and do I know where I am on it? And if those two criteria are met, that means that I'm in a place where I'm oriented to be of service to the organization. So I think those are a couple of directionals that can be helpful as manager effectiveness data comes in from the workforce that leaders can look at and maybe take some advantage of.
Wow, David, thank you so much. It's been a joy speaking with you, truly. I've you've given me a lot to think about personally as well, just thinking about your career and everything. And this has been an insightful conversation on how people strategy can become a true driver of business success.
One message stood out very clearly: when people leaders align talent, culture, and leadership with business priorities, HR evolves from a support function into a strategic competitive advantage. And that's where continuous listening becomes essential with real-time employee feedback, pulse surveys, and manager effectiveness insights, platforms like CultureMonkey help leaders understand what's happening across the organization, measure the impact of people initiatives, and make informed decisions that strengthen both culture and business performance.
And before we wrap up, David, how can our listeners connect with you to continue the conversation or learn more about your work?
Yeah, sure, absolutely. Darcy, it's been a pleasure talking with you and definitely check us out over at illumio.com/careers our mission in the world is to help stop breaches from becoming cyber disasters. And in this world now where you're thinking about you know, these advanced LLMs that are coming out, the mythos class LLMs, breaches are now inevitable. And so we're on a really important mission inside of Illumio to do that.
And love to connect people on LinkedIn. I'm on the socials with great regularity. It's kind of like my version of Instagram so connect with me out there, love to be in the dialogue with all of you. And Darcy, thanks again for having me.
It's been a real honor.
Absolutely. Well, I'll definitely connect with you on LinkedIn as well. And to all our listeners, thank you so much as always for joining us. If you enjoyed today's conversation, don't forget to follow, share, and subscribe.
And that's a wrap for this episode of CultureClub X, powered by CultureMonkey. Until next time, I'm your host, Darcy, signing off.
Frequently asked questions
Why does L. David Kingsley say HR is a cost center?
Because he thinks arguing otherwise wastes the energy that should go into the work. Product, sales, marketing and customer success all have a legible line to a customer. The G and A functions, finance, accounting, HR, IT, legal and workplace services, do not, so their question is different: how close can we get to delivering that same customer value with the minimum amount of calories deployed. Accepting the label is what makes that question the operating one.
What are the three jobs of HR, according to David Kingsley?
Job one is to keep the company out of jail. Job two is to keep it out of the headlines, at least for the wrong reasons. Job three through X is everything else that helps the company achieve its mission. His point is that the first two are table stakes and that people teams forget the order rather than the list, which is how a function ends up doing HR for HR's sake.
What is the one question he would have every leader ask in the next 90 days?
"How are we doing as a company at getting you what you thought you bought here?" asked of every person on the team. His estimate is that most organizations run at roughly 80 percent of the capacity they believe they have, because some people are under-engaged, under-equipped, under-informed or under-empowered in ways that never surface unless somebody asks directly. He calls the alternative crockpot management: you can do crockpot cooking, you cannot do crockpot management.
Why does he care more about survey participation than survey scores?
Because participation tells him whether people still believe speaking up is worth it. He borrows the physics: vector is direction and valence is energy, and if there is no valence you cannot re-vector things. On a 360 survey he looks first at how many people gave feedback about their manager at all, good, bad or indifferent, on the grounds that a group which has gone quiet is a harder problem than a group with a low score.
Why does he say HR gets seated at the kids' table?
Because, in his view, HR puts itself there. An outside observer can usually pick out the HR person in a room, since HR people speak on HR topics and go quiet on product, customer and marketing questions. In publicly traded and venture-backed companies he means it literally: if you cannot connect people work to net-new ARR, NACV or GRR, you will not be heard. He includes himself and scores his own meeting contributions on it.
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