Quirky HR
Quirky HR
Ep 68 | In the HR Arena with Sam Eaton: Resilience, Mindset and Future Challenges
Get ready to be inspired by the journey of Sam Eaton, global business coach and the owner of Mindability Consulting. We talk all about HR consulting, the business side of being an HR founder, and the future she envisions for those in the fractional or consulting HR sphere.
Connect with Sam on Linkedin HERE --> https://www.linkedin.com/in/samanthaeaton1450/
Learn more about Mindability Consulting HERE --> https://mindabilitybusinesscoaching.com/
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Dana Dowdell - Boss Consulting - @bossconsultinghr - @hrfanatic
This episode is brought to you by the Essential Skills for Supervisors training offered by Boss Consulting HR. If you're a new supervisor or a green supervisor or you just feel like you need to refine your skills, it's a great training for you. It's offered online and we cover all of the basics of onboarding, performance management, having difficult conversations, interviewing, compliance everything that you need to know to be a better manager. So if you're interested in checking out the training, we have one coming up soon, and if you head on over to bossconsultinghrcom forward slash training, you can sign up for our next session.
Speaker 1:Welcome back to quirky HR. I am very excited, I think since starting this podcast. I forget the reach sometimes of the listenership, and a couple months ago I was contacted by our next guest and we were able to connect outside of this episode and she is lovely and fantastic and I'm so excited to have her on quirky HR. So today we are joined by Sam Eaton. She is a global business coach and the owner of MindAbility Business Coaching and I'm so excited to have you, Sam. Welcome to quirky HR.
Speaker 2:You know, I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for having me. It's yeah. We had a great conversation, didn't we? A couple of months ago, and I think we made the world a better place by the end of it. So I agree.
Speaker 1:I'm looking at the tabs on my browser and I still have.
Speaker 1:We talked a lot in our conversation about disrupt HR and I still my brain works just in terms of tabs on a web browser, so I still have them open as like things I need to follow up on, and you provided so much valuable insight and to me and our initial conversation, so I'm very excited for the listeners to learn more about you. But let's start there. So tell us a little bit about yourself and about MindAbility, how it got started, how you found yourself in this wild world of HR.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I formed MindAbility business number five during the pandemic and everyone told me no one needs another business coach and I was like, if the world doesn't need decent business coaches now, then I truly don't know when the world does, and I made every single rookie mistake and I should have known better. I was arrogant in terms of I've done this before and I got a real wake up call, which was great. I love the world of HR and I've fallen into it about 15 years prior to that and learned the world of HR through CHRO, saying no to me because I'm a commercial beast. I've built businesses so I can really coach people on how to build businesses because I've got a different take. I'm not looking at it from the technical aspect. I'm looking at it from what value can you bring to an organization. And I fundamentally believe that the HR community are at the forefront of the workplace evolution and our role is to help you, amplify your voices to get the right clients, to make this world a better place that we live and work in.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So for those that have not heard of MindAbility, their tagline or the tagline on the website is we help HR founders grow their business their way, and I think that's an interesting I think if you work in HR and I saw this a lot during the pandemic where people were really burnt out working in a CHRO or HR manager or HR business partner capacity and they were interested in starting a consultancy business or doing some side work and so what was the motivation for you to start the coaching business and to focus specifically on HR founders and HR leaders?
Speaker 2:Okay, so everyone's got a backstory right and I'm no different and I'd had a lot of challenges in my personal life. I think people are quite surprised at how bright and breezy I am, having had a marriage that ended up in me being treated with PTSD through losing a partner very suddenly, who went out one day and literally dropped dead and I don't say that to be dramatic. That is what happened. I'm very fortunate that I've met a super superman and have remarried, but through all of that, there was one moment in time and I can literally take everyone back to the middle of this field, to a stone where I standing on having a conversation with someone thinking I need to give back to the world. Something's happened and this has happened for a reason.
Speaker 2:Now I could be a life coach and I thought, sam, you make Joan Collins look good no offence to Joan Collins, but you're damn good at building businesses and I really enjoyed what I learned through the whole people space and how undervalued it was, and that's where I grew as a person and I learned so much about psychology.
Speaker 2:I went off and invested in myself in terms of neuroscience later on and that kind of stuff. I studied gender diversity in Seattle and the more I learned, the more curious I became. As to HR, it's the wrong word. It's so much more than that and with everything that was happening in the world, as I said, when I started my ability, I did it all wrong and I did exactly what I now coach people not to do. I thought I could coach everyone, and I can't, but I can make sure those who have their own HR businesses can build their business on their terms, which is something that you'll hear us say a lot, because the expertise that's been gained through 20, 25 years plus, in some instances, of just feeling burnt out, lonely, undervalued and fed up with having to constantly organize the Christmas party You're all better than that and it's something I feel really passionate about.
Speaker 1:I think it's interesting and I think in our initial conversation we were talking a bit about HR consultants. They popped up a lot during the pandemic and I think some of that is people absolutely feeling burnt out and wanting to do their own thing. And then I think some of it and not all of it is people thinking well, hr looks easy. I love the administrative function of HR. Let me start a consultancy. What do you see in this space with the people that you coach in terms of the motivation, the background, the skill sets that's really pushing people out to start their own consultancy businesses?
Speaker 2:I think a lot of the motivation is they want autonomy in their lives. They're fed up with being interrupted during their supper with their kids. They are fed up, and I remember one client saying I have 16 tabs open every time I go to bed, the implication being she worked till bedtime got up and then did it all again. So I think the key driver is wanting that autonomy, replacing the corporate salary and doing the interesting work that they know they're capable of achieving in terms of the results and the outcomes.
Speaker 2:Changing that the world of work, making sure that the workforce is relevant For example, do we need a marketing director or do we actually need a holographic expert? Do we need a chatbot behavior expert or do we need a marketing assistant? And these are things that the HR community and those with workforce planning have the ability to be able to do if they're given the opportunity to be able to go out and sell themselves and achieve just that. It's hard, bizarrely and I've had this conversation before with the CHRO, when you know, years ago, when I was working with an HR consultancy and that was and I said to her you can do this work, the work you're paying us a lot of money, you know you're capable and can do it, but your leadership team don't respect you enough for you to deliver it. And she said it's exactly that and I can't say the things that you can, and I think there's a lot of it behind that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's Okay. I have so many thoughts about the value of HR as a strategic function and changing the assumptions around what we do, and so I've been saying that my consulting business is a fractional HR company and they're like, well, what does that even mean? And I think we forget that so many people don't understand that HR really, truly is a strategic function. And so can you shed some light on the successes of that? How you're seeing HR founders communicate the value of what they do?
Speaker 2:For sure, and this is the bit that I'm so proud of for the community as a whole the creativity now that the founding community has identified in terms of okay, well, this is what I do, this is the outcome that I do, but I need to package that up in such a way that when I'm talking to people who don't know what HR is, they don't know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2:I can put it in the tonality, the vocabulary, in such a way that the people I want to buy this will get it.
Speaker 2:So that's a huge win right now for the consultancy world. To your point, the fractional community is growing and it's growing fast and it's a wonderful thing to see and their different skill sets and outcomes with the work that they can deliver. But by being creative and ironically, there's now more as I was saying earlier, almost through booting out the marketing community, there's more of a synergy now than ever with the HR founder and consultancy community and the marketing, because we've got to almost productise what we're doing, to change how we work and what that looks like. I mean three years ago very few people knew what work from anywhere was Very few, and now it's a term that we talk about the whole time with this horrific battle and I do think it's horrific where huge communities of people are being forced back to the office and again there's an opportunity there for the HR community to, yes, again rise up. I'm sure they're going to be beaten up yet again, but haven't we learned to have even thicker skins than we did three, four years ago?
Speaker 1:Are you seeing a change in the resiliency of HR professionals?
Speaker 2:I am. I feel that earlier on this year there was so much burnout and you know what, there was a really pivotal moment and it was this week, beginning of September. We just had Labor Day. It felt like there was a reset. And we seem to have go through these periods and you just sense it, and there was a reset again, which is do you know what? We've gone through the pandemic, we've gone through global wars Goodness, knows what's happening with money.
Speaker 2:Talk about all of this coming back again and big, big global businesses going back on their word and saying, do you know what? Yeah, no, we're now going to. We've got a short memory. We're going to make everyone come back to work. And yet, through it all this, one day earlier on this week, something clicked and it was almost like there was that next level of resilience that was found, and people's posts and the HR communities that I'm part of. There was just a different feeling. So I think we've dug deep as a community. We've dug really deep and we've made some huge wins, and now the challenge isn't with us and can we do the work or have we earned the right? My God, we've earned the right and we know and we can see what's happening in terms of the old fashioned companies forcing their communities because they're no longer employees. We're building communities back to work. Actually, a lot of people will leave and walk towards the more future thinking organizations and they're the ones that will invest and invest heavily in the great HR community we've got around us today.
Speaker 1:So I did an episode on the podcast about networking in HR, and particularly in that it's not inherent in our field to network unless you perhaps work in a staffing capacity and you're building a network, and I think in a way, the idea of owning a business is the same thing, right, unless you have that experience, I think sometimes people want to start an HR consultancy and not really know where to start. So for the clients that you serve and the mastermind participants, where do you see them gathering that information, that mindset to jump in to starting a consultancy?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the initial part about mindset is huge and I don't know if you felt it when you started yours, but it's the case of oh my goodness, I've got to sell me.
Speaker 1:I have this profound memory of when I first started networking. I used to say, oh, I'm trying to start an HR consulting business, and I switched the narrative and the words to say I own a human resources consulting business, and that very much shifted my internal dialogue in terms of how I thought about my business. And then, as I've grown, the dialogue has become less me and more we, and I think it's. I will always think back to it because I think it's very interesting in just how we think about ourselves as business owners and the verbiage that we use when we are marketing ourselves and selling ourselves, and it's so easy to forget that actually we are, first and foremost, business owners, and this is what I come up against time and time again, particularly with those early stage HR consultants.
Speaker 2:It's I'm an HR consultant, well, are you? Well? Yes, of course that's what you do. You're a business owner and actually you're having a peer to peer conversation with your client as to whether you can add value and actually whether you want to add value, because they might not be the right client for you. And that's a huge mine mindset shift. What was the moment for you that you changed your mindset shift?
Speaker 1:I don't know, I can't. I can't remember like this specific moment. I think for me it was a series of moments, that kind of built over time, like I remember I was calling a lead, that I had gotten about some training and I had to put a sticky note on my computer because I my human nature is to be really accommodating to people and I had to remind myself that, that it is a business and that I charge this much for this service, and so for me it's been just a building block over time. I don't, I don't think I have a defining moment and I will say you know, I'm six years into owning a business and every week I'm constantly adding to that toolbox, flexing that muscle of entrepreneurship that I didn't have in 2016 when I first started.
Speaker 2:Hopefully, and I fundamentally believe that if you get to that point where you say, no thanks, there's nothing I can learn today, that's when you start to lose that interest in what you're doing. I completely agree that curiosity, that unwavering curiosity, is really healthy, actually, because it helps challenge yourself. But the mirror up to your clients when they think the problem is over here and actually it's way in the other direction and it's something completely different, because they're just trying to put a bandaid over something because there's too much else to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think it's something that I've struggled with and I would be curious to hear if you find this with other HR consultants or if any of the listeners think feel this way as well. But the business side of it I have this regular fear that if I hold an employee accountable and the employee then goes to complain to ownership or something like that, that I will then be fired. And so there's this really interesting fear dynamic in a lot of what I do in my business where it's like I've had to almost self coach myself Like no, you know that's the right thing to do, you know that that's your duty and obligation and in HR capacity, and if you lose that client because they didn't stand behind you, they weren't a good client anyways absolutely and that fit is a complex feeling, this fear of failing and being judged and I've done a lot of work with Joe Dispencer, breaking the habit of being yourself.
Speaker 2:I frequently listen to his audiobook, I read his book and that challenge of you know, is that really the case, you know, and changing myself on that, obviously our fears are slightly different, you know, are we doing enough? Are we supporting that person in the right way for them? But ultimately, that feeling of not that adequacy, but am I doing the right thing? I also think it's a healthy thing because it's that self-checking and again it's start reminding that by the time we're on mid 30s we're 95% habit. So the very fact that we're challenging and questioning ourselves is really healthy because it shows that we're still present, we're still prepared to learn, we're still growing and we're still actually looking at things in a way that we're not making assumptions.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a constant. It's a constant, it has to be a constant, it has to be a constant. So I'm curious what you think is going to happen to fractional HR, hr consultancies, even kind of the niche parts of HR, talent development, performance management, training. What are you feeling will happen to those types of opportunities in the future?
Speaker 2:Personally, I think we are going to a world where we're more human than ever. We've been through a lot. I also sense that there's still a lot more to come. I don't know what that is, but it doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon. And with the advent of things like AI, those who are using it as a system, not a tool and there is a difference will remain human.
Speaker 2:And looking at the human side of things Performance management, workforce planning what does that workforce look like? I think that's going to be really interesting and actually really exciting, and I read something on LinkedIn. Actually and forgive me, I can't remember where I saw it, but as early as the end of 2024, global CHROs will be saying well, we welcome you to come along with your robots and your AIs. That's a really interesting take. Again, it's taken less than a year for that to be commonality. So performance management and how we do that I think that'll change from where we are today. Thank goodness, the annual review so many people are now saying that's just dead in the water. We need more of that ongoing when and how we manage talent. That will change because how we connect and communicate is changing. We're looking at holographic technology and how we can embrace that. Where you meet people, it's not just the metaverse.
Speaker 2:Personally, I think that was almost the red herring. I think there's something beyond that. With holographic technology and everything else that's coming. It sounds still so space age to so many of us, but it's here now. So I think a lot of these disciplines will continue to be in demand. We're also seeing a lot of the larger companies struggle and yet the SME market in many instances is still booming. I do not take away from the fact that we are seeing many sectors, like the tech sector, in dire straits right now, but again, we've seen this before. I'm not underplaying it or underestimating it. So there's lots of good stuff to come for the HRs. My one warning would be for those who are simply at the operational level and I mean we're comfortable selling the employee handbooks and policies. Please don't. I personally think that those kinds of consultancies will be irrelevant within the next 12 to 18 months, because it is about the people aspect of it and what you can do and how you can utilize your experience to support this ongoing evolution.
Speaker 1:And that can be a competitive advantage. Is the strategic component right? Totally, I love it. So you at Mindability, you do masterminds, you do coaching one-on-ones. I know that you're at capacity, if not exceeding capacity, but for those that are listening, that are interested in connecting with you, where can they find you?
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you. So I hang out on LinkedIn a lot, so it's Samantha Reaton, 1450, or just look up Sam Eaton. Mindability I'm the Green Lady is someone once referred to me when I bumped into them at Heathrow. Our website is mindabilitybusinesscoachingcom and there you can find all about us, anything from our free masterclasses to our masterminds. We've got loads of exciting things coming for more advanced HR consultancies next year, more community. We have business clinics and also things like my book are on there as well. I decided to write a book last year, so constantly doing a lot. We're here to support the HR community and even if it's Sam, do you know someone who can please reach out? I am not going to talk at you or sell at you. It's not our style.
Speaker 1:I love it Very much, relationship based, and I can attest to that because I get a ton of sales pitches in LinkedIn and Sam's was not that at all. So very grateful that you reached out to me, sam, and thank you so much for being on the quirky HR. Oh, thank you for having me.