Quirky HR

Ep 74 | Embracing Entrepreneurial Spirit Amidst Fears of Failing Forward with Claire Chandler

• Dana Dowdell

Share episode
Our guest this week is Claire Chandler, the mastermind behind Talent Boost. Claire shares with us how her experiances along her never say never journey have helped her succeed in becoming a successful HR professional and businesswoman. Listen along on this adventure, and hear how she recounts the life-altering moment when someone recognized her potential, and the importance of leaders doing the same. 

We cover a lot in this episode. Talent is not about merely fostering an "entrepreneurial spirit" but truly embracing individuality and creativity. Claire tells us why Millennials are underappreciated when it comes to their role in shaping company culture with their pursuit of community and purpose. We even address the age-old conundrum faced by colossal corporations - how do you align an employee's passion with their role? 

 And here's a little sneak peek - Claire spills the beans on her upcoming book as well as her unique growth on purpose methodology! So, whether you're an HR professional gearing up for grand growth or just curious about workplace dynamics, this episode packs a punch.

Find Claire Chandler at the following;

Connect with us:
Email the podcast.
Join us on Instagram - we appreciate your support!
Dana Dowdell - Boss Consulting - @bossconsultinghr - @hrfanatic

Dana :

Hey, quirky HR listener, it's Dana. I wanted to take a minute before we jump into this episode and just say thank you. This podcast was an idea that I had a couple years ago, and it took me a little bit to actually get the guts to make it happen from idea to publishing the first episode and so I really just wanted to say thank you for listening. If you've listened to one episode or all of them, I'm just really grateful for the traction that this podcast has gained over the last almost a year, which is wild to think about. I also wanted to remind you that if you're a fan of the podcast, it helps it to subscribe on whatever platform you listen to it on. It also is really helpful if you can follow us on Instagram or Facebook. So on Instagram, we're at it's Just Business Podcast and on Facebook we're at it's Just Business Podcast and coaching. And then, lastly, it helps the podcast if you can share this with someone. There are hundreds of thousands of people who work in human resources or who work in operations and do some human resources, and if you find value in any episodes that you're listening to and wanna pass this along to a colleague or a peer or a coworker or a fellow student if you're in school, that can just help this podcast reach more people. So any and all support I'm entirely grateful for, and if you just wanna stay a listener, that's great too. So I wanted to thank you again and thank you for making this fun little idea that I had in my head actually something that people enjoy. Now we'll get onto the show.

Dana :

Welcome back to Quirky HR. I am joined today by Claire Chandler. She is the president and founder of Talent Boost. Claire, welcome to Quirky HR. Thank you, it's so great to be here. Thank you for being here. So you have quite the career in people, leadership human resources to owning a business. Tell us a little bit about how you landed in HR in the first place and how that kind of fostered a transition to what you're doing now.

Claire Chandler:

Yeah, I definitely got into HR through what I call the side door, after swearing I would never go into HR. Like of all of the career paths I envisioned for myself, hr was not one of them. I also had said I was never gonna work in corporate and I spent the first two decades of my career in corporate. So you go where the opportunities are and you go where you're kind of pulled. But I was working in a corporate job. I was an English major and so I really migrated more toward communications roles and marketing and all of that. And then I was taking a turn in my corporate career with a company that I had been with.

Claire Chandler:

I ultimately stayed for close to 15 years and I was working in customer relations and it was sort of a random I don't wanna say detour, but pivot in my career.

Claire Chandler:

And one day the head of HR called me up and said our head of training and development just gave notice and we know that you have been involved in some training for the customer service team. Would you have any interest in interviewing for the job? And he didn't even get the whole question out and I was like, yeah, it was just something that pulled me. So I first entered human resources as the head of employee development, which was what it was called at the time, and then gradually that built momentum and became this big, massive role which ultimately became led to me being the vice president of talent development for the company, which was wonderful and that really unlocked for me my passion for what I do now, which is all around culture building and executive leadership development and all of that. So that was really how I kind of snuck in the side door of HR. It was through the training door.

Dana :

So I wanna ask about the idea of someone tapping you on the shoulder and saying hey, you're, this is a good potential opportunity for you. Would you be interested? That was obviously a critical moment in your career and I feel like not everyone has that mindset or that the belief that, like that's kind of our duty as leaders, as HR professionals. How important is that in an HR capacity, in a leadership capacity, to just find someone who you see potential in and say I believe in you.

Claire Chandler:

I have told that story multiple times and you're the first one to really key in on the power of that tap on the shoulder. I think it's critical. I think had that not happened, had that role merely been posted internally one, I may not have seen it and two, I may not have felt like where I was in my career evolution I was right for that role, I was qualified for that role. Where that anyone would actually be interested in talking to me about that role because they wasn't from HR right. You talk to most HR professionals and they have deep experience. They grew up in HR.

Claire Chandler:

Most people that I know that are in the HR field. With a few exceptions, that's all they've ever done and that's great for them. They have a depth of experience, but they don't necessarily have that broader business perspective and so that tap on the shoulder for me not only raised my awareness of that career opportunity, it gave me a little bit of that. But I don't wanna say validation. We were talking right before we started recording this. I kind of joked about seeking external validation, and I think so many people do, but I think it was sort of the that first help over the initial hurdle of? Am I worthy of even thinking of myself as qualified for this role? So I think that tap on the shoulder from HR, who is uniquely positioned to look across vertical boundaries and silos, is really, really powerful for talent that perhaps is hidden in your organization.

Dana :

I think it's probably the self-efficacy of just having someone say this might be a good fit, probably instilled a bit of like I probably could do this Like thinking outside the box.

Claire Chandler:

Yeah, yeah.

Claire Chandler:

I said it was not. It was not a destination that I had designed for myself. That was not where I thought I was going to take my career. I had really good friends in HR and I always said to them you know, I can never do what you do. Yeah, such a thankless job. People come to you with such raw emotion and you're sort of the dumping ground for disciplinary problems and for people that you know don't like their benefits or whatever it might be. And then, lo and behold, as I brought my box and my potted plant over from customer relations into HR, they were all snickering at me and going. I thought you said you would never come over here. So never say never, right?

Dana :

But even then, I think about your previous experience and how applicable. This is why I love asking about people's career paths into HR, because it looks so different. But just that customer service. Think about how many HR professionals would be better at their jobs If they had some formal customer service experience right. So I think I love this idea of seeing the experience for what it is and being able to apply it to a position that maybe is not traditionally thought of in that way.

Claire Chandler:

Yeah, I know this is not a customer service focused show, but your call out is so important because I do believe that the three or so years I spent within customer service were such time well spent. I had the wonderful opportunity to meet the now late Tony Shea, who was the CEO of Zappos. He had spoken in a conference and I had a chance to speak to him one-on-one and he got it. He got the fact that customer service is the absolute bedrock of an organization, and I highly encourage anyone in any organization to spend at least a little bit of time in a customer service role. You will truly understand why your business is in existence, what it is that drives your customers to either follow you.

Claire Chandler:

Now, in my case, I worked for a company that was a monopoly, it was a utility, and so the customers didn't really have a choice who their provider was going to be. But that certainly didn't mean we couldn't choose how to relate to them and how to create an experience for them that made them want to tell a positive story about us. And I think to your point, hr needs to spend a little bit of time in customer service and needs to understand that we are all in customer service number one and number two. There is not a role in HR that does not touch employees in a deeply meaningful and impactful way, and so we all share an obligation and a duty to create as positive and productive and cohesive and employee experience as possible.

Dana :

I 100% agree. I came from hospitality and I was working in hospitality. But just having that experience just shaped the way that I look at the function of HR and strategic alignment and being connected to a vision and a mission. It just totally, totally transformed it for me. So I agree that we not discounting experience that may not seem 100% relevant can actually be really relevant in the HR capacity. So you own Talent Boost. Tell us a little bit about Talent Boost, what you do and what was the motivation behind starting it.

Claire Chandler:

So the short answer, what I do now. I help businesses expand without losing their best talent. Primarily, it is, almost ironically, through the HR door. So my bread and butter client is the chief HR officer of a large, growing organization that is trying to coalesce their people, their business, their culture around processes and performance and ideals that actually move the needle toward the longer-term growth strategy.

Claire Chandler:

I didn't just flip a switch, hang a shingle, open up my doors of Talent Boost, and that was going to be the mission. It was always centered around this idea of talent, though. So when I founded the company in 2011, and I was coming up with a name for the company, this mantra kept running through my head, and it was the undercurrent of what I deeply believe in. That mantra, which became a tagline for the business, is talent isn't born, it's boosted, because I truly do believe that everyone has it within them to be amazing every individual, every company and the key is to find what that is that lights you up inside, individually and organizationally, and bring that forth in a powerful way. So that was really always my mission, my purpose. I didn't always know what that was going to look like in terms of a valuable service to my clients, but that was always the seed of the idea when I founded the company in 2011.

Dana :

I have a follow-up question on that, because I was talking to my partner and there were some frustrations around his job and and I just think some communication issues, and I'm constantly having to tell him you need to advocate for yourself. No one will be an advocate for you in the way that you need to advocate for yourself. And so I'm curious what you're and it actually ties into what we were first talking about of being tapped on the shoulder right Is where does that responsibility lie in your eyes? Is it on the employee to say this is what fills my cup, this is what brings me the most joy, and I need to communicate that and I need to make sure that my job career aligns with that or is it more on the side of leadership, where they need to find out what fills their employees' cups and lean into that? So is it a shared responsibility? Does it fall on one party or the other? What are your thoughts on that?

Claire Chandler:

Yeah. So I think it's 100% a shared responsibility. I think, individually, it is incumbent upon every one of us, not just as employees but as humans, to figure out what lights us up. I think too often we hear the excuse that I'm miserable in my job. If it were supposed to be enjoyable, we wouldn't call it work. The rise of the meme in our modern culture is because of those myths and those things that we have settled for as individuals. So I do think there is a deep obligation as an individual to figure out what lights us up, just as humans, because one of the things that my life experiences has taught me is life is too short and so we really don't have that many years and that many waking hours to spend, and it's important to do that in ways that do refill our cup. Organizationally, I think the obligation is on both HR because they have a unique sort of perspective across the organization and every single person who is tasked with managing people.

Claire Chandler:

I was having this debate the other day with a client about their people managers and the fact that they're not really leaders. So we have to stop calling them leaders, and I challenged them. They were within HR and I said well, part of the reason for that is because we haven't helped them create capacity to actually lead. We say we want them to be leaders, but we give them all of these duties and responsibilities that are essentially to manage tasks and to manage resources toward a tactical result, and those two things are not the same. And so, to come back to your question, I do think it is a shared responsibility between individuals, kind of understanding and maybe even reconnecting with what lights them up. But then organizationally looking across that and saying how do I best harness what you were deeply passionate about with how it can contribute toward fulfilling our shared mission?

Dana :

And so when we're looking at a business growth environment, start up or tech or whatever healthcare, what does that look like from an organizational perspective? Because I'm sure it's very easy for those people, the passion, the connection to get lost and diluted or forgotten about.

Claire Chandler:

Yeah, and this is where the conversation is going to get really, really scary for a lot of leaders and a lot of large businesses, because the concept of turning on the light within individual employees, in terms of aligning them and their roles with what they are deeply passionate about, sounds a lot like inviting chaos. And I would argue that the opposite is true. Right, when you bring people together into an organization and you pay them a wage and you say I want you to fit within this box which is defined by your job description, it's actually harder to get people to be innovative and to support each other and to bring truly their best selves to work. Right, we hear that all the time. Now we hear we want to create an environment where you can bring your full, authentic self to work, and then the minute that you do that, they go well, not like that. That's not what we meant.

Claire Chandler:

Right, and I want to come back to something you said about your conversation with your partner, because we have millennials kind of running rampant in the workplace and they often get a bad rap as a generation. You hear the word millennial and most leaders in established organizations roll their eyes and say well, they just don't get it. They don't want to pay their dues. They don't want to stay with an organization for years and years. They want different things.

Claire Chandler:

And what I love about millennials and I credit millennials for really impacting the culture is that they truly are the first generation who have advocated for themselves, who have stood up and said this is what I need, this is what I want. I am not looking to join a company and stay with them from cradle to grave. I am looking for an experience, I am looking for a sense of community, I'm looking for a mission that I can deeply believe in, surrounded by people where I feel like I belong. And so we can take a lesson from millennials, because it's not about a lack of work ethic. It's about the fact that, walking out of the womb, we kind of got something that the rest of us struggle to understand.

Dana :

Well, and it's almost counterintuitive to say we want people who connect to our purpose and then to criticize their connection to a purpose, right? So how do we? You know, yes, I'm sure you have so many thoughts on this.

Claire Chandler:

I do. I have some wonky stories about that. Can I just go on a little mini soap box for a second? So every organization, when you look at their job postings at least the public-facing ones, the candidate-facing ones they always include this one bullet that drives me insane. They're looking for people with an entrepreneurial spirit. Right, and that's wonderful if that's really true. If you truly intend to bring people together who have an entrepreneurial spirit, who think outside of the box, who are creative, who are gonna question the status quo, who are going to do things perhaps a little bit in a more quirky way Just one of the reasons I love the focus of your podcast If we're truly going to do that, then we have to commit to creating an environment that allows them to do that in unique ways. And I wanna share, if you don't mind, a story, because when we are prepping for coming together on this show, you had challenged me to bring some bizarre stories, so I'm gonna share one with you.

Claire Chandler:

So probably within the last two years of my corporate career, I was walking back to my office. I think I had like a two minute window to run to the ladies room and my boss stopped me in the hall and you're gonna think I'm making this up, it's actually happened. He said you need to tone down your walk. Yep, and I go um, what like, what? And he goes you're, you're, you're walk, it's too, it's too bouncy, it's too happy. And people are going to wonder if you're up to something, like if you, if you know something they don't. And I was like, okay, good, good talk. Went back to my office. Now, spoiler alert I didn't, I didn't tone down my walk, I didn't change my walk. People commented on my walk my entire life and we could go down that rabbit hole. But what I? What I found? I didn't see it in the moment, but for some reason that story stayed with me and in hindsight it was so emblematic of that type of corporate culture that advertises for entrepreneurial spirit but then mandates conformity. We have to do better.

Dana :

And I think there's. You know there's a day long conversation about focusing on things that don't actually matter. You know what I mean, like the heuristics, bias that exists just as humans, and the way that we tie assumptions to facts is is so frustrating from an HR perspective. There have been a count countless times where there's an employer relations issue and we have basically come up with a solution before even finding out what the problem is. And I think, as leadership, as HR professionals like that, that need to take the step back and say okay, what is actually what is actually important here? You know it's not I imagine it's not like you're kicking people as you walk by them. You're just happening. Happening to exist in the world as you, as you are, and yet it became a talking point can be so frustrating.

Claire Chandler:

Yeah, absolutely Absolutely. And it's so funny because every time I tell that story about the you know, don't that you need to tone down your walk I'm always like for me telling that story, seeing the facial reactions from people who hear it that are like you know, at first, initially, you go that can't actually be true. And then, the more you think about it, there's that second beat of I know so many leaders who have, who have had similar sorts of mandates maybe not those exact words, but the tone, the theme of we want you to bring your entrepreneurial spirit. But then, as soon as you start to express yourself in a unique way that does not follow their straight line, they go whoa, whoa, whoa. That's not what we meant.

Dana :

Right, like, don't be too much. Yeah, be just enough for what we need you to do. Yeah, yeah, it's. It's very interesting and I imagine it'll continue to evolve as we, you know, continue to move out of the pandemic, where I think people really shifted their priorities at work and and what's important for them. So, so, in your, in your work, in talent boost, it's very much focused on culture, and is it? Is it maintaining culture or adapting culture as the company grows?

Claire Chandler:

So it's a little of both. If I just stayed within the realm or the schema of culture, I wouldn't get very far right. I wouldn't get past the walls of HR, because I think HR most HR leadership within HR understands a culture is foundational. But we have to transcend that and we have to say but culture is not just foundational to a positive employee experience, it is foundational to sustainable business growth. And so my work is all around getting people to understand the business rationale or the business case for building, in an intentional, meaningful way, a strong, fit culture, but then harnessing that culture and the talent within toward achieving your, your growth strategy. They are not mutually exclusive, they are not just the realm of HR, and so part of my work is to is to really get business leaders across the spectrum, not just within HR but beyond it, to understand that they have to work together to build culture and to form culture and to and to nurture and harness the right talent in the right direction to achieve their strategy.

Dana :

A lot of the frustrations that I've heard from leaders is that the like, the micro culture, or like their culture within their department, is ideal, but the culture within the organization is not ideal, and I've heard this around like the idea of remote work, meaning my department thinks remote work can happen and we would put the structures in place, but top leadership doesn't believe in that, and so I'm curious what your thoughts are in terms of the micro culture influence in these large growth moments.

Claire Chandler:

Yeah, I think it comes back to this, this sort of dual expectation that people managers also have to be leaders, right, I think, where there are micro cultures that are working, the tendency of a people manager is to say my team gets it, we're cohesive, we work well together. This is the type of culture that I want you know to to permeate the organization. But I only have so much power and so much influence and so much capacity, and so, rather than try to get the rest of the organization to emulate the model that we have figured out, I'm going to insulate that model from everybody else. It's where silos continue to perpetuate, where the walls of those silos get thicker and thicker, you know, and often silos again get a negative wrap because it's like, well, that's just people digging their heels and not wanting to cooperate.

Claire Chandler:

I think silos are also perpetuated by those micro cultures that are working and don't want to get diluted by kind of spilling out into the larger organization. So we think it is incumbent upon the leaders at the very top of an organization, which is why, when I come into a, to an organization, I really do try to work from the top down because they have to get it first. But it's really incumbent upon those leaders to create ways for the managers who get it, the talent that gets it right, the right team, the right culture, the right beliefs, and give them ways to share that and spread that without diluting what's working with people and what's working within those micro cultures.

Dana :

Yeah, I think it's. I really appreciate your idea in the concept of when something works, they sometimes try to protect it and insulate from external. And because I see that all the time yeah, I see it all the time and not a compliance standpoint. When I see, that is normally when there's potential harassment or discrimination issues that are trying to be dealt with in inside of that internal culture, when really they should be being brought to HR or another leadership member.

Claire Chandler:

Yeah, and it's. There's kind of a tipping point, right. I mean I can remember times in my corporate career where I was leading teams and I'm sure every leader in your audience can relate to this. There are moments where everything comes together and you have the I don't want to call it perfect, but the right combination of a team and you know it right. You've got a team that gels, that not only gets along and has fun and deeply cares about each other but gets stuff done, that moves the needle, and you equally know that that's fleeting right. You know that that team is not going to stay together forever, whether it's the nature of the workforce, the nature of the business.

Claire Chandler:

Other things happen right.

Claire Chandler:

The ebbs and flows of the overall organizational performance. You know I can remember a time where I had that kind of a mix and I could almost lift myself out of the day to day and go this is the team that I always wanted. But also know that right around the corner we were going to face layoffs and we were going to have to necessarily disrupt that flow. And I think there's a tipping point there because some managers kind of coming back to this impulse to insulate from the larger organization that maybe doesn't get it. When you have that team that has that cohesion, that has that culture, that has also that performance and the outcomes that you're looking for and know that that's fleeting, there is an instinct to protect that by hiding your talent. And this is one of those tipping points that people managers need to get through, not on their own, not alone, but through HR and other executive leaders to help them to understand that truly, to make that impact and amplify that impact, you have to nurture talent, which often means you have to ultimately let them go.

Dana :

Which is always scary, especially if you're in that place of my team is really good. This is the best version of a team dynamic or best person I've had in this role. I am 100% on board with that and you cannot inhibit someone's growth and development simply for your own security.

Claire Chandler:

Well, and the other sort of instinct to hold on to that talent is, as soon as I let one of my A players go, one of my top talent go, even if it's within the larger organization. So organizationally we didn't lose them, but I lost them as part of the team. There is almost always going to be a dip in performance because you have let that top talent go, and so that kind of feeds into that reluctance to share that talent with the larger organization. And this is where executive leaders need to do better. And what I mean by that is there needs to be a tolerance for the pivot. There needs to be an acceptance that when we create a culture where talent is not just nurtured but it's shared, there may be some ebbs and flows in the performance of that team that had been cohesive and now released one of their top talent into the broader organization.

Claire Chandler:

There has to be some tolerance for that, for a little bit of the I don't want to say failure, but maybe a little bit of a scaling back so that the larger organization can benefit from that talent. I mean that introduces this whole concept of failing forward which so many companies, if you put the question to them, say yes, we encourage innovation and we want people to take risks and to learn from their mistakes, because that's where the growth is. But as soon as they stumble, they get marked down for it, and so it's hypocritical. It's just like posting a job saying we're looking for entrepreneurial spirit and a mandating conformity. Failing forward is absolutely fundamental to growing, to innovating and to achieving scalable expansion without diluting your culture, and most organizations don't know how to do it.

Dana :

I feel like we could talk about that for another hour and a half. So you have a guide for HR professionals and chief HR reps and people in a CRO capacity and how to prepare for massive growth within an organization, correct?

Claire Chandler:

I do. So the methodology that I've kind of developed over the years and this started in my corporate career. It's not just I founded a company and then kind of figured this out. It was sort of buried treasure. This is something that I've kind of developed over the years, but I call it the growth on purpose methodology or model or framework, kind of pick your noun there. But it's really designed around four pillars that when you do them in the right sequence and you get them right, you can actually go from this place of high turnover, low engagement, big succession, gaps in your talent pipeline to a state of perpetual growth.

Dana :

Which I think we all need, and so you have a book coming out, so you have a guide on your website, but then you also have your writing another book to kind of hone in on this a little bit more. What's the timeline on that book?

Claire Chandler:

Oh my gosh. So give me some pressure here. So, yes, I am working on the book, so a couple of things. So there's sort of a one page kind of overview on my website. We can drop the link for your audience. That really just kind of lays out at a very high level that growth on purpose methodology. But I am in the process of writing my next book that really does a deep dive into the model, into the framework, and really kind of walks leaders, especially HR leaders, through the four pillars of the growth on purpose model Timeline. So we're recording this in Q4 of 2023. I am very hopeful that it will be released sometime in January of 24.

Dana :

Amazing and exciting and obviously needed in the HR industry. So excited to see that that launch and land. So, claire, this is great. Where can listeners connect with you?

Claire Chandler:

So my social media platform of choice is LinkedIn, so people can find me there. I would love for your audience to reach out, connect, just say hello and then they can also hit me up on my website.

Dana :

Fantastic and, as always, we'll make sure that Claire's LinkedIn, and then the website to talent boost will also be in the show notes. So make sure you get on LinkedIn, connect with her, pick her brain and stay up to date of when the book goes live. So, claire, thank you so much for being on Quirky HR.

Claire Chandler:

Thanks, it was a pleasure.