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Ep 51: How Rachel Olchowka, balanced the role of GC & CPO @ Fetch
79 Plays2 months ago
What do you need to know if you're considering taking on the people function? What's the difference between a chief people officer and a CHRO? And are GCs well-positioned to take on both of these roles simultaneously?
Rachel Olchowka, Former Chief People Officer and General Counsel at Fetch and current Chief Administrative Officer at Prizm Insurance, had no hesitations when she volunteered to operate a complex, metrics-driven people function in addition to her responsibilities leading in-house legal at a fast-paced organization. Not only did she learn how to do both roles—she learned how to do them well.
Listen as Rachel shares how she was able to find balance between two very different executive positions, know whether expanding into a people role is right for you, establish a game-changing comprehensive parental leave plan, craft culture within a company and executive team, and more.
Read detailed summary: https://www.spotdraft.com/podcast/episode-51
Topics:
Introduction: 0:00
Taking on the chief people officer role while serving as general counsel at Fetch: 2:25
The difference between CPOs and CHROs: 5:25
Encountering pushback from the executive team on HR policies: 9:01
Crafting culture within an executive team: 12:35
Establishing a comprehensive parental leave plan: 14:53
Approaching the hiring process as a CPO: 19:38
Comparing in-office policies against remote work: 24:40
Dealing with emotionally charged issues in the CPO/CHRO role: 30:57
Recommendations to GCs who want to take on multiple executive roles: 36:34
Considering the right candidate for dual GC and CPO roles: 42:39
Book recommendations: 46:37
What you wish you’d known as a young lawyer: 50:19
Connect with us:
Rachel Olchowka - https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachel-olchowka/
Tyler Finn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerhfinn
SpotDraft - https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotdraft
SpotDraft is a leading contract lifecycle management platform that solves your end-to-end contract management issues. Visit https://www.spotdraft.com to learn more.
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
There were definitely moments where I didn't know exactly what to do. Sometimes you have a manager and an employee, and the manager says the employee is terrible. And the employee says the manager is terrible. And both could be true, right? i think A lot of folks, sometimes we believe the manager and we, you know, assume that the employee is underperforming, balancing that dynamic with the fact that trust was so important to us, right? Those situations got very tricky.
00:00:29
Speaker
What do you need to know if you're considering taking on the people function? What's the difference between a Chief People Officer and a CHRO? And are GCs well positioned to take both of these roles on? Today, I am joined on the abstract by my friend Rachel Ochalka, who recently served as the Chief People Officer of Fetch.
00:00:52
Speaker
Before that, she was also Fetch's general counsel. She served in both roles at once for a period of time. And earlier in her career, she spent eight years in various legal roles of increasing responsibility at TransUnion. She started her career in litigation at Grippo and Eldon, and before that at Kirkland and Ellis. Rachel, thanks so much for joining me today. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
00:01:18
Speaker
I am looking forward to learning all about the people function from you. But before we get going on that, you left Fetch a couple of months ago and you're taking some time off this summer, been able to do anything fun.
00:01:33
Speaker
We're just getting started with the summer. I've got three kids and today was actually their last day of school. So yeah, I'm spending a ton of time with them this summer. They're already angling to get out of summer camp a couple of days and they hang out and have fun. So just going to be enjoying time with the kids, with the family.
00:01:53
Speaker
I feel like kids are getting let out like later and later these days. Do they at least get like a full two and a half months off or something like that? They do. Now summertime is so stressful for working parents because yeah camp and work schedules don't always line up. Camp is a little shorter day. Yeah, they are getting out a little later. Maybe the administrators have been listening to the working parents who beg for a little more time in the school year every year.
00:02:18
Speaker
I'm glad that you're taking some time off and I'm going to ask you later about sort of what's next for you and and what you're thinking. But let's go back to when you started at Fetch. You'd actually only been the GC there for a few months when you also took on the people function and took on the Chief People Officer title. How did that come about? How did you decide that that you wanted to, or you were ready to, or were you voluntarily told to become the Chief People Officer too?
00:02:47
Speaker
Yeah, I was not phone told. I asked for it. I asked for it actually a few times. So as soon as I got into the GC role, I was thinking not just about the legal function, of course. So I was the first legal hire GC. So we were busy, right? I was busy building out the function, getting the templates ready, right? Making sure that I understood everywhere that we had risk, we had agreements, we had processes that needed work.
00:03:12
Speaker
um But the then chief people officer left Fetch after I'd been there a short time, a couple months. um And I went to Wes, our CEO, and I said, hey, you know, I've been thinking about succession planning, and I've been thinking about this team. And I would love to take them on. It was a large team, 35 people, large relative to ah the size of legal teams, right? Yeah.
00:03:32
Speaker
And he said, thanks for offering to take it on temporarily. And I said, no, I really would like to do it full time. And to Wes's credit, he bet on me. So we took about a quarter, a little over a quarter, to just you know have me take on the team, start learning the functions, start leading the team to see how it went. And after a few months, I was in both roles permanently. And that lasted for about a couple of years.
00:03:57
Speaker
What aspect of taking on the people function do you feel like was the steepest learning curve for you coming from a more strictly legal background? It was all new to me. And so when I was interviewing for the GC role at Fetch, they asked, is there any area of the law that you would need to know as GC that you don't know yet? And I said, yeah, I have zero experience in employment. So it was an area where I didn't even really have the legal foundation when I took the role on.
00:04:27
Speaker
But learning is my favorite part of working. And so the thought of taking something on that was brand new to me, but that fascinated me. I have always been interested in what makes people tick. I did a psychology major in undergrad. I love the idea of great leaders and great companies and great cultures inspiring folks to do work, better work than they would have done in a different environment right to be a aligned behind a mission. And so that has always really interested me. But in terms of learning curve, it was all learning curve. right So I hadn't really interacted a lot with HR teams at all. right So when I was at TransUnion, I didn't have any HR issues. I you know talked with the recruiters a little bit, but that was it. So I spent a good amount of time, while I was leading the team, I spent a lot of time really, really focused on learning everyone's processes and functions.
00:05:17
Speaker
so that I could lead them well and so that I could share what they were doing appropriately with the rest of leadership and the rest of the company. Your title was Chief People Officer, CPO. and You see a number of other folks, both you know maybe at more traditional companies also in tech too when they take on both roles who are CHROs. How did you think about the title and do you think that that distinction is important?
00:05:43
Speaker
Good question. I've seen CPO and CHRO used interchangeably. Sometimes it can give a little bit of a sense of how the organization feels about the people or the HR function. But generally speaking, a Chief People Officer role will be broader than a CHRO role. So in addition to HR, HR was one very, very important, very broad part of what the Fetch People team was doing while I was there, of course, and continues.
00:06:11
Speaker
um But we also had our offices. So we had the teams that picked out the offices, built out the offices and managed the offices. Sometimes that lives under the COO org. We also for a time had IT, we had employee experience. So we looked at the HR or the people function more holistically than as just HR plus recruiting, HR plus talent management. And so I think the CPO role at Fetch for us and for me really reflected the way that we thought about human capital or people or employees, right? It was more about who they were as human beings, who they were as people. So a lot of focus on inclusion, a lot of focus on belonging, a lot of focus on the ERGs.
00:06:59
Speaker
And making sure that all the different people who made up the Fetch employee base, right? All different, different skill sets, different moments in their life. Making sure that everybody who came to Fetch felt like Fetch was for them was a really important focus. And the people title captures that, right? It's about the people. human resources, I find a little, we didn't even actually call our HR team HR. It was people operations. And so you see and you can learn a little bit about how a company views folks sort of as part of their culture with the way that that role is titled and also with the scope of that role.
00:07:36
Speaker
When you stepped into it, what was sort of the state of the union, both in terms of the function and the company culture? I mean, you're talking about right like shaping company culture more broadly. I'm curious, you know what was it like then and and what are you proud of having built over the past few years?
00:07:53
Speaker
Yeah, the team was great and they were mature in terms of the way that they worked together, what they were focused on. Throughout my time at Fetch, the thing that I'm most proud of is how the team worked together and their unyielding focus on making sure that the people at Fetch, every single person, whether they were a top performer, whether we're an executive, right? Or whether they were struggling, unsure about their future there.
00:08:20
Speaker
The people team at Fetch made and makes everybody feel, to my earlier point about inclusion, like Fetch is there for them. And the employee experience at Fetch was really a positive one, at least in terms of the feedback that we got in engagement surveys right and reviews. That's what I'm most proud of. The team was amazing. They still are, of course. They work so well together. The teams are cross-trained really well. And so there are no single points of failure on the team.
00:08:48
Speaker
And folks from all different functions would step up when we had a leave or if someone was out or on vacation, the team functioned really, really well together. That is what I'm most proud of.
00:09:00
Speaker
as you rolled out these different sorts of programs like learning and development, or I know you're very proud of the parental leave sort of policy that you crafted, we can chat about that, or different yeah ERGs. I do think with other executives, I mean, of course, there's a thought that like, if we have the right culture, the business will thrive, right? But to a certain extent, these are also sometimes seen as costs to the business, right? Did you ever encounter pushback from Not specific executives, but people on the executive team. And and how do you how did you handle that? Because the objection there is a little bit different maybe than on the legal side, which is, this is just too risky, right? How how did yeah how did you how did you handle that?
00:09:40
Speaker
Yeah. So at Fetch, the leadership team is exceptional. And I never had pushback. No one ever said, why is this so expensive? We did it we redid the whole benefits package. I mean, I said it, of course. But it was never in a way, they were never blocking what we were what we were doing. right We redid the entire benefits. We got a lot of feedback that the benefits were not great. They were a little cheap. They didn't cover enough stuff. Folks were writing big checks and taking out their credit card when they went to the doctor's office, which I hate doing. right Yes. You're paying every paycheck for your health coverage, right? And you're still having to pay for everything that you're doing. So we just threw everything we were doing with benefits with a couple of exceptions in the garbage. We just got rid of all of it. We hired a broker and we said, we want to build something that is really, really exceptional.
00:10:26
Speaker
But that stuff is not cheap. The way that it worked, generally, when I was talking with the other executives, when we were presenting, you know, this is what we think is important, this is what we think we want to do, to make sure that there was consensus and that everybody was aligned, there was always back and forth negotiating with the benefits specifically, we figured out how to price the different plans, right, so that not everybody would select the plan that was most expensive to the company.
00:10:51
Speaker
But we were all aligned always on making sure that the folks at Fetch felt engaged, felt like they were part of something, and that they didn't have sort of needless administrative hassle when they were living their lives. So I was very, very lucky with the executive team at Fetch. At other organizations, CHROs, CPOs, and GCs face similar sort of struggles or frustration ah CFOs often face similar destination right where you're not driving revenue directly and so advocating for more expensive plans or policies or we did a really amazing welcome kit for new employees to really really make them feel
00:11:38
Speaker
Like they were special for having been selected to join us at Fatch, right? So they would start out feeling really great. I didn't get pushback. Oh, that's not worth it. Or we shouldn't be doing that. Everybody was aligned. And to the extent that something was very expensive or would take a lot of resources or time or energy from other things that we were doing. there was always a very healthy negotiation and balance. So we didn't always do everything the way that we first proposed it, or the way that know we would have loved to see it if we could have you know written our own future just within the people team. But that push and pull and negotiation and balance is critical to having a functioning and healthy business, right? You cannot pay everyone a million dollars a year.
00:12:22
Speaker
And so there are always going to be trade-offs and negotiations, but the entire time that I was at Fetch, those negotiations were always centered on wanting to make sure that everybody was doing the right thing for everyone working there.
00:12:35
Speaker
I have like a little bit of a follow-up on that, which is, as you're thinking about working with the executive team and having that negotiation, is the role of the chief people officer a little bit different in terms of crafting the culture within the exec team and how those discussions happen, not just around benefits, but on other issues than when you were in the in the GC role sort of strictly or or just coming to things from the legal perspective? This is a really good question.
00:13:02
Speaker
I think when I sort of walked through the doors, the imaginary doors, because I was on Zoom on my first day I started during the pandemic, but when I started at Fetch, I think this is common of first time you know executive leaders. I had a lot of the skills that were important background to be able to do at least the GC role, right? But I didn't have a lot of the executive sort of, I want to say executive functioning, that's not quite the right word, but yeah ah the skills that you need to work well within an executive team.
00:13:31
Speaker
Now I learned I'm on the job, right? I appreciated my my colleagues being patient with me as I went through my learning curve. But I do think you find a way to take yourself out of the equation, right? And so if you're a chief people officer and you're thinking we must do this for the people,
00:13:48
Speaker
or this is what I want to have done. And I think we all fall into these traps, especially if you are really passionate about the work that you're doing. You really have to take yourself out of it. And so I was there, right, when we were talking about making changes or improvements, I was there not as the only person who cared about the people, right, or not as the head of all of the people, but as someone who was bringing sort of bridging between the employees and their needs and desires and the things that we know keep people around. Which was concentration, right? Bringing that stuff to the executive team as a shepherd of the idea, as opposed to as, you know, this is this is my vanity project, right? It impacts your objectivity if you approach work in that way. And so it was really important to take a step back, take a step out of my own personal feelings. Parental leave is such a great example because I have three kids.
00:14:42
Speaker
while also working. So taking yourself out of it makes it much easier to be objective and to negotiate those things with your fellow leaders, which will always need to happen. Let's talk about parental leave, actually. I'm curious because I know that it's an area that you're very passionate about. What do you think companies should should do on that topic? And how do you think they reach the right answer? Is there only one sort of right answer around parental leave or Does it vary based on the sort of like company and employee base that you have? i mean Obviously Fetch is largely you know sort of like white collar in office employees. yeah Talk to me a little bit about what companies should be doing on on that topic in particular. I think with any policy, there's never going to be a one-size-fits-all approach across industries, across companies of different size and maturity. right There are some companies that are so small that they're exempt from FMLA.
00:15:37
Speaker
yeah and And not all companies can afford to pay someone for weeks and weeks and months and months while they're out on leave, right? I think the guiding principle should be think about the whole family. And don't just think about so don't just think about the birth giving parents, certainly. And don't just think about heterosexual couple with a man and a woman having a biological baby that is fully their own, right? There are yeah many, many, many ways to make a family. And so any parental leave policy that doesn't cover surrogacy, adoption, foster care,
00:16:07
Speaker
that doesn't cover leave for pregnancy loss, in my opinion, it should be regardless of the reason for loss, is missing the point. And so thinking holistically about the whole family and how families are created and the many, many different ways that can happen, that's really important. I think another guiding principle would be do as much as you can. And then when you feel like you're at that threshold, really, really go deep with, is there more that we could do? So there are a lot of elements that make up a parental leave policy. Certainly, there's the time away from work. And there are some really HR specific details there around short term disability, etc. You got to think about the time away from work. At Fetch this spring, we rolled out a baby bonus where we would pay a cash bonus to folks as soon as they let us know that the baby was born because we know that when you have a baby, it's an expensive time in your life.
00:17:01
Speaker
So there are many, many different things, phased return to work, working with the managers so that they really understand what parental leave is, why it's important, and how to objection handle with the rest of the team, right? So some folks feel, oh, I have to take on all this extra work because so and so is out for weeks or months at a time.
00:17:20
Speaker
starting to look at leaves as a positive opportunity for the team, which I firmly and genuinely believe they are, I have benefited from getting to do different work that I hadn't been exposed to before when a colleague was out on leave. There are also really important lessons around efficiency.
00:17:37
Speaker
when folks go out on leave, right? You don't have to spend eight hours on every contract, right? Not everything has to be perfect. And those are really important lessons for the whole career and, you know, maybe life in general, right? So I think viewing leaves is positive. And then providing that support and people teams are important, leaders are important as well here, making sure that the teams don't get crushed.
00:18:02
Speaker
when folks go out on leave. So you can bring in temporary help, right? You can shuffle work around, which obviously depends on the function. So taking a holistic view, as opposed to saying, oh, give this person some time off because they need to recover from the physical, you know, you know after effects of pregnancy and childbirth, thinking about it in a broader way is important. Last point I'll make is parental leave covers not just the birth giving parent if there is a birth giving parent, right? But in a, in a family like my family, where it's my husband and I, and we had three biological kids, parental leave for the non birth giving parent is for the birth giving parent, right? So that you have support so that you can get sleep so that you can have a little bit of help. And so it's common, I think for folks to say, ah Do we really need to give the dad
00:18:53
Speaker
eight weeks, 10 weeks, 12 weeks off. But it is really about the whole family unit, and not just about the parent who gives birth or or doesn't give birth. So lots and lots of considerations, but that guiding principle of do as much as you can and then push a little bit further. I know when I was having babies, I so appreciated TransUnion's support and the ability to go off and focus on building my family without also being sort of wrapped up in work at the same time.
00:19:21
Speaker
And on that last point too, I mean, I think that there's increasing sort of research that shows that in a case where there's a birth giving parent and and another, health outcomes are a lot better, mental health outcomes, that sort of thing, right? So like thinking about it as the whole family, I like that, that framework.
00:19:38
Speaker
slightly different topic, which is, I'm curious about hiring, you know, you've hired for lawyers before and and had teams, but hiring for people, not only do you have a bigger team, and you have sort of a very diverse team in a sense, right? I mean, hiring for a recruiting profile is probably very different than hiring someone who's really good at compliance or around various ah HR logs, bylaws and regs. But how did you how did you approach hiring? Once you became chief people officer, and did you have to look for talent in ah in a different way than you had before?
00:20:08
Speaker
I definitely did. So not knowing each role and function made hiring really challenging initially. right I didn't know what a great recruiting coordinator would do. I didn't even know the whole scope of the role. So I spent a lot of time personally really understanding the JD, the job description, right? But it wasn't just about the job description. It was about the job and the work. And so it was useful for me when I early hiring, when I first took on the chief people officer role,
00:20:37
Speaker
I would really dig in. I would shadow folks. I would try to understand their role well so that I could understand beyond culture fit is a little bit of a tricky phrase because I think folks can use culture fit in interviews to to end up intentionally or not with a homogenous team.
00:20:55
Speaker
sure But culture fit for us at Fetch, who's really more about our performance culture, is this someone who can work in a very, very fast paced, very dynamic environment where things change quickly? And not just can they work in that environment, but do they thrive in an environment like that? Do they crave an environment like that? And so on both the people and the legal side, that was really important because there is a profile of an HR employee or a lawyer who has been doing the same thing for a long time or who has a really firm point of view on the way that things should be done or must be done. So that would not have worked at Fetch. Maybe it would work in a you know compliance focused function in a heavily regulated industry, right? And so looking for folks, for us the main focus was, will they love this environment? Does this give them what they need, what they crave, what lights them up, what brings their energy up?
00:21:52
Speaker
And that was the same in people and in legal. In both people and legal, it was very important for us to find folks who wanted to, were energized by doing things in the fetch way. So on the people side, that was not being a conventional HR function.
00:22:10
Speaker
If there was something that everybody everybody else was doing, right, but we weren't doing, we did not just automatically snap to that, right? And just start seeing the thing that was common. We pushed, we questioned, we we thought really deeply, do we want 9Box performance management? So 9Box is a way to look at not just work or performance, but also potential.
00:22:33
Speaker
We spent hours and hours debating, is nine bucks too conventional? Is the way that we're doing things too unconventional, right? And so we spent a lot of time sort of pushing on and challenging the everybody's doing it this way perspective on things. And we did the same thing in legal.
00:22:50
Speaker
And so we were looking for those things as well. The biggest difference for me with hiring was that I was less familiar with the people roles. And so I leaned a little more on my leaders in terms of what they felt was important in the hiring process, I felt really, really comfortable hiring in legal, knowing needed.
00:23:09
Speaker
but definitely leaned more on the leaders there and also the the specific subject matter expertise to your point about having a diverse team. The people team was made up of folks doing HR, folks doing comp and benefits, folks doing DEIBA work, right? yep Social impact, we had IT like I mentioned in offices. And so we would always start with, can this person do the job? And do they want to do the job in the way that we want them to do the job? So the hiring was very, very similar in people and legal. But the specifics of the jobs and people took a little bit more work on my end to just learn and make sure that we we're making the right decisions.
00:23:52
Speaker
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00:24:12
Speaker
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00:25:05
Speaker
We want our employees here talking to each other in person in their cubicles or open office plan or what have you. And then there's the remote side, which is we want to go and we want to find talent wherever it is and we don't care if you're here and we just want you to be able to talk to your colleagues on Zoom. And where do you come down in in that debate? I think both models actually can work to a certain extent, but where do you sit from from your experience leading people both through COVID and and also in the years afterwards.
00:25:39
Speaker
Yeah, there is a personal answer to that question, which is for me, and it's important to keep them separate, but we'll talk about that. For me, that flexibility, the ability to be at home is really, really important. I don't even like traveling for work, right? And so everybody is different. I think part of it is recognizing that everyone really is totally different. So for me going into the office five days a week, commuting into the city from the suburbs where I live,
00:26:06
Speaker
That's like a no for me, that's like a red line for me, work with. But some people, and we had a lot of people, including young employees, which surprised me at first, who really not just wanted to be in the office, wanted to be in the office every day, and wanted everybody else to be in the office every day.
00:26:23
Speaker
and so those are two extremes right and then again there's my sort of personal perspective which is i really love being home i love being in my own space i don't love commuting i don't love getting dressed up i am an introvert so a lot of reasons why i like being at home but it was also important to be able to separate that out from what's best for the company because i do believe there are some companies and some functions certainly that do have to be in the office. So the folks who were managing our offices had to be in the office every day or pretty much every day, right? And then there are some roles where it's a little fuzzy, some roles that work very, very well, being at home or being remote all the time. So throughout my time at Vetch, I tried to be open-minded to see the world beyond my firmly held perspective in terms of what's best for my life and my family.
00:27:11
Speaker
We never had a return to office, like a firm requirement that folks be in on certain days or some minimum number of days that ran across the business. Trust was one of our really important core values. And part of that included trusting leaders to make the decisions that were right for their teams. So we did have some teams that came into the office more often than other teams did.
00:27:35
Speaker
And that was sort of led by their leadership by their managers. And that was good with me with us, right? But I think keeping an open mind in terms of, you know, shifting needs requirements, how is it going hiring talent, we had some really interesting journeys when I started it was October 2021. So sort of mid pandemic, but not the craziness of 2020. When the pandemic started fetch, I wasn't there, of course, but fetch had gone fully remote started hiring folks all across the country. At one point, we had folks in 47, maybe 48 states. I was very jealous of the person or people in Hawaii. But totally and that worked very well for us. We had a a really strong slack. Yeah. Sure.
00:28:20
Speaker
There was a strong emoji culture within Slack, and so we saw folks building groups, building affinity groups, building teams, and building camaraderie and relationships really, really well over Slack and virtually, generally speaking. We continued hiring folks all across the country with some exceptions. There were some roles where we wanted folks to be together.
00:28:43
Speaker
We were really, really focused on getting folks together very frequently. yeah And so you wouldn't be apart forever. We wanted everyone to meet. We wanted folks to benefit from in-person face-to-face interaction because it is magic. There's no question about that.
00:28:58
Speaker
I think the question is how often do you have to do it to capture that magic, yeah the magic to turn into business outcomes. So we always kept an open mind. We built out our offices in a way that made them really welcoming. We didn't require folks to come in. And so the folks who came in did it voluntarily.
00:29:17
Speaker
We had amazing snacks, great coffee, ahha beautiful offices, and the office design was very intentional. We wanted to make sure that there were spaces for everybody. So every office, every fetch office has spaces for introverts, spaces for extroverts. In our Chicago office, which is our flagship, there's like a little secret nook actually on the most social floor, because we know that introverts mostly benefit from being around people, but they need their quiet, they need their space, they need to recharge. And so right behind the big meeting rooms where we did our all company town halls, there was like almost a secret hallway, you wouldn't know it if you weren't looking for it. And it had bench seating, it had booths, it had beautiful views, floor to ceiling windows.
00:30:02
Speaker
And the Madison office has something like that. Birmingham office has something like that. So we made sure that the offices were welcoming for everybody, not just for the extroverts, although we have spaces for them as well, of course. So that folks would feel welcome when they got there, when they got together, right? The space would facilitate that interaction that was magic. And that worked really, really well. But you have to keep an open mind. Things shift, things evolve. We noticed that our peer companies and a lot of the tech sector,
00:30:32
Speaker
moved back in office, we made a decision to continue doing what we were doing because it was working very well for our folks. And it is one of the best recruiting advantages that a company can give itself. Yeah, but you get great people right from, you know, you get candidates from all over. And there are still a lot of folks who want to be home and want to have that flexibility. So it works very well for us. But every company is different. And that's not the only way.
00:30:57
Speaker
One of the reasons I was really curious to do this interview with you is I worked with someone who was both a chief legal officer and a CHTRO for a period of time. And he would often say that one of the most challenging parts of doing the people HR work was it's much more emotionally charged. That was actually the most difficult part for him. And he and I worked on very hard stuff together. We worked on public policy stuff and crisis comm stuff and compliance issues. And, but that all felt very intellectual in a way that an employee coming to you with a personal benefits problem or unhappy about their salary or
00:31:39
Speaker
refusing to work for this manager anymore, did not. rap I'm curious how how you made that adjustment. it Well, one, I suppose if you found the same thing or experienced the same thing, two, how you made that adjustment.
00:31:55
Speaker
Yeah, they are roles that have so much in common, the GC and the CPO role. Yeah, and there are so many things that are so different. I loved that balance. I loved the hard intellectual work of being a lawyer, trying to figure out whether we could do something that had never been done before or that was controversial, maybe dealing with challenges with contract negotiations or with relationships if those things came up from time to time.
00:32:22
Speaker
I love that hard intellectual where you have to apply your brain to a problem and your brain has to do its best. You have to be hydrated and caffeinated and fed and energetic to to have sort of optimal brain functioning to find the answer. I love that. I also love people, and I find the millions or billions of of things that act on us that impact the way that we show up, how we feel about work, the work that we do, I love, love, love, love that.
00:32:53
Speaker
And so there were elements of each role that really provided something that the other role didn't. It reminds me Ruth Bader Ginsburg once wrote that this was about parenting and work. She said, each part of my life was respite from the other. And I think a lot of working parents can relate to that, right? You love your kids, but sometimes you are done wiping their noses and you would like to focus on your own pursuits, right? Every parent I know feels some version of that. It was the same thing with work. So there were elements of the CPO role that I absolutely adored that I did not get at all from the general counsel role. One example is we expanded our parental benefits beyond leave. And there was an employee at Fetch who was able to adopt a baby using that benefit. He invited me to the adoption hearing.
00:33:38
Speaker
on wow Yeah, and that was really moving and powerful. Gizzy Goosebumps just talking about it. You never get a moment like that as a GC, right? Folks would be grateful for your help and man, you really got ah us out of a difficult situation or thanks for getting that deal over the line. Not a thankless job by any means. yeah That ability to have impact on folks in the CPO role was something that I just adored and and didn't really have in the GC role.
00:34:06
Speaker
to your question about can it be draining? Absolutely. It can be it can be hard. You can have employees in very, very difficult situations. There were definitely moments where I didn't know exactly what to do. Sometimes you have a manager and an employee, and the manager says the employee is terrible. And the employee says the manager is terrible.
00:34:23
Speaker
could be true right A lot of folks, sometimes we believe the manager and we you know assume that the employee is underperforming, balancing that dynamic with the fact that trust was so important to us. right We had to trust the managers to lead their teams. We had to trust the employees to tell us whether they were happy or engaged and you know how they felt about work. Those situations got very tricky.
00:34:46
Speaker
I also would get calls, you know, Fridays, we joke Fridays are are busy, busy days in HR, folks can hold it together all week. The week starts to wind down. They're looking ahead to the weekend. There were many Friday nights that I was on the phone, eight o'clock, nine o'clock, 10 o'clock at night working through issues.
00:35:02
Speaker
ah And ah it didn't bother me. You say, yeah and and there were, you know, when the phone was ringing and I was sitting at dinner with my family, and man, I had that same reaction, right? But i got a lot of it really brought my energy up to try to help folks out surerk to find a solution and try to make sure that we were being balanced and pragmatic. And I hate the word fair, but it sort of worked in the situation. An important part of the CPO role is boundaries.
00:35:27
Speaker
And so if anyone can call you anytime with any problem, then you actually can't do your job, right? And so for me, there was a ah need to find a balance between being an authentic, available CPO, yeah but also reserving the ability to do my job and live my life and not burn out.
00:35:47
Speaker
And so drawing boundaries is really important. Maybe there are times that you're available for everybody and times that you're not. And you can provide those opportunities with office hours or with being in the office when folks are around. But it does take some but intentionality, I think. around drawing the boundaries. But really, any executive role is going to be a 24 seven always on, you know, I used to joke that not joke, really, but you know, if if my CEO called me at one in the morning and said I needed something, I would I would get out of bed. Absolutely, I would. Right. And so when the work is more personal or can be more draining, like a CPO role, especially when things get tough.
00:36:26
Speaker
You just need to find ways to create balance around the work that needs to be done as opposed to saying it's five o'clock. You're not going to find me until tomorrow. Right. You were both the GC and CPO for a period of time and then at the last six months or a year or so, you had the CPO role as ah as a standalone and had a legal counterpart. Curious if you felt like it's possible to do both roles really well, what you recommend to folks who are maybe facing or you know deciding that they want to take on more, should they be thinking, okay, at some point I need to give one of these up? How do you think about that?
00:37:02
Speaker
I think both roles can be done by one person well, but it's really challenging. It's really challenging. So I think someone who's thinking about doing both roles needs to really understand the resourcing on both teams. So it is true sort of universally that you can't lead and be in the weeds all the time.
00:37:22
Speaker
I see them as sort of like, it's a door and only one can go through at a time, right? So I think it's good to be a leader who, you know, rolls up their sleeves and gets their hands dirty and is there with the team when things are needed. But if you are understaffed, you will be in the weeds, right?
00:37:39
Speaker
We will be doubly in the weeds if you have two, but really it's more like 10 or 15 or 20 areas of responsibility because there's a lot of different work that rolls up to a GC and there's a lot of different work that rolls up to a Chief People Officer. So the most important thing is your team and your resources. If you've got a great team and specifically I'm really focused on the leaders one level below you.
00:38:03
Speaker
So you've got a great couple deputy GCs and you've got a great head of talent acquisition, head of people operations or HR, right? Then it is 100% doable, 100%. If you are under resourced, if you are an individual contributor in one or more areas, if it is hard to get more roles when you go to your team and you present the data and the benchmarking and you say we need more folks,
00:38:29
Speaker
yeah Then it will be very, very difficult to do both roles and there's really high burnout risk. But I definitely think that they can both be done. One of the sort of lesser understood challenges about being a GC and CPO is that in many, many situations, even beyond employment related issues,
00:38:48
Speaker
the GC and CPO are very powerful allies on the leadership team. And if you are in both roles, then you are sort of taking away another human being who could be there, not just to help you, but to bounce ideas off of. So the confidentiality sort of protections and access to data are similar. And generally speaking, it's two people who are thinking broadly about risk, about what's best for the company, all the way across the company.
00:39:16
Speaker
And so it is very nice. i When we brought in a GC and I moved into 100% focus on the CPO role, he and I got along really, really well. It was great to have a counterpart. And it was great sometimes to have something that I would have done a alone when I was in both roles, but to be able to hand a piece of it over to him or to be able to you know seek his counsel on something. Because we all benefit from bouncing ideas off of folks who are smart. And so there it was really, really nice to have a counterpart and to have someone I could talk to and and and we could work through issues together. That's something that I didn't think about when I asked to take on both roles. And, you know, it wasn't an insurmountable challenge, but there were definitely moments where it would have been nice to have someone else's CPO or someone else's GC when I was making decisions or working through things.
00:40:06
Speaker
That's really interesting. And for what it's worth, by the way, when I've talked to other folks who have been dual-hatted as GC and CHRO or Chief People Officer, they consistently say what you say, which is they might be able to step a little more easily into the weeds because they grew up as a lawyer, right? And have subject matter expertise. Doing that on the HR side is really hard. There was another episode of this podcast that I did with Vanessa Gage, who's amazing. And we talked about interim roles. And she took on an interim CFO role for a while. And she felt very similarly about taking on the finance function, which is to say, if you have great subject matter experts working with you directly reporting into you,
00:40:51
Speaker
will go really well. If you don't have those folks, it's going to be really, really challenging. Yeah. Yeah. But you know it's a good it's good practice as a leader, especially if you start as GC. I think it's probably rare that someone starts a CPO or CFO and takes on GC responsibilities because it's very specialized, right, in its persistence profession. But um the legal sort of work that you do in the run up to becoming a GC, right, your law school and your whole career as a lawyer before you become a GC, prepares you well in some ways to be a GC. But it doesn't really prepare you. My legal work and training did not really sort of directly prepare me for how operational the chief people officer role was, right? if I had always successfully resisted having my work evaluated based on performance indicators or KPIs because I did highly complex work, right? And when you're doing contracts, think about a ah massive you know licensing agreement that lasts a decade.
00:41:49
Speaker
versus an NDA, right? and And so there's so much complexity in a legal role that makes KPIs really tricky or complex. yeah In a chief people officer role, the data, the analytics, that's everything. Because you can't say, Oh, this thing is working because people are happy, right? that's that won't do i mean it's it It's meaningful, right? But that's not the whole story. And so getting into that sort of metrics driven mindset was a huge, huge shift for me and candidly really challenging. Yeah, so the operational aspects of the chief people officer role, I learned them over sort of a longer period of time, and I would still have plenty of learning to go if I were still in a CPO role or took on a new one. But it was it it is definitely, definitely possible to do
00:42:37
Speaker
both well. Maybe that's a great lead in to sort of my last substantive question for you, which is if I'm a GC or and I'm thinking about taking on the CPR role as well. Is that a good idea? Right? Who is this right for? Because presumably it's fairly like to be fair, right? Like it's not right for everyone. Not everyone is going to enjoy being dual-hatted like this.
00:43:01
Speaker
Yeah, I think um the GCs for whom this would be the right move, right, also taking on CPO or CHRO responsibilities, I think the the passion for people and culture is a necessary but not sufficient to be very lawyer-y.
00:43:18
Speaker
prerequisites to being able to do that role. you have to You have to be energized by the work that comes with being a CPO or a CHRO. So I think that's the first thing. I know a lot of lawyers, and I have talked to a lot of lawyers who said, I can't believe you did that. I would never do that. I would never want to do that. right and so But for me, it was like,
00:43:37
Speaker
I wanted it so badly. I really, really, really wanted it. I wasn't on the fence about doing it. I really, really wanted to do it. So I think that passion drives you through the Friday night, 8pm, you know, there's something is going wrong. There's an emergency moments. You do need that. I think in any job, the love that you have for the work or the enjoyment that you get out of the work carries you through the times that are difficult.
00:43:59
Speaker
and And back to the operational piece of being a Chief People Officer, I really think you have to have, even if not a love for operational rigor, you have to be open to it. And you have to accept the fact if you are a lawyer, GC, who's going to step into a CHRO or Chief People Officer role, you have to know how big an element of that role, the analytics, the KPIs, the OKRs, that operational rigor element of the work,
00:44:26
Speaker
You have to understand that it's an enormous piece of what makes a CPO or a CHRO successful. And I counsel someone who's about to step into the dual role. That is the first thing that you should start digging into and learning more about, if that means taking a class, right, or just studying reading books. That's a really, really important sort of, I think, hurdle for some folks who are interested in and have the opportunity to take on both roles that needs to be addressed early.
00:44:56
Speaker
This has been great. What's next for you, Rachel, as you think about the fall and the rest of the year? And what are you excited about in terms of a next adventure or are you just focused right now on enjoying the summer and spending time with your family?
00:45:12
Speaker
ah all of the above. I am very, very excited to spend more time with my kids. They're five, seven, and eight. They are at the most perfect ages. They are sweet and they're funny and they're smart and they bring home crazy facts about bugs I've never heard of or inventions I haven't thought about since I was a little kid. So for now, I wrapped up at Vetch at the end of May.
00:45:35
Speaker
and so for now i'm just focused on hanging out with them they're getting out of school it's gonna be summertime we're in chicago summer in chicago is just about as good as it gets so focusing on that and you know the next role i'm not sure i don't know if i had to guess i would say it's probably a little more likely that it will be a gc role yeah Like I said, I loved, loved, loved the impact element of the CPO role. And so if I end up taking on a GC only role, of course I would do both again. But if I took on a GC only role, I would have to really think about how I could bring that culture and people and impact side to the work without sort of stepping on anybody's toes. And maybe that's within the legal team. Maybe there's something broader like sponsoring an employee resource group.
00:46:21
Speaker
But I do know that I loved that balance between the two roles, the intellectual rigor of the general counsel role, the impact in the chief people officer role. So we'll see. But for now, just enjoying the beautiful summer in Chicago and hanging out with my family.
00:46:37
Speaker
As we start to wrap up, there's a couple of questions that I like to ask most of, if not all of our guests. The first is if there's any books that you would recommend for me or our audience to to read and they can be people related and and sort of management related or just something that you've enjoyed recently.
00:46:58
Speaker
I love it. I have three books that I will recommend and each of them sort of touches on this different piece of me and I think will resonate with listeners in different ways. So as a person really focused on people and culture and building that in a business, Patty McCord was Netflix's CHRO.
00:47:18
Speaker
Netflix has this amazing culture. Their culture deck is available publicly. And Patty McCord wrote a book called Powerful, Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, that is unequivocally the best book I have ever read about culture. It's not too tactical. It's not too focused on the KPIs, the metrics, the operational rigor. It really is more about creating an environment where folks are able to do their best work, be creative, be free, because they feel trusted.
00:47:47
Speaker
So Powerful is absolutely one of my favorite books. We ran a leadership development cohort-based course, essentially, for folks on the cusp of leadership. And we gave copies of that book out at the end of a couple of the cohorts. It is a really exceptional book, and it's short and an easy read.
00:48:03
Speaker
As a parent, I read a little bit about parenting and about the decisions around parenting. And the parenting book I'm reading now is called The Anxious Generation. It's about kids and smartphones and social media. It's getting a lot of rest. It's really interesting. The biggest takeaway for me is I should not get them phones. They're too young for that.
00:48:23
Speaker
And I should send them outside to run around and play with friends and get into trouble and fall out of a tree because risky in-person experiences are good for kids while risky online experiences have little of the same benefit. So that has been a very, very interesting book. I'm not done with it yet.
00:48:43
Speaker
And then one of my favorites, which you and I have talked about before, is a book called The Power of Full Engagement. It's an older book written by two guys who used to coach elite athletes, and then they switched to coaching executives and business folks. And that book is really about managing your energy, not your time. A lot of folks think, oh, I have to manage my time. I have to have enough time for everything. And really, it's more about managing energy. We all have experienced, you know, you get on a run with work,
00:49:11
Speaker
and you're able to do something in an hour or a few hours that are taking you weeks or would take you weeks in another whatever life or another situation, managing your energy, making sure that there's a balance between when you're doing your work and you're really engaged with that, and then rest, right or indulging your own taking a walk being with yeah friends getting coffee with someone networking, and that idea that the the rest or the time away from work isn't just time away from work. It's not time that's spent not working, right? Although it is, factually.
00:49:45
Speaker
Great. Better, right? When you're working, it makes you more productive, more creative. And so that book I read when I was in the throes of the GC CPO blended role, I had a lot going on. And it was very helpful for me. It almost allowed me to give myself permission to go to the gym or leave my phone upstairs for a few hours in the evening to hang out with my kids, which really made a big difference in my quality of life.
00:50:12
Speaker
I love that. That's one that's going in my Amazon cart this afternoon. Good, good, good. My last question for you, which I like to ask most folks, is, you know, if you could look back the days when you were a lawyer just getting started maybe at Kirkland and Alice, us what's something that you know now that you wish you'd known back then? Such a good question. I think if I could give that version of me advice,
00:50:38
Speaker
I would say be a little bit more bold in terms of what is working for you or not working for you. So I was a litigator for five years. I went to law school to be a litigator. That was the only reason I wanted to be a lawyer to begin with. I did not love litigation. And so I have a personality that lends me more to an in-house role. I like to build. I like to create things. I like a long arc, right? I like to see the work at the beginning. And then I like to see it pay off at the end, which you don't really get to do at at a firm, particularly in a litigation role, right? We would be brought in, we would dig in really deep, we would work really, really hard. And I remember when cases would settle, I would be disappointed not just because I wasn't gonna get trial experience, although that was part of it.
00:51:20
Speaker
but because i didn't want I wasn't ready to be done, right? I had just gotten in and learned this whole business, and I wanted more of that. But I stayed in litigation for five years, which was probably four and a half years you know too long. Not that I regret it, but I would have made a bolder decision, I think, knowing what I know now, and said, this isn't working for me. I'm going to go do something else. I was fearful around change for a very, very long time. And I think if you're really gutsy and you say,
00:51:47
Speaker
this isn't right for me. And see that not as a failure, not like you're not good enough to do this role. But like, I don't choose this. Yeah, you can end up finding happiness in your career. Maybe a little earlier, you can be on the path to doing, you know, having an eventual goal, like being a GC, or being a, you know, chief people officer or doing something else.
00:52:08
Speaker
that you you reach in a little bit more of a direct way if you are bold and if you really listen to yourself when something doesn't feel right for you and just make a move. So I would do that a little earlier. I'd have a little more courage around my conviction in terms of what's good for me. That's fantastic. This has been such a fun conversation. Thank you so much for joining me today, Rachel. Thank you for having me.
00:52:32
Speaker
And to all of our listeners, thanks so much for tuning into this episode of The Abstract, and we hope to see you next time.