Name: How to Empower Managers to Drive Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Productivity
Uploaded: 2025-10-01T18:31:05.810Z
Duration: 1 h 12 s
Description: How to Empower Managers to Drive Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Productivity

Transcript for "How to Empower Managers to Drive Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Productivity": Yes. Yes. Hello. Hello. Welcome. We're just gonna give it a minute or so as people tune in. If you wanna enjoy this discussion with Phoebe and I, we're just talking backstage about the morning show, news fosters. Phoebe, could you do it? I don't think I could be a newscaster. Could you? You know, I think I could. I would have a lot of fun with the pressure at the moment. Though I do tend to because my first language is Portuguese. Every now and then, I will mix up words, and my so called friends call it Priscila pearls, which are the ways in which I butcher the English language. And so sometimes, I will do those, phlemicisms or I will flip different words. And so I'm I'm not sure I would be a reliable new caster, but I would have a ton of fun with it. That is what is hilarious and so validating. You and Roxanne, my CEO, need to talk sometime because I I'm confident I'm convinced that this is a anyone who grew up bilingual, this is a thing that you have. I never get idioms correct. I'm always like, there's I know there's, like, two bushes. No. There's two chickens in the bush and one is in your hand. But one of them is worth more than the other one. I don't know, but I know it's a saying and you know what I mean when I say it. So, like, why complain? You know? A 100%. A 100%. Hello, all. Welcome. Welcome. We are so excited to be chatting with you today about this very, very important topic of managers, especially with by the way, PB, I don't even know that we talked about this that much in the prep, but everyone's also talking about, you know, this new world of replacing all middle managers with AI. So I'm excited to really dig in and talk about the importance of managers and how to enable them. Oh, if you are new, I wanna introduce you all to both of us. My name is Melanie Naranjo. I'm the CPO at Ethena. We're a compliance training company. We'll share more about that in a second. And I'm so so excited to be partnering with, with Priscila, who's the vice chair at LifeLabs Learning. And Priscila knows this. I'm such a LifeLabs fan girl. LifeLabs, for anyone who's not familiar, is, like, one of the best trainings out there. Like, truly, you you're gonna do a better job of this in a second. But it was such a pleasure to get to meet, PB and the LifeLabs team in person a couple years ago because I watched your trainings for the first time, I think it was, like, eight years ago and was so hooked. Like, truly, can we get some love for LifeLabs in the comments? Go plus one if you've ever taken a LifeLabs training or heard or heard some positive feedback about LifeLabs. I'm obsessed with the way, and and what a great transition into the topic, but I'm obsessed with how, how easy, you make manager enablement tools. Like, you don't overcomplicate things. You understand that they have to be simple in order to be memorable and applicable. So with all that said, PB, please introduce yourself and then talk to us all a little bit about LifeLabs before we jump into the topic for today's session. Yeah. No. Absolutely my pleasure. Wow. The good thing about this introduction, everybody, is that this is a a mutual fan club. So you're gonna have to hear me talking about how Ethena is compliance training that I actually stop everything else that I'm doing for just so I can participate fully. But let's tell you a tiny bit about LifeLabs Learning. So, truly, LifeLabs Learning has been spending more than the past decade, really, as Melanie said, translating the best in behavioral economics, cognitive psychology, industrial and organizational design into the most usable immediately applicable fun tools you can have so that instead of thinking that it's going to take months or years to develop your managers, you can do so immediately. You're gonna walk out of the room and already have tools to help people truly thrive in the workplace so that you can boost performance engagement and retention. We have trained over 3,000 companies globally on how to get their managers and teams to be much more effective and productive from the outset, and we really pride ourselves in ensuring that we remain super useful in these times of tech change. Now, hearing that Melanie has been a fan of our programming is also fabulous because, again, now that she has, like, celebrity status in in our world, I have to say that, you know, imagining that our companies have played a hand in really supporting each other in some of these initiatives is truly fantastic because I think that what brings Ethena and LifeLabs Learning together so well is that we're both really inspired by how to frame the future work. Right? How can we truly make the time that people spend together be meaningful, be productive, be engaging, be exciting, be authentic so that we can really achieve all of the goals we wanna achieve. But, Melanie, tell us more about Ethena too. Oh, hard to follow. What a good act. That was great. That was a really good sales pitch there. I'm I don't know if I can follow it. Phoebe, let me talk a little bit, yes, about Ethena. So we do compliance training, everything from harassment prevention and cybersecurity, hotline and case management. And one of the things that I have been particularly excited about, with Ethena recently is all the innovations we've had with AI. And before I even get into it, let me just get a plus one in the comments. If your CEO has been pushing you to do more AI, more AI, more AI. Is anybody else just hearing from everyone across the company, You gotta adopt it. I don't know how, but you better figure it out because it's not gonna replace your job. Okay. So a lot of people. Here's my take. Maybe controversial. I don't know. We'll find out. Tell me in the comments if you disagree with me. I think that it is absolutely critical that every HR professional educate themselves on what AI tools are out there and know enough about AI to understand the risks, to understand how to effectively adopt it with or roll out adoption at the company. What I don't think is that every single HR professional needs to now become an AI wizard and technical expert. Quite frankly, that's just that's not how we got to where we are in our careers, and I don't know that that's the highest impact value of our job. However, I do think we need to know enough about AI to use it effectively. And so the best analogy I can think of is, you know, I don't wanna have to learn how to build a car engine from scratch in order to be able to drive a car. I want somebody else to build the engine, and then I wanna know enough to be able to determine what is the right car for my needs and then leverage that car to drive to drive myself from point a to point b. So one of the things that we're really focusing on with Ethena is how do we empower HR professionals with the AI tools that they need to succeed and get ahead in their business and show their CEOs that they really are AI forward without forcing HR professionals to build everything from scratch. I'll give a very quick example and then we can move it along. But one of my one of the tools that we have that I'm so excited about is we have a PDF to training, converter. And so literally, if you say, for example, roll out a new PTO policy, you could literally upload the PDF of your, PTO policy to our platform, and it will spit out an interactive training for you with an AI copilot where you can say, oh, I like this, but please replace the images with, you know, factory workers because that's a better representation of our employees. And, oh, I don't like that you use the word HR. We actually use people at our company. Please replace all uses all uses of the word HR with people. It's just a better, faster way to do things without you having to build an AI tool from scratch. Your vendor should be doing that for you. So, I'm really, really excited about a lot of things that we're doing with Ethena to, yes, drive better compliance across the companies across all companies and also just make HR professionals' lives a little bit easier. Okay. Cool. Alright. With that said, should we get started, PB? Is that, like, did we do it? Alright. I was really excited when you all, when you all reached out about this topic because it's a topic that I hear about quite a bit. And I I wanna hear from you and your perspective, you know, especially LifeLabs being the kind of company that really focus so focuses so many of their trainings on the role of the manager. From your perspective, what breaks if we don't have great managers? Well, so it's it's such an interesting question, Melanie, because today, if I were to be very cheeky, I would say everything that makes work work. Alright. So when we think about all of the work that has been done in the last twenty years, for example, Google has tried twice to do away with managers and researched a lot of the impacts that that change would have And everything from engagement to productivity to retention to innovation suffered a hit in every instance. And there's been so much correlation between how is it that we think about the role of managers and the outputs that all of those organizations have. And so I think that in a world where every human could behave a 100% logically, a 100% clearly, learn a 100% completely, and internalize messages a 100% in alignment, we wouldn't need managers, but we do not live in that world. And so in a way, all of the times in which we try to take away, particularly as the creativity and complexity level of tasks that we need to do increase. When we try to disintermediate a lot of that from having someone who can be the bridge between the overall top strategy that you're trying to achieve and the day to day execution and the tactics of the work, we end up in trouble. So the cost is generally super clear. Right? You see goals being missed. You see slower cycle times. You see rework having to come through. You see a culture of conflict. You see, folks escalating things a lot more frequently, and then you end up having lots and lots of bottlenecks that impact outputs really severely. So here with that, you're talking a lot about the importance of managers, and I agree with you. I don't disagree with you. But but, you all shared a very interesting stat with me, which, you know, I'm not gonna give my opinion. I'm gonna actually hear from the audience before I share my perspective here. In the audience, can you all get your keyboard fingers ready? And, I'm gonna share a stat with you. What I'd love to know is on a scale of one to five, how surprised are you by the stat? Five being super surprised, one being not at all. 52%. Apparently, 52% of Gen z professionals don't want to be middle managers. How surprised are you all? Five, very surprised. One, not surprised at all. Gonna give it a second for everyone to drop in their thoughts. Fascinating. Very cool to see these answers. Oh, let's get a negative minus one. I know. I wish I could call on people because I'm always like, you gotta tell me more. Phoebe, as you see oh, we got one five. Very cool. Peebee, as you see these answers coming in, what's your perspective? Are you surprised by the answers, and are you surprised by the stat altogether? Yeah. So it's such a fascinating question because, again, as someone who really loves numbers, the first thing that also comes to mind for me is one, you know, what was it in other generations? Because when I hear the stat, I actually have to play my ignorance. I don't know what previous groups of people said. So we are implying and assuming that it is a decline from from previous generation. So maybe let's assume that it's a decline, but I don't know if it's a decline or not. So Okay. Fair enough. I'll say that, well, like, certainly, I'm, like, that was my goal because I thought that was the only way to get ahead in my career. I was like, I gotta be a manager. So right? Like, that's the only way. So but that is so interesting. Right? Because if we think about the the structural changes that the role itself has experienced. I was recently, seeing a a conversation, between the New York Times and and Brene Brown, and I thought that this was very interesting because for the first time, she articulated something that I thought, you know, folks have been talking a lot about intergenerational, differences in the workplace and attitudinal changes. And I've often been very skeptical of this because to me, there are as many differences within a certain group of people as there are amongst different groups. And so I'm like, you know what? Everything is heterogeneous. I don't wanna, generalize. But she did articulate something I thought was great, which is that historically, our pension and interpretation of work was very hierarchical. And so in prior generations, the idea of being a manager or a leader was that you could actually say, do this, and it would get done. There wouldn't be a whole lot of questioning. Now we are finding a moment where the immediate response is not, okay, I'll get it done. It is, why why do I have to do it? Not in a challenging way, but, like, help me understand. Is this truly the best way? Why not this other option? How about this other possibility? Or wouldn't we go this route instead? Or how did we get here in the first place? So there's so much more curiosity and interest in in expectation that whatever you're doing is going to be connected to a rationale that I now get to internalize that the expectation has gone up. Right? Like, this is no longer I just tell me what to do and I'm gonna follow your orders. If anything is engage me, coach me, convince me, support me, get me excited, which is a much different skill set to do. And at the same time, you still have managers being responsible for the output whether or not they're successful in that endeavor. You know what's fascinating to me about what you what you just said is it all resonates and also I think almost implicitly, maybe explicitly. What it signals to me is that the issue starts much higher up. Right? Because when you have people asking more and more questions, the reason it's hard is because you don't have those answers. Right? And you'll have those answers because somebody else didn't give you those answers. So classic example, somebody says I want to get x increase, and the manager comes back and says, sorry. That's gonna be a no. And the person says, well, why not? Why am I not making this much? What would it take to get this much? What market data are you using? The manager is sitting there. It's not that they don't wanna be transparent, it's that they themselves don't understand what the company's comp philosophy is, where HR or the team lead got that information from, and they themselves are struggling to answer those questions. And so what it makes me think is really part of the problem is that there's not enough transparency at the top. There's not enough, policy setting, philosophies, and ethos articulation such that managers don't need to be making things up or struggling to answer the questions. They should be able to much more easily answer these, in my opinion, yes, scary, but valid questions from director of Orange. I mean, what I see a lot of nodding on your end. Like, are you seeing this as well? Have you seen people who've done this particularly well? Well, absolutely. And I think that so this to me, like, it comes to the core of, you know, back to that question earlier of, like, why do managers matter? Like, to me, what's interesting is managers are, in a way, sense makers and pattern watchers. Right? Like so it's very interesting. Like, when you're a first time manager or as you just ex like, described, you're gonna have a conversation. That conversation seems difficult because either I've never had to do it, I've never been exposed to it, or it feels like I don't have the answers. Or in some cases, I, you know, I haven't been exposed to many instances of it. So whatever response I get, I immediately think that's how people react to that thing. When in practice, that may not be the case. There's an entire kind of which is why even at LifeLabs Learning, I try to encourage, like, scope of control to never be just one or two reports because that can skew your own perception as to, like, what is happening across the department or across the team or across the company because your sample size is so small. The flip side of that is, again, how exciting and fun and and great it is to see that when a manager does have a larger scope of control and when they are being equipped with the tools that you're mentioning. Right? Like, when they have access to the information, when they have access to the tools, and when the company has empowered them to actually really be explicit about policies that were well thought out and that we are implementing across the board because, you know, god help us from all of the world of exceptions, then I think managers can be massively effective because they do get to see all of the different variations of the implementation of that particular thing. You know, what's fascinating to me as I hear you, walk through that is I could imagine a lot of people listening. In fact, let me throw out a question to the audience before we jump in here because now I'm curious. Maybe maybe I'm I'm the only one who thinks this way. On a scale of one to five, five being agree, one being disagree, how much would you agree with the following statement? And don't worry. I wanna give everyone an out. You don't have to be out in your current company. Think about, like, any company you've worked at in the past. Right? Historically, would you agree with the statement that my company has dedicated adequate resources to manager development and enablement. So five being, like, historically, you know, across many companies, not just my current company. Five, like, they definitely did all the things that managers needed. One being not at all. Okay. What we're getting mostly low responses, I have to say. Like, not a ton of high ones. And what's interesting to me is, Priscila, the question I wanna ask you is, I imagine a lot of people hear arguments like this or are kind of like, yeah. But, like, that's the name of the game, man. Like, you chose to be a people manager. You're making more money as a result of it. Like, suck it up, buttercup. You know? Figure it out. You know? That like, you gotta figure out how to answer the questions because I don't have time to be doing all these things to enable you. Look, I'm paying you more money to educate yourself. What goes through your mind when I say that, and what would you say to an executive leader who who who genuinely feels that way? Yeah. No. So I would say that that is truly a failure of role design and the failure of resource allocation. Right? So nobody in any other circumstance or job would have the same attitude towards any other set of skills that you need to implement to the company and say, oh, let us get someone who's never done this specific job and who has not been equipped with the training or skills to do so, whom we haven't given the tools to and expect them to deliver all of these results, you know, straight away. I mean, that is nonsensical. And all it takes is just playing it back sometimes to go. If that's the attitude that we are, having when we are talking about managerial roles, we're already setting ourselves up for failure in that regard. Right? It's it's a it's a fallacy to expect that whatever success you had as an individual contributor is now going to translate into success as a manager because the skill sets are invariably completely different. And I'll go as far as to say some of the things that made you successful as an individual contributor contributor could backfire and make you a terrible manager. And many of us have may have been in that experience or seen what it looks like to have the interference or the micromanagement or have your autonomy taken away or folks that will say things that they would never have expected if it was going to be based on a managerial lens. So I do think that it is something that, again, we all have a responsibility to look at it responsibly and go, if we wouldn't treat an engineering job in this way or a sales job in this way or a customer service job in this way or an operations job or a finance job in this way, why would we actually entrust the role that is meant to be a multiplier across the team with such few resources. And I think that in some cases, the this state of affairs comes about because folks don't even know where to start or they themselves think, well, because it has happened already. Right? Like, the greatest, pushback I sometimes hear as well. My people have been managing for a really long time, and I'm like, oh, but the fact that you've done it for a very long time does not necessarily mean you've done it well or you've done it effectively or you can't tell what the counterfactual was going to be. So I do think that this notion of giving them the tools, giving them the resources, being clear on the policies, and ensuring that the application is also uniform across the board is super important because, otherwise, you will see the power of personalities come up in managers that are more forceful than others, and that's not how we want that role to be deployed anyways. I am so bothered, and I don't know if you are seeing this, PB, but you're getting so much love and, and, like, plus ones in the comments. People are super down with exactly what you're saying. I'm also gonna, like, come in and say, like, two tough things from the HR perspective. And in the comments, I welcome you to push back on me if you disagree. Okay? The first thing I I'm just gonna say it. I think that for better or worse, definitely for worse, HR professionals are often very quickly dismissed and just not taken seriously from, like, a business perspective. And so what happens is in this role, you have to earn trust. You're not just given trust when you join the role. You have to earn it, which means that, again, for better or worse, you have to go about these things very strategically when it comes to getting buy in. I'll give a very specific example. If I were to go to, like, a first time CEO that I was partnering with and say, hey. I need, you know, this budget and this many hours of every manager's time because I know that it's gonna lead to this much value and increase in revenue, make it happen. I'm going to guess that nine out of those 10 CEOs would be like, yeah. Every dollar spent towards management training is money that is not spent towards producing revenue, so that's a no. That's a no. And so a better approach when you are earning and, like, building up that trust is to really understand where you can, meet people halfway, in my opinion. I'll give an example. At a prior company where I worked, I did not have any approval for budget, or time for training. And so what did I do? I hosted voluntary sessions. They were voluntary, and I ran them myself. Not nearly as good at LifeLabs Learning. Don't worry. We got LifeLabs in afterwards, but once I got that buy in. Okay? But before that, I did my own and they were voluntary. So I wasn't taking away anyone's time when they were during lunch. And I was like, hey. Do you wanna have lunch with me? And I'll talk through some management best practices. And slowly but surely, that became an incredibly popular, such series where it was almost I think it was something like 50% of the people managers voluntarily started coming on a regular basis. And I just did it once a month during lunch break, and it led to change such that later, I was able to then get that buy in because they saw the impact that it had. So the one very tough thing I'll say is, I think, unfortunately, we are in a tough role where you have to earn that trust. Not it's not given it to you, even though it should be, but it's not. The second tough thing I will say is I think we need to own that too often in HR, we work in conflict with the business, not in harmony with the business. Let me be specific. I used to be the kind of person, so I own it by the way. I have empathy if you are in the at this point in your journey. I used to be the kind of person that would say, I have written a 10 page handbook on how to give feedback effectively. Every manager, please read this so you can give feedback effectively. And what did I learn? Not a single manager read it. Think that they didn't have the time. And what was my response at that time as the HR person who knew better? Well, you'd read it if you cared enough. But the reality is I wasn't listening. They do care. They just genuinely don't have the time. So what did I start doing? I actually, over time, finally, started realizing I need to meet them halfway. And I think, PB, you know this. One of the things that I'm really excited about that we do have Ethena and we we literally, it's part of our, common language at Ethena. Every employee knows it is we just had color coding our feedback. Because rather than making sure every manager gave feedback perfectly every single time, we just started saying, anytime you get feedback, just color code it. Is it yellow, orange, or red? Yellow is it's nice to have. It's a stretch opportunity. Nothing bad will happen if you don't take action on this. I just think it'd be a cool opportunity for you. Orange means, if you don't do this, I'm not gonna fire you, but it's gonna hold you back from promotion opportunities and from getting further up on the salary band. Red means danger, danger. If you don't improve on this meaningfully and quickly, your job's gonna be at risk. And so now we're to the point where sometimes when a manager gives wishy washy feedback as they inevitably do because we're all human and we air, the employee will say, you're making me nervous. Is this an orange or a red? And so my my advice to anyone who's struggling with this is, make sure that you're doing what you can to meet people halfway, and that you're actually listening to the underlying issues. So that that's that's my that's my spiel. Oh, PB, do you have any thoughts on maybe how, either where you've seen HR professionals accidentally partner in conflict with the business or, partner with them particularly effectively? Yeah. No. I I so love the the thread of everything that you're talking about because to me at the end of the day, it's about how do we ensure that all of the upskilling, the equipping, the tooling that we're giving managers happens in the flow of work instead of trying to be something that's outside or external. Right? So I'm a huge fan of whenever we're thinking about practices is, you know, are is there existing time? Are there existing processes? Are there existing routines where we can already embed it and not make, like, an additional system, an additional process, or an additional space that people have to go into? And I will, like, plus one Melanie's color coding because it's absolutely brilliant. Like, we see so many instances of folks misunderstanding the severity or urgency of feedback that's shared. And in our experience, a lot of miscommunication actually comes simply from that. It's like, oh, have you heard it? Yeah. But you didn't really internalize how important it was. Other things that that have been super helpful or that I think are great ways for HR to partner with the business is is that send of the the pattern setting that we were making. So for example, if we look at the feedback arena that you just highlighted, at LifeLabs Learning, I would often notice that if we were to look at what are the instances that are being escalated to HR or where is it that HR is getting involved, there was a pattern. And there were things around that that like, okay. Can we now take that and either simplify it for the managers and goes, if this is something that often we see happening, can I give you a quick formula so that you don't have to start from scratch every single time? Or if we solve it in this one particular way, can I immediately turn it around and ensure that every other team and department is also aware that this is a potential best practice that that they can make use? Because oftentimes, I see HR being reactive to things that have come from the business versus proactively ensuring that we are already staying ahead of all of those resources scenarios or things that I that I would like for you to see. So as much as I understand the pain that sometimes, like, this lack of time that the business can proclaim on certain areas, I also think that there is a a massive opportunity for HR to speak the language of, hey. We want to accelerate your results. We want to ensure that you're being efficient. Therefore, here are some preemptive things that hopefully aren't 10 pages. Yes. Yeah. Don't do that. That was a bad example of what not to do. Exactly. That you can use straight away. Oh, I know. I also think that to your point originally of, are we actually even speaking the same language? Right? Are we talking about just engagement, or are we talking about results? Do you really tied it to an ROI measure, or are we, kind of supposing what could happen? I also think that your idea of our pilot is super important because I often ask my team, like, what is the minimum viable amount of data that would actually double down on your case or make it so much more compelling. So then now it's no longer a question of opinion, but it is let us try this out so that we can understand the benefits of rolling it out more extensively as well. That we want is so critical because you will learn so much faster by putting something out there even if it's only, like, 80% good, than if you spend an entire quarter trying to perfect it only to then find out that it didn't solve the right problem. Also, shout out, PB. People are using LifeLabs Learning's language in the comments, and it made me so happy. Somebody was like, well, that's a very blurry word. I was like, oh, god. I'm loving it. It's that simplicity that really sticks with you. Okay. I wanna ask you a little bit about, a little more about the role that HR specifically plays in manager enablement. So in addition to, you know, things you were talking about, learn to speak business language, getting that buy in, What can HR do within the structure of their company, in their partnership with managers directly and their employees? What can they do to make sure that they are, helping drive manager success? Yeah. So I think that, you know, we've touched on some of those things. I think that the listening is super important because to your point, what's fascinating is in most instances, HR can even enlist the managers themselves to be a pressure point in here are the resources that we want. Right? So if we know like, if as an executive, as a CEO, if I know that my managers are clamoring for a particular resource, that will also carry away. And so I do think that that idea of of partnering as a collaboration and and truly stepping into this advisory role with a sense of, like, hey. I wanna enable you for success. What are the things that are going to make your life a lot easier? There, you know, there's a lot that you can do there, whether it is, again, simplifying are the areas that seem unclear or blurry. Where is it that applications of something that we thought was going to be a simple policy have actually not worked out in practice? Because sometimes that also happens with the best of intentions. We'll put something in place, but then there are unintended consequences down the line. And in many cases, the managers are the ones who are hearing it first or that are experiencing it first if all of that feedback is coming back. So how can you truly strengthen that sense of collaboration and partnership, rather than it being kind of, like, distinct disciplines. It's truly this idea of, like, us versus the problem. Yeah. You also said something that really stood out to me the last time we talked about, the importance of just setting clear expectations for managers around what it means to be an effective manager. And the reason that stands out to me so much is because I think so many man I think too many managers, especially first time managers who are going from being someone's peer to someone's manager, or the first time I see to now a manager, maybe they're trying to overcorrect for things that they didn't get from their own manager. I definitely did this myself. Is, you know, they misinterpret what it means to be a good manager. So they maybe think being a good manager is protecting your team against all like, at all costs. So it doesn't matter if they made the mistake, you gotta cover for them. Or, being overly gentle with your feedback such that they actually don't realize that if they don't do this, a year from now, when you had their performance review, you're gonna have to have the much tougher conversation, which is you didn't get that promotion. Or maybe they think that, you know what? The reason they're underperforming is because I, as the manager, have given them too much work. And I need the the solution is I need to take work off their plate. As opposed to, hey. Let's have a conversation around prioritization, efficiency, or, oh, there's conflict happening. Don't worry. I'll solve that for you. Like, there's not enough clarity around what actually does it mean to be a good manager. I have more thoughts on this, but I wanna hear from you, Priscila, since you brought this up, and I don't wanna steal your thunder. It was a wonderful thought. Tell me a little bit more about why this is so top of mind for you. I think that you're touching on something so important, and thank you for, like, remind bringing it back to this point, which is that sense of, like, you know, managers are people too. How can you feel confident, empowered, and successful in your own role if the expectations themselves of what being successful in that role are going to look like. And we're all human. And so in a sense, when you see the team failing, I think it is very reasonable for us to expect that for a lot of folks, they will internalize a lot of that as their own failing, and it is important for us as an organization to actually say no. No. No. That is actually you doing your job. And here are the ways in which we can equip. Because to me, setting that boundary of, you know, at the end of the day, you are responsible for supporting, again, an effective resource allocation and delivery of outcomes, but you cannot be expected for those outcomes yourself entirely. And I think that that distinction is very, at times, tough to communicate effectively because you wanna hold managers accountable as well. And you also wanna set some limits for where does my responsibility and accountability as a coach and as an enabler end and when there's your responsibility and accountability as a performer also begins. And I think that that line is often very confusing, especially when you put in and, like, I would say, people who wanna be managers for reasons of engaging the team or building others or coaching, like, their heart is in the right place, and it's all the harder for those folks to then come in hard when, at the end of the day, they care so much about how to grow others. And so I do think that leadership and organizations have a responsibility to support, you know, a clear delineation of, like, here is where it begins and ends because we cannot expect a manager to be the therapist and the friend and the coach and the enforcer in all of the ways. Like, that is a recipe for burnout and ineffectiveness. One of the one of the hardest things as an HR person is, partnering with a manager after they've terminated someone and talking to the manager and hearing them really beat themselves up and say that I I see this termination as a failure on my behalf. And what's interesting is listen. I'm the kind of person that's very growth oriented, so I'm I'm always like, how could I have done better? What could I learn from the situation? It's constantly postmortem with me. And so, like, I'm certain, yes, of course, we can think about what can we learn about this for the recruitment process, what can we learn about this in terms of identifying, you you know, the right people for the team? But it is not a failure to quickly and efficiently identify that someone is not working out to quickly partner with them on a path forward and then to quickly identify when that path forward, unfortunately, is not going in the right direction. And so to really, like, alleviate that burden for managers, I think makes such a difference and provides that clarity that many of them need. And along those same lines, one of the things that I have found to be, so meaningfully helpful at Ethena is, we as part of our onboarding for all new hires, we actually have a session that's called career ownership. And it's all about what your responsibility as an IC is. And we tell them this is what your manager is responsible for. This is what they're not responsible for. So if you come to me saying, Melanie, you know, I came to my part for you and my manager I was expecting them to promote me and my manager just told me that I didn't get promoted. I'm really frustrated because they never told me that I had to do these things to get promoted. My first question is always going to be, well, when did you tell your manager that you wanted a promotion? And when did you ask your manager what it would take to get that promotion? What I'm not saying is that, oh, it's only on the direct report. What I am saying is that this is a two Way Street. And I have found that, you know, speaking of people who maybe struggle or scared to be a manager, one of the most impactful things I believe that any company can do to help managers how help alleviate that load is to set clear expectations not just for managers but for the direct reports. So the managers can have those clear and direct conversations with the employee. Yes. It's not just on me to drive your career forward. It's on you too. And also to help avoid these area these opportunities of friction. Right? If you know from the beginning, oh, if I want something, I better speak up. Right? That will then help mitigate the risk of things blowing up because, you know, one person thought that you were supposed to do this and they thought you were supposed to do this. So, yes. I've just found, you know, be very clear on expectation setting for everyone, not just for your managers, but for your direct reports, for your leadership team, for your department heads, for for everyone. Oh, I'm looking at the time. I think we got time for maybe one and a half more questions before we move it along to q and a. So I'm curious to know, from you, PB, when when you think about helping managers drive, not just, better management, but, like, in this era of AI, driving higher efficiency, effectiveness, productivity, what are the things that you think HR can play a role in, to really partner with their managers to help level this up for the entire company? So it's so interesting because there's I don't know if y'all have seen the some research that recently came out on, Harvard Business Review also on terming the the coining the terms. You mean terming the coin? Coining the term work slop. The bridge. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They called it work slop, which is the amount of work products now that look good and polished, but that are just a bunch of stuff that AI has produced and that now other coworkers and colleagues and managers need to be clearing through and how that's actually killing some of the productivity gains that were expected because so many people are finding themselves having to redo work. Super interesting because I've been on the receiving end of that. Right? Like, now instead of getting sometimes a thoughtful kind of, like, one page or one paragraph on a key business problem, I'll get a 10 page report that I need to, like, sort of sift through and a lot of it is still not getting to the core of what I want. So so when we go back to your question of, like, how do we now support managers in this age of AI, I think that what's really interesting in the AI conversation and in the manager conversation is that, ultimately, you know, both managers and AI are only effective when it is very clear what are the constraints, what are the trade offs that we're willing to make, What are the stakeholders that we are trying to appease as wage or support? Yep. What are the values by which we wanna make this decision? And what does success look like in this particular outcome that we're working for? So I think that those are the typically human thorny business decisions that teams and and particularly leadership teams need to be making, but that then become kind of laddered down throughout the organization. And that I think are both critical in how we now think about enabling teams with AI. If we go back to the initial conversation, yes, there will be some things like AI can do very well. Like, if you say, here's a client and here's the email that I wanna send, draft it for me. Okay? But somebody still needs to be proofreading this to ensure that there isn't a sentence in there that shouldn't be there or that it is actually aligned with whatever training we may have given it to, being in line with the mission and values of what we wanted to achieve. So that calibration, that sense making, that that that idea of, like, who is doing the ultimate quality control is something that, again, managers and AI are going to need very heavily and remains uniquely human moving forward. Because if anything, AI is just giving us the average of all of the common practice. If you truly want to separate it out and find, okay, what is the best practice that is still going to be a work of, again, common sense, discernment that the humans in the conversation are going to have to impact so that then it can be delivered down the line. Yeah. I, I find all of this really fascinating to think about because, it really is so complex and you could take this in so many directions. The the thing that comes to mind for me is I found, you know, along my AI journey within HR, one of the biggest unlocks was actually refocusing on less on how AI could streamline my work and more how I could leverage AI to streamline to your some of your points, managers work and free up their time. Because I really do think time is one of the the resources that they struggle with the most. And so for me, I've been really having fun experimenting with things like, we we recently had our performance review cycle and, I created a a custom GPT for performance reviews. And I fed it, you know, like, all our company values, all our, performance standards. I uploaded the career ownership deck. I uploaded the manager principles that we have. I I uploaded our performance review template, all that stuff. And when I tell you that I tested it by having Roxanne, our CEO, send me, like, a voice memo, a voice memo just answering two questions, about, like, one of her direct reports. And I was like, you know, where do you think they're doing great? Where do you think they have room to improve? And I and I promise you, I kid you not, I just uploaded the transcript to the GPT, the custom GPT, and said using this information, can you create a performance review? And it freaking did, and it tied it back to the job description. And it, incorporated the feedback using the right color coding, and it and it made sure that it emphasized impact, and it grouped it in exactly the right template. And what I found is when we rolled this out to managers, managers were just like, like, what if I because, like, the value isn't are you a great writer. The value is can you give thoughtful feedback? Are you being thoughtful about patterns of behavior? Are you actually observing growth opportunities for your team? And so I definitely think one of the things that I'm thinking about is what are tools that I can build or that I can buy, adopt, whatever to just, like, alleviate some of the burden for managers. Okay. We have just a few minutes left. So before we open it up to audience questions because it looked like people were hungry for some stuff, lightning round, if you had to summarize, what are three actionable steps that you recommend that every attendee in this audience today can take with them to help drive management success. Okay. So, yes, at the end of the day, we wanna make managers more efficient. Right? So I do think that one, you know, what you were describing right now, which is find kind of, like, repetitive areas of either friction or pain and give them either templates or quick tools that are going to take away whatever the cognitive load or the pressure that they had in dealing with those situations so that instead of spending half an hour or an hour on something, they now can get it done in two to five minutes. That to me would be number one, and there are so many applications we talked about. Feedback, performance reviews, one to one templates. I mean, and formats of meetings, like, how to give them those pre signals to also identify, like, when there should be something that I can be thinking a little bit more about or how to spot things that I should trust my gut and take action sooner instead of waiting kind of six months, for a problem to raise. To me, that would be one. The second is that clarification of what does being a great manager in my organization look like and what are my responsibilities versus what's the team's responsibilities and ensuring that that gets shared widely across the entire organization because then it's not just on the managers to have that understanding, but on every individual contributor as well. So thank you for your example in telling us about how you do that during onboarding, and I hope it's something that is widely accessible for the team at any given point in time because I do think that knowing what the job is and what the job isn't can also free a lot of, like, the pain and pressure that you see in so many cases. And then finally, I would say the recognition of what are the skills that are actually necessary for this role and have we either, you know, assess that the folks that we put into those positions truly have those skills and if they don't, can we actually give them this the training that is going to be required in the development that they need so that they can actually execute the role appropriately. Yep. I I love that so much. And actually, I'm realizing as I as I ask you this question, I'm like, man, it's really tough to encapsulate this in in just three things. So thank you for taking a first stab at this. Give me some time to think through some mind some more. I think for me, one of the most important things that you can do is build autonomy and agency for managers to lead in the way that is going to be best for them. We didn't get to talk about this, but, for example, you know, one of the things that we do at Ethena is we, I don't run team events for people. I I've stopped doing that because what a hard truth that I've had to accept is that, you know, a company wide initiative is never going to be as effective as a team specific initiative because the sales culture has a very different team, very sorry. The sales team has very different culture than the engineering culture. And, you know, the sales team is maybe really motivated by swag or extra money, and the engineering team is like, yeah. I don't want your swag. I don't wear your I don't want the company logo on a on a piece of sweatpants. Like, no. Thank you. I would like more PTO, for example. And so, what I found is that what, to the extent that we can, we've done things like we have a a manager morale budget. So every manager has their own budget for engagement related activities. They can use it for swag. They can use it for food. They can use it for an in person get together, whatever they want, but, like, we've freed them up to do it themselves. And we do that really in partnership VP as well. So I partner with them to be like, what is the strategy that's gonna work best for your team? Whether it's AI adoption for your team, whether it's how we do performance reviews on your team, whether we do comp on your team. I really think one of the most important things you can do is give your managers and leadership space to customize and tailor and have autonomy over the way that they run their team. The second thing I would say, we touched on this earlier is, free up, don't eat up your manager's time. So whether it's, you know, even if you're doing a training, I would replace, don't add. So if the if the training is important enough to do company wide, then the training should be important enough to replace a single town hall at your company. Right? Everybody else just got free time, and your manager didn't have to find more time to make this work. They took the training during that specific allotted session that was already blocked off on their calendar. If you're doing the performance review GPT. Right? Like, you are saving your manager time. What can you do to free up their time to focus on those more strategic, those very difficult things that they have to do as managers? And the last thing I would say is really empower your managers with a ton of transparency, clarity, and open dialogue. So things like, you know, having a clear company wide publicly available comp philosophy that has an FAQ that explains, like, you said I'm amazing, but you put me at bottom of band. How does that make sense? You know? Or, hey. I've been, you know, performing really well, but I haven't been promoted in eighteen months. What's up with that? Right? Like, be very clear so that, like, your manager has a clear ethos they can lean on and already a list of FAQs. And I'll give, like, a very tough example, and then we'll move it along to q and a. But, because I think it's really important to to see this in practice. You know, give me a plus one if anybody remembers 2022 when the economy was maybe not doing so great, and every company and their mother was doing lay offs, and they were trying to figure out, like, how do we save money? What do we do? Okay. Maybe I'm alone. Maybe nobody else had this. And then, by the way, Jen, we can share our our our, Ethena's, company or our Ethena's compensation philosophy and FAQ is public, so we could share that. People are curious afterwards. But, when that happened, we did not shy away from the discussion because we knew the employees were nervous. We knew that managers were having to answer really tough questions. So what we did, credit to Roxanne, our CEO, and I partnered her with her on this as you should as HR. Right? Because you understand, like, employee needs and the right wording and all this stuff. Roxanne went up in front of the entire company and said, oh, I'm not gonna lie to you. It's it's rough out there. The economy is not in a good place. Here are the goals that we have set for ourselves as a company, and here's the goal that we have to hit in order to not make cuts at the company. If we hit this number, we don't have to cut. If we don't hit this number, I don't want to lie to you. We will have to make the cuts. We will have to make cuts. It will likely be in this department. I will keep you posted on how we're progressing to goal and if it's not looking good. But, like, I don't want you to be wondering and thinking we're hiding secrets from you, and, also, I don't want you to be thinking your manager's hiding something from you. I'm telling you here. You're hearing it from me. You can ask me questions. And so, like, it just made it so much easier for the managers to have those conversations, the employees to have clarity, like, okay. I have some semblance of control. I understand what I have to do. Or, hey. One of the things Roxanne said was like, and by the way, if you don't think that we are about to hit our goals, if you are seeing something we're doing wrong that could better enable us to hit our goals, speak up. And by golly, people did because they felt so empowered. They were like, I wanna be part of the solution. Thank you for being so open with me. It was a really just great moment of treating your employees like adults. Treating your employees like adults and then reaping the rewards of them partnering with you. Again, what could have happened is we're not gonna say anything. We're just gonna have the middle managers to have to, like, field all the all these tough conversations. No. No. We made it public so that that we didn't have to put that onus on the manager. So, anyhow, with that said, all I know it's time for some q and a, so let's take a look. I believe there's a q and a bot over here that I've gotta find somewhere. Oh, here we go. Alright. Questions that have come in. Alright. Jen already answered you. We got comp philosophy's, templates that we'll share with you. Let's see. Oh, where can you get templates for the friction or pain for engineering team culture? Phoebe, you you have, like, a first reaction to this when you think about engineering team culture and friction? I I have thoughts. So if you if not, I'm happy to answer. I was gonna say, why don't you start? Because you you've been working closely there. Yeah. I'll start. I I'll say the blunt thing. I don't care. I'll like, I have all these conversations with my team. One of the things that I love about engineers and product people in general is, like, how detail oriented they are. Like, if you give them a goal, they're gonna get that goal. If they have a a road map, they're gonna do all the things on the road map. They're not like me with my ADD brain that's like, wait. What are we doing? I don't know. I'll figure it out, you know, when I have thirty minutes left to do it. No. They're, like, focused and they're planning. Where that can get challenging is, again, I'll be honest. Engineers in particular, I find if you're an engineer, if you know an engineer who disagrees with me, talk to me. I'm open. Is I found that engineers rightly so because they are so analytical and thoughtful, they smell BS real quick, real quick. And so if you say a thing that doesn't make sense or that isn't fully thought through, they're gonna call you on it, and they're gonna say the thing. And they're not gonna be scared to do that. And what I have found is, one, I actually really like that. That really holds me accountable. Like, I need to know that I can I'm gonna be able to defend whatever I say, if an engineer comes and talks to me. But the other thing I have learned is that sometimes it's really important to acknowledge when you don't have all the answers. I was talking to a CEO recently who shared that, they made a tough decision about return return to office RTL, and one of their engineers was like, you know, all these stats show that it's actually better to be remote. And the CEO was like, you know what? You're right. There are ton of stats that show that remote work works just as effectively. And there are also a ton of stats that show that office work actually leads to a ton of collaboration and a lot of benefits that you don't get from being remote. I think, realistically, anyone could make an argument for either side. At the end of the day, I'm the CEO and I have to make a tough judgment call, and this is the judgment call that I made. It's not perfect. I I I can't say that, like, if there's irrefutable proof, but I can tell you that this is how I made the decision, why I made the decision, and I will own it if if two years from now we find out that was a mistake. But today, this is a decision that I think is correct for the team, and I, I I ask that you, give me that grace. And I just I just loved it. So, like, my I don't have a template for you, but what I would say is be straight with engineers. Don't be ask them. If you if you are not fully making a decision based on data but more than more like judgment call, say it. Own it. Embrace it. And the last thing I will say is, one of the things I love to do the most when people are, like, rightly argumentative with me, it helps push me and level me up and hold me accountable, is I like to say, thank you so much for this feedback. If you were the CEO and you had just heard this feedback from an employee, knowing the the different things that you have to balance, the business, the employee happiness, the money, what would you do with this information? And I found that it just helps people sort of like, oh, okay. Maybe that is a little bit harder than I thought. Or sometimes they come back and they give me an idea, and I'm like, oh, that's pretty smart. Let's do that. You know? So be really open. Don't be defensive. Engage. Give them the benefit of the doubt, but be honest. Don't don't be as an engineer. That that's my that's my advice. Priscila Bala, I don't know. Oh, did I just maybe maybe the engineers are gonna hear this and they're gonna cancel me. I don't know. No. No. I I think you're you're spot on. I think it's that sense of, like, concision, precision, logic. Can we actually tie the pieces together? And most importantly, I would also say it's like it's that sense of, like, you have to be in dialogue with your own team. And and one of the reasons why it was hard for me to sometime to, like, answer this question straight away was because I was like, well, when I think about all of the engineering teams we've worked with, we've been massively successful with engineers because they appreciate the fact that we're research backed, you know, two hours in and out and everything is practical and not theoretical. Is that also their cultures vary so dramatically depending on what language they're coding in and and how they're structured and how flat or hierarchical their teams might be, whether they're, you know, onshore, offshore. And so I think the context also matters, which is why it's important to Melanie point to be super transparent and clear about the conversations that you're having and then to customize it to the context of your own engineering team because they will have their own kind of, like, pensions and directions. And I think that it's, you know, the more we can again be in the flow of work of their specific, practice rather than trying to give them something else to do, the better it will be. Okay. I think we have time for maybe one more question. I had I'm really excited about this one. Oh, go ahead for Oh, go. No. I was gonna say, there is one here that I kinda wanna answer really briefly just because I wonder if you say one is so go go. The question was, have people found that managers like to receive resources line in or through one pagers so that they can reference it when they have the bandwidth to read through it? One of the reasons why I wanted to answer this question is not that I know which mode, but more because I'm gonna advocate for all modes. This is one of the biggest mistakes that leadership generally makes. In cognitive psychology, those of you that are that are big on that will know have heard of effective frequency. Marketers also know this. Right? So we forget that in order for messages to be effective, science tells us about seven times is what you need in order for something to really be internalized and go in. Marketing would tell you that's actually up to 15 or, you know, if you're in b to b sales, god help us because so many touches need to happen, right, before you get someone's attention. So we often forget that. And, you know, sometimes I'll see leaders or managers or HR getting frustrated with, but I've already said this, or I've already taught this, or I already put it in this place. Until you've put it in 10 different places and set it in seven different ways and created some sense of repetition and given folks opportunity to find it in in different places, our job isn't done. And that is just how adults brain brains work. I love that so much. I okay. I'm looking at the time. I'm gonna answer two questions in one real quick, and at the same time, I'm gonna put up our feedback, barcode in case anyone wants to share feedback with us, which we would appreciate. What did you like about the session? What would have been better? What do you wanna see next? We have a couple of questions. So one is, how can, we better start with instead of, prove it with how can we, approach a start with trust instead of prove it with me approach with managing employees? And what would you say to a leader who thinks the interview process should uncover which candidate has sufficient people skills for the managerial role? Very briefly, and then, Phoebe, if you have a quick thought, share too. One of my favorite things is we have, a user manual that we use at Ethena that basically ask questions like, you know, what's something that people often misunderstand about me, and how do I prefer to receive feedback, and, you know, what's, what's a what's a specific thing growth area for me that I am trying to get better at? And what I've learned is two things. One, it just makes people more human, and more, like, it's less like of this, like, oh, you're this ominous, you know, manager figure, you know, and more like, oh, I struggle with that too. Or, oh, I didn't know you were insecure about that. Or, oh, I okay. Sounds like you have a lot of self awareness. You are working on this thing. And then, the other thing I like is it just helps you learn how to better partner with them now that you know these things. Oh, my conflict style is, you know, conflict avoidance, but it's not because I don't care. It's because I'm scared. I don't know how to say the thing. So how do we partner on that so we can say it? And then from the interview perspective, I think it's really cool when managers that are recruiting for a role just say, like, this is my user manual to all candidates. Let me know if, like, this works for you or not. And you could ask in an interview, like, answer these questions just to, like, better understand that person. Okay. I know we're at time. Final thoughts, TV, before I wrap it up. That was really well done. Thank you so much. Always a pleasure having your conversation with you, Melanie. So please wrap wrap us away. Same here. Thank you all so much. I hope you got as much value out of this as we did. Have a great rest of your day. Bye all. Thanks all.