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A CHRO Success Story: Skip Schipper, Chief People Officer of Yext

June 28, 2016 by Samuel Dergel Leave a Comment

Skip Schipper - Chief People Officer at Yext
Skip Schipper – Chief People Officer at Yext

The following is from an interview with Brian “Skip” Schipper. As announced in CHRO Moves, Skip became Chief People Officer of Yext in May 2016. Skip joined Yext with over 30 years of human resources experience, including a long stint at Twitter, where he oversaw global Human Resources and strategic people initiatives. Prior to his work at Twitter, he served as Chief People Officer at Groupon, and led human resources at Cisco.

Samuel: What made you decide that Yext was the right next career move for you after Twitter?

Skip: A big part of my decision to join was based on talking to Yext customers. It became immediately obvious that the Yext platform adds tremendous value to the businesses that use it – and not just in marketing, but throughout their organizations. I’m excited about the opportunity to contribute to the growth of Yext, it’s that much better knowing that the Yext platform is having such a positive impact for our customers.

Samuel: Tell us about the challenges that face you in this new adventure at Yext.

Skip: Yext has done an amazing job attracting terrific talent and creating a company that employees love. The challenge is to ensure that we continue to attract great people to Yext and make the employee experience even better while continuing to expand on our core strengths, attract more customers to our platform, and scale. While Yext has many large global clients, we’re only just getting started putting resources in markets outside North America as another growth driver. I’m looking forward to helping to drive our team’s global expansion.

Samuel: What are the top HR challenges that face growth companies today?

Skip: In their formative years, companies are built through the often heroic work of entrepreneurial team members. At Compaq Computer Corp in the mid-1980s, we used to characterize ourselves not as a small company, but rather as a big company in its formative stages. I think of Yext in much the same way.

Building a great company for the long run means building sustainable organizational strength.  That requires moving past a dependency on individual heroism, to building organizational capability. To me, there are two tests for whether the organization has achieved a sustainable level of capability: whether the organization can both form and then execute on strategy and whether we have achieved the resiliency to thrive through the inevitable difficulties that all companies face.

Samuel: How do you develop other leaders?

Skip: The best leaders with whom I have worked are highly intentional about the job of leading others.  Leading requires conscientious allocation of time to understand customer problems, creating a compelling vision of the future and forming the strategy to achieve that vision. And, the best leaders allocate considerable time in communicating to all their constituents. They don’t just lead their immediate teams–they lead and align the whole organization.

Investing in learning and sharing leadership frameworks has a place, but the best way to develop a leader is to broaden her or his accountabilities and expect real results beyond what the leader had previously proven.  Because leadership involves intentional action, it’s important to ensure the developing leader is given intensified support and feedback around whether they are investing enough time with customers and with their teams, and whether the actions taken are leading to others internalizing the vision and strategy, and are thereby able to align their own work to the vision.

Samuel: Who, from your perspective and experience (other than the CEO), is the most important business partner to the head of HR in any organization? How can they work best together?

It’s important that the head of HR be fully integrated into the leadership team of the company.  There is an art to being close and trusted, but it’s critical that the head of HR never compromise his or her integrity and objectivity. The business-facing members of the HR team need the latitude to build the relationships necessary to drive the people and organization agenda of the business units, geographies, or functions they support.  So job one is ensuring those business-facing team members are highly capable and valued.  In effect, they are the HR function to the part of the business they support.

With highly capable HR business partners in place, the CHRO inevitably spends relatively more time with the leaders of other staff functions such as the CFO and GC. I find many of the decisions that directly impact the employee experience requires close alignment and collaboration across the staff disciplines.

Collaboration and coordination requires face time. I’m in favor of having a governance framework in place that puts leaders of support functions around the same table with a regular cadence.  Another approach I have seen work well is to hold periodic combined all-hands meetings across teams such as Finance and Accounting, HR, Legal, PR & Comms, and IT.

Samuel: What advice would you give to HR professionals who want to make it to the Chief People Officer chair?

Over a career, it is important that HR professionals prove they can both be an effective HR generalist (business partner) and lead one or more HR staff roles. These roles draw on often complementary skills and leading the function means having an first-hand experience-grounded appreciation for what it takes to be successful in each.

The analytical rigor, the compliance requirements, and the board exposure that often accompanies a compensation and benefits role are increasingly seen as important if not a necessary prerequisite for leading HR. The time spent leading compensation and benefits at several Fortune 50 companies has been invaluable to me in both heads of HR roles as well as the boards on which I serve.

Having functional expertise in compensation and benefits has also helped to build strong people analytics teams in my previous assignments. Investment in strong analytical capabilities within the HR function has enabled much more rigorous comprehension of people and organization problems, and much greater accuracy and efficiency in architecting low-tax solutions to those challenges. Too much of the work of HR has historically had a questionable ROI due to opinion-driven diagnostics and imprecise problem-solving.

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Samuel Dergel is a Principal with DERGEL Executive Search. He is an executive search consultant, executive coach, blogger, speaker, trainer and author.

Filed Under: CHRO Success Story, CxO Success Story, Executive Leadership Blog, Skip Schipper, Yext

2 Types of Knowledge Required for Career Success

May 31, 2016 by Samuel Dergel Leave a Comment

I have a theory that there are 2 elements required for career success:

    • What you know – you are hired and compensated because you have excellent skills and abilities that are in demand and few others have.
    • Who you know – you have an ability to make things happen because people like you and trust you, people are willing to open doors for you and you are able to add value to yourself and others based on this ability.

Most people in the world that are successful use a combination of these two knowledge points. Some are more “What you know”. Some are more “Who you know”. Few are solely one or the other.

What is your knowledge mix for success?

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Samuel Dergel is a Principal with DERGEL Executive Search. He is an executive search consultant, executive coach, blogger, speaker, trainer and author.

This blog originally appeared in Samuel’s CFO Blog

Filed Under: Executive Leadership Blog, Leadership Knowledge

The Value of “Thank You”

May 27, 2016 by Samuel Dergel Leave a Comment

Most parents drill their children to say “thank you” when receiving something from someone. People that meet children judge their parents favorably when the children are polite and say “thank you”.

There is a good chance as a child your parents ‘strongly suggested’ you write Thank You Cards for birthday and other gifts received from relatives and family friends.

In today’s age of instant communications, is saying “Thank You” a lost art?

People say “Thank You” all the time. “ty” is the new “Thank You”. However a text message or email or LinkedIn message is easy, and has less impact. How you say Thank You is important. Taking effort to communicate your thanks is much more effective than saying these two words in passing.

When you want to make a difference and want to be remembered, go out of your way when saying thank you. This applies in a job interview context as well as networking. The cost of a card and a postage stamp is minimal compared to the return you receive on being remembered and staying top of mind.

Stand out from your peers. Buy a set of cards and stamps and keep them on your desk. Use them liberally. Write notes with meaning and value in your own handwriting. I guarantee an excellent return on investment.

When was the last time you sent a Thank You Card?

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Samuel Dergel is a Principal with Dergel Executive Search. He is an executive search consultant, executive coach, blogger, speaker, trainer and author.

This blog originally appeared in Samuel’s CFO Blog

Filed Under: Acts of Leadership, Executive Leadership Blog

The One Perk Every Executive Needs

May 25, 2016 by Samuel Dergel Leave a Comment

Any executive who has negotiated their own compensation appreciates that it can be stressful to make the case to be appropriately compensated. Whether they are being offered a new career opportunity or they are taking steps to ensure they continue to be paid fairly for the value they are delivering, knowing what to ask for (and accept) is a challenge.

‎Base salary, bonus, equity based compensation, vacation, medical benefits and the other standard executive compensation issues, while very important, are not what will be discussed here.

‎Your career is more than just about your ability to get the job done. You have grown throughout your career because you have continued to invest in improving yourself. Think about all the opportunities you had for growth throughout your career – conferences, training and others. All these things allowed you to not only improve yourself, but deliver significantly improved value to your employer.

Ask most executives, and they will admit that they have been beneficiaries of professional development expenses paid for by their current and previous employers. ‎However, in 4 out of 5 times when I ask executives to go to their employer and ask them to pay for executive coaching, they balk. Why?

The reasons I am given, at first, is about budget. They almost always say “I don’t know if I can get that approved.”‎ This response continues to concern me. Why would a strong, valuable executive be reluctant to ask for an investment in improving the value to their employer?

The real reasons I see are consistent across all types and sizes of companies. Asking for something can be stressful. Getting to yes, even with people you work for, can be a challenge, especially if it is not only about the company, but about you as well.

Fears of rejection, being looked at as being inadequate or not knowing what you should already know, as well as other fears, founded and unfounded, play into the difficulty of asking for approval of a professional development expense.

The answer to this challenge, which progressive companies are providing up front for their executives, is a Professional Development Spending Account(PDSA). The additional cost for such a program is usually negligible, since almost all companies, in theory, budget for training and development costs as a percentage of salaries.

A Professional Development Spending Account (PDSA) gives the choice to the executive. This allows them to choose the most appropriate professional development activities for their needs without having to ask for approval for each activity. Even better, companies can incorporate an assessment of the use of the PDSA in executive performance reviews. This process can assess how effective and relevant the executives were in spending these allocated dollars.

Retaining executives continues to be a challenge for a number of companies. Those organizations that invest smartly in the continued development of their executives will benefit greatly.

A PDSA (Professional Development Spending Account) is one perk that no executive should be without. If you don’t have one, ask for it. Let me know how it works out for you.

Samuel

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Samuel Dergel is a Principal with Dergel Executive Search. He is an executive search consultant, executive coach, blogger, speaker, trainer and author.

This blog originally appeared in LinkedIn Pulse

Filed Under: Base salary, Cash bonus, Executive coaching, Executive Compensation, Executive Leadership Blog, Long-term incentives, PDSA, Perks, Personal Development Spending Account, Short -term incentives, Training and development

A CFO Success Story: Vinay Mehra, CFO of POLITICO

March 22, 2016 by Samuel Dergel Leave a Comment

Vinay Mehra
Vinay Mehra – CFO of POLITCO

The following is from an interview with Vinay Mehra. Vinay became CFO of POLITICO in November 2015. Previously, Mehra served as Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer of the PBS/NPR media organization WGBH, as announced in CFO Moves. This interview was edited for clarity.

Samuel: You’ve embarked on a new role. Why is this exciting for you?

Vinay: The primary reason I came to Politico is because they have built a new business model. I love going into businesses that are creating and inventing new business models. Politico has redefined how to make money in the media business without just being dependent on the advertising side of it. That’s something that really attracted me– they not only created a new business model, but they are also hugely successful in this new business model, and I want to be part of that.

  • Quick Takes from Vinay Mehra on…

    What makes a good CFO?CFOs often forget that we are story tellers. And we need to tell a story with the numbers. We need to overlay the non-financial data with the financial data to complete the picture.Underappreciated skillsetThe most underappreciated skillset in finance is the cost-accounting mindset. Once you have a good understanding of true cost, and once you figure out how much of that is the standard cost, it becomes easier to manage and scale a business.

    Not-for-profits

    I find it very fulfilling. One tends to forget, in life, we all have the responsibility to give back to society. Whether it be money, or donating your time and skillset to a needy organization.

    Working with a millennial workforce

    This work force wants constant change and they’re not willing to stay with the status quo. Therefore they are constantly adopting new technologies, or adapting to new way of doing things.

    Importance of good HR

    The biggest assets here are the people. I really feel that HR is probably the most strategic department of this company. And that is where we have to make the investments.

    Something to remember

    The CFO is, in a way, the chief sales person. He is the one who sets the tone of what the organization is doing. He needs to keep providing a positive spin on how the business is doing. To be able to tell people the story even in the worst situation. He not only has to be a fabulous story teller, but also has to be a great sales person.

Samuel: You’ve had a good long run from your previous experience, in more of a television environment. And now you’re taking that to a new and exciting “new media” environment. What perspectives are you bringing to this new business from your years at WGBH?

Vinay: The first thing I can think of is that the most underappreciated skillset in finance is the cost-accounting mindset. The media business is heavily capital intensive. Having to understand the cost is really important. And thanks to my experience in accounting for 10 years, I had alot of clients – manufacturing clients, tech clients – one of the things they taught me was the concept of cost-accounting. Once you have a very good understanding of true cost, and once you can figure out how much of that cost is a standard cost, it make it much easier to manage and scale a business – rather than just focusing top line goals which is just the revenue side of it. And I think what TV broadcasting taught me is – that it is a business which is hugely capital intensive. For example, if we had 5 to 10 million dollars to make a TV show, we would have a very robust cost-accounting system. We would knew down to the penny, and down to an invoice, what everything was being spent on. And for which episode. So taking some of that same discipline is what I inherited from my experiences in the broadcast side of things and brought it into the “new media” side of things. And that was pretty hard to do – because you’ll have journalists writing their stories, and then they’re putting up their stories up on websites, or newspapers. And then you have to figure out how that translates to revenue – which are the stories that are actually driving traffic to the website, which are the stories that are driving revenue. And then figuring out the cost allocation system. So I think that going from old media to new media is where I found the benefit of having the ability to build a true-cost evaluating system.

On the revenue side, there is alot more diversity in the revenue field; more in new media than there is in the ‘traditional’ media space. Because the new media companies treat content as information, they don’t treat it as just content. The content that’s on the website should be driven by analytics. And they should decide what really makes sense to put on the website. But more importantly, let’s not just treat it as entertainment, let’s treat it as information. So there’s the mindset of it being an information company instead of being just a media company.

Samuel: What do you think makes you a good CFO?

Vinay: I think there are 2 kinds of CFO – there are CFOs who are very financial focused, and then there are CFOs like myself – CFOs who blend the financial and the non-financial data. What I have found in my career, what has made me successful is the fact that I am able to overlay the non-financial data with the financial data itself. So I can tell a story around what exactly is happening. And in every financial function I’ve had a small group of people doing data analytics. But they’re putting non-financial data and they’re trying to see if it tells a story. I think very often we CFOs forget that we are story tellers. And we need to tell a story with these numbers. Just by looking at the numbers it’s hard to tell a story, unless you have the non-financial information to overlay to show if there is some kind of a trend; or to show what is driving those financial numbers. So I would say that I am very much one of those people who loves to tell the stories behind the financial and the non-financial data.

Samuel: I also see that in your career you’ve been very involved in not-for-profits. How has that helped you?

Vinay: I think it’s very fulfilling. To be honest with you – one tends to forget, in life, we all have the responsibility to give back to society. And I personally found it very fulfilling to be involved in different causes – to give back to my city, my town, to my local cultural institution. And that’s one thing I would encourage everyone to try to do. It’s less about being on another board, its more about feeling how I’m able to give back. And giving back doesn’t necessarily need to be about giving money – it could be about giving your skillset, and your guidance to these organizations who don’t have allot of sophisticated management skills. They have a mission, and as long as you are in mind with the mission, you can help in many different ways. Helping to make it successful and running it like a business. Even a not-for-profit has to be run like a business and sometimes they lack the skillset. For me it was something very fulfilling, and something I’m glad I got involved with.

Samuel: And how did that benefit you? What impact did it have on you as a professional and as a CFO?

Vinay: Sometimes, as a CFO, you tend to look at things are pretty black and white. Things are just numbers. But when you get involved with a non-profit, the thing that I’ve come to appreciate is – sometimes, when you are making an investment, you don’t have a true ROI, from a financial perspective. But you will have ROI from a human impact. Or from the bigger benefit of the people, or of this country. For example – when I was in WGBH, very often we needed  build TV shows and I would say “hey – no one is ever going to buy this show, no one is ever going to agree to do a big sponsorship for it”. And while that’s true, someone needs to tell the story of lack of diversity, or to tell the story of some other area which nobody else is willing to put the money in to do, because they don’t see the financial ROI on it. But we have a responsibility to tell that story. So we’ll spend money on it because that’s really our core mission is – to educate people. So I would say it’s given me the appreciation to understand that sometimes in business you will make an investment in something that may not have a true ROI, but there will be other ways to measure ROI beyond the financial terms of things.

Samuel: What was most surprising for you when you showed up at Politico?

Vinay: The energy and the passion around their mission of providing political information to their audiences. They are all uniformly passionate about this subject. You know, it’s not often you walk into a business where everybody – from the administrative assistants, to the help in the kitchen – are all uniformly passionate about this stuff. It’s amazing. And it make everything alot easier, because everyone is aligned with the mission. Everybody is very passionate about what difference they want to make.

And the second thing – which came as a bit of a surprise for me – was the millennium demographic, which is a large proportion of our employee base – between 25 to 28. They’re working at a much faster pace than you or I do! And I love working fast and changing things, but this work force wants constant change and they’re not willing to stay with the status quo. Therefore they are constantly adopting new technologies, or adapting to new way of things. And they crave it, and they keep pushing for it. This has been a big surprise for me, coming from big corporations where change is so hard, and it’s so hard to get people on board, or to follow new ways of doing things.

Samuel: It must be a big change, coming from NPR-type of background, where you were truly middle-aged, taking a look at everyone around you. Coming from an environment where you were one of the younger ones, to an environment where you’re one of the older ones.

Vinay: Yes – and the other thing is I think their desire and energy for staying in the forefront of technology and processes – it’s in their DNA. You don’t have to tell these people – they live this every day – how can we do things better. They’re built this way. And I think some of it is maybe because you don’t have the luggage of a traditional media company and all the headaches of running a traditional media company. But this is a company that continues to innovate every day. In every way – from how to come up with new revenue ways, to how can we become more efficient to how to use new technology. It’s just blowing me away. And it’s very refreshing to be an environment like this.

Samuel: And how does that translate for your finance team?

Vinay: That’s where I would say I have work to do. Because the rest of the organization is so forward thinking that my finance team hasn’t kept pace, with their level of change. In some ways I think the finance team got comfortable with the old ways of doing things. As if it’s the only way to be doing things

Samuel: So what are you doing to put change into a finance group that needs to be changed a little bit?

Vinay: The first thing I’ve done is to physically relocate people from my finance team into business groups. The people who do invoicing and billings and collection for my ad business used to sit in finance, in a central location, and I’ve taken them out of there and said go sit in the unit. Go sit in the business. Go see what they do every day and be part of their workflow, instead of sitting separated on a different floor and communicating through emails. I think that’s given them a sense of appreciation how the business operated, that they never knew before.

Secondly, substituting some of the skill sets that are lacking on the team, I bring in new people. For instance, somebody with more experience and or somebody who is an expert in certain areas is going to have expertise in their DNA of the finance function and will be able to figure it out as they go along. Which works to a certain point, but then a lack of knowledge and a lack of expertise because of the hindrance.

And the third thing is technology. They are very advanced with leveraging and using technology here. And because of that, the business units have gone off and made selections of technology products to streamline their operations and their processes. And on the back end of things you have finance working on QuickBooks because they haven’t kept pace with the evolution and change that has happened in the business.

Samuel: What are you ultimately responsible for, at Politico?

Vinay: I have Finance, I have HR, and I have Operations. I have pretty much ALL the business operations of the business. Basically all the non-editorial side of things.

Samuel: Have you always had HR responsibility?

Vinay: I have. In different forms. In WGBH I had business managers in HRO sitting in the business units, who reported to me. So yes, I’ve always had some HR responsibility. Planning, strategy, all those groups reported up to me

Samuel: How does it feel to be responsible for human resources in an environment that’s growing, dynamic and where culture is a key part of the talent pool?

Vinay: To be honest – the biggest assets here are the people. They don’t really have any physical assets here. And so preserving that asset base is extremely critical, for the organization. And we are thinking about additional approaches – until now we took for granted that we’ll have 20-30% turnover and keep hiring new people. My philosophy is we need to find a better way of keeping this from happening instead of constantly dealing with this turnover. And I get excited about the fact that I can help influence and be a caretaker of the culture of the organization. I feel that it’s a great opportunity for the organization to be able get what they are looking for, from a cultural perspective. Sometimes I feel that an HR reports directly to the CEO of an organization, and they tend to take a more of an administrative function. I really feel that HR is very strategic and probably is the most strategic department of this company. And we have to make the investments here. This is where we need to put the most focus – to help make sure that we can keep our employees.

Samuel: What advice would you give to someone in finance that’s trying to work their way up and wants to become successful in their career? Advice that you wish someone would have told you?

Vinay: I would say that having an understanding of the numbers and the context of the business, the strategy of the business is extremely critical in this day and age to be a successful CFO. Early in my career, when I was in accounting, I think the reason why I was so successful with my clients is because I was able to focus on their business problems, not just their financial problems. Additionally, in some ways the CFO is also kind of the chief sales person. He is the one who sets the tone of what the organization is doing. He needs to keep providing a positive spin on how the business is doing. To be able to tell people the story even in the worst situation. And so what tends to sometimes happen is that we forget that we have the DNA of a sales-person. We need to use that. Whether we are talking to our salary employees, or if we’re talking in external shareholders or investors. And I feel that anyone who wants to grow their career in a finance perspective, not only has to be a fabulous story teller, but also has to be a sales person.

 

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Samuel Dergel is a Principal with Dergel Executive Search. He is an executive search consultant, executive coach, blogger, speaker, trainer and author.

This blog originally appeared in Samuel’s CFO Blog

Filed Under: CFO Success Story, CxO Success Story, Executive Leadership Blog, POLITICO, Vinay Mehra

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