This week, Jessica is joined by Megan Hansen, the Chief People Officer at Ontra – a legal tech company navigating the world of AI and private equity.
Megan opens up about the paradoxes that define her role: balancing empathy with performance, innovation with ethics, and purpose with profit. Her perspective is rooted in what she calls the power of “and”: the belief that polarities can be managed, not solved, and that great leadership lives in the in-between.
They discuss AI, education, corporate responsibility, and how trust and transparency are the foundation of real change. Megan also shares why being a Chief People Officer is one of the hardest roles in the C-suite, and how she keeps showing up with conviction, clarity, and care.
About Megan Hansen
Megan Hansen is the Chief People Officer of Ontra and the executive sponsor of Ontra’s DEI Council. She is responsible for unlocking Ontra’s growth by creating an ecosystem where talented people can do their best work. Prior to Ontra, Megan was the Chief People and Culture Officer at Smartsheet and also served in leadership roles at MOD Pizza, Outerwall, and Frog Design.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/megan-hansen-04583a341/
Jessica Kriegel:
Website: https://www.jessicakriegel.com/
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicakriegel
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jess_kriegel/
Culture Partners:
Website: https://culturepartners.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/culturepartners/
TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: This week on Culture Leaders, I sat down with Megan Hanson, the Chief People Officer at Entra, a legal tech company navigating the fast changing world of AI and private equity. Megan brings a sharp mind and an even sharper heart to the work of building culture. She opens up about the paradoxes that define her role, balancing empathy with performance, innovation with ethics and purpose with profit. Her perspective is rooted in what she calls the power of and the belief that polarities can be managed, not solved, and that great leadership lives. In the in-between. We talk about AI education, corporate responsibility, and how trust and transparency are the foundation of real change. Megan also shares why being a chief people officer is one of the hardest roles in the C-suite and how she keeps showing up with conviction, clarity, and care. She’s not afraid to question trends, which I love. She challenges assumptions and she also will admit when something needs to change, Megan leads with purpose even when the path is uncertain. It’s a thoughtful and honest conversation with a leader who is shaping the future of work. Please welcome to the podcast Megan Hansen. Megan Hansen, thank you for joining us. I’m so excited to have you on. So my first question is, what is your why?
Megan Hansen: Okay, friend, I love that you asked me this question and I’m super excited to be here. First of off, lemme just say that thank you so much for inviting me on to the podcast with you. I went into this work because I want to make a difference and it its core. I believe that work can and should be fulfilling and it should create energy for people, not just for the way they show up within their work world, but also for how we show up outside of work like when you go home or when you walk outside of your work setting. And I’ve kind of over the years hounded in on what I think makes a good environment like that. And for me it’s three things, and I’ve kind of translated that. I think it actually works for others as well, which is do I feel valued?
Am I using my strengths and am I learning and growing? I think anyone can ask that of themselves in any role at any point in time. If you can answer yes to those, it generally means you’re in a good spot and you’re going to have that energy to show up and be the best version of yourself and give the best version of yourself to whatever the task is. So ultimately, if I bring it back to your originating question, I view my job as a chief people officer to create the systems and structures that generate that sort of culture for the people in my organization, giving them the space to bring their best selves to work.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: So I think this is a very tricky why to have that’s fair role to be in. That’s fair too. Why is similar? Why that’s, we’ve been friends for so long and why we liked each other because we got excited about this. But there is also the systems and structures within which we operate, not those that we influence and control, but the ones that we don’t influence and control in our world that have a lot of incentive to make work not fulfilling, to make people not feel valued, to make learning and growth not happen, even though it doesn’t make sense for the bottom line, the structures are in place to make that challenging. And so it’s really hard to be the person who’s saying, I want everyone to feel valued while also being the person who says, and also I want to help the bottom line. And these two things are equally important to me. And when everyone who has a subscription to Harvard Business Review things, they can do the job of a chief people officer preach. He’s got that added layer on top of it. So what are the greatest challenges in you achieving that? Why I suppose where this question is going?
Megan Hansen: Yeah. Yeah, all super fair points and I couldn’t agree more. I think that there’s a lot less in this world that’s mutually exclusive than we often believe to be the case. Actually, you’re going to appreciate this. So literally right here on my desk, I have this little ampersand. I am a big believer of the power of, and I am a believer of polarities. And I think that sometimes you actually get to the best spot when you are thinking about something within the construct of polarities. There is generally a, you could do this or you could do this. Then how do you find the place that manages the best of both sides without getting super sucked in to the negative? So if you think about the infinity sign, it’s an infinity sign for a reason goes on and on and on. And I think if you get too high centered on any one pro of a thing of the polarity, then you get to a point where you realize that it’s AstroTurf, the grass is not greener and something is wrong.
And you start to really hone in on the negatives of whatever that choice was. And then those negatives start to become what you focus in on versus the positives. And they’re what then drives you over to the other side of that choice. And then you go deep in and you’re like, yep, this is all the reason why we’re here. All these beautiful, wonderful positives are why we’ve now chosen this alternative perspective. But you forget the other side completely. And so ultimately I think what ends up creeping in become all of the negatives of whatever that side and that choice was. And then the exact same thing happens and in time you get completely disenfranchised and then you go down to the bottom and then next thing you know you’re back over on the other side and you create these, we’re constantly swinging these pendulums to the sides because we aren’t making a balanced decision and we aren’t making choices that are really thinking about the fact that they’re very rarely is one good and only answer.
And there usually are polarities that we’re managing. So I try really hard to think about what are all the things, what is this ecosystem that the decision is whatever the decision is is being made within, and how do we try to balance and find something in the middle that maximizes the positives and at least creates awareness of the negatives? And that allows you to, I think, be more thoughtful with where you land in ways that you don’t have these Cinderella fabulous moments where you forget everything. You also don’t live in these dark spaces where you’re not caring about the heart of things. So for example, I think during COVID, a lot of people went very heavy on leading with empathy and making sure that you were putting things into place for organizations that thought about how it was going to impact your population, how it’s going to impact your humans.
And I think some companies went way too far. They stopped performance managing, they stopped looking at productivity, they stopped doing some of the things that were truly holding people accountable. And so then as soon as the market started to shift a little bit and there was more freedom, people are like, oh, snap. Let’s go double down on productivity. And thinking of that as a opposite of empathy. You then completely rewrite the script and end up doing totally different things organizationally. Whereas I think if you try to find the space where you can both be empathetic and focus on productivity, and I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive, it’s hard, but we’re like, how do you try and find those spaces in the in-between? That’s where we can create programs and policies and structures and things that I think have more staying power. And also you can tell a better story. I can help my CEO and the board and the street understand why I am doing something, but I can also help my employees and our leaders who are really in on empathy. Not that the others aren’t, but you know what I mean. You can tell a good story across because you’re weaving together understanding of both sides versus just being so drawn to one side that you’ve completely left the other behind.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah. Well, I interviewed Pete Stavros, the co-head of Global Private Equity at KKR.
Megan Hansen: I didn’t know that, but I should definitely go watch that one.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: You should definitely go watch that. It was a great episode. And he has empathy gyms that he does with his CEOs and it’s like, go cash a check, go get a payday loan, go do the things to experience what it’s like to be someone who isn’t with incredible amounts of wealth, influence and power like all of you do. And he studying empathy with some academic partner that I can’t remember what institution they’re from, I think maybe Stanford, I don’t know that may be wrong. And they said that empathy can be learned and the number one lever that you need to learn empathy is to believe that it’s learnable.
Megan Hansen: Growth mindset. Isn’t that interesting?
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Right. And I said, yeah, but do you also have to believe that it’s valuable? Because there are a lot of CEOs I’ve met who would say, I believe it’s learnable, but they’re like, I’m good. I’ve got it. I’ve interviewed some of those CEOs on this podcast and I also know a ton of CEOs with empathy. I don’t want to oversimplify or label CEOs in any given way, but I think that that’s interesting, right? That trying to find, I think there’s a lot of HR leaders out there and a lot of culture leaders out there who do themselves a disservice by being too hard on the soft skills. And it seems naive to me and out of touch with, I mean, I just don’t think that their phone is ringing, frankly. And so that’s what I’ve always admired about you as a leader is your ability to talk to the board, talk to the employees, make people feel seen. You have little things that even the first time I met you, I was like, oh, this is a good leader. You call people friend. You opened up. I remember. Oh, you got to tell everyone about your dad. Can we just pause right now on tangent about your dad? Can you tell everyone what your dad did?
Megan Hansen: My dad was an amazing human. He spent the first half of his life, his first chapter, if you will, as a medical missionary out in Africa. And then he spent the second chapter of his life as a US bound, but still considered himself to be pretty missional in his work as a physician. But he was, I think I share this with you. My first job out of college, I was a recruiting coordinator, props to all the recruiting coordinator folks out there in the world. And I made more money than my dad did in my freshman that first suay into corporate America because he took patients who were H HMO patients, he’d get paid $10 for 10 minutes, but he would spend an hour with them truly diagnosing what was going on and the stuff that was happening for people. Tell
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: The snake story.
Megan Hansen: The snake story. Okay, so here’s the snake story. So when my dad was out in Africa, he would have patients natives who would come to him with snake bites, and there’s a million different antidotes for whatever the snake is that has bit you. But if you don’t know which one it is, you don’t know which antidote to provide. Most of the natives don’t know what the names of the things are, obviously, and they might not even have language to describe it because they all are snake. All are snake. So he captured all of the local snakes and kept them in jars, in formaldehyde, in his medical hut so that when someone would come in, they could point to the one that had bit them and then he would know which antidote to give them. And his mortality rate was pretty rad.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah, that’s pretty incredible. I mean the stakes in that job are pretty high, very high, but the impact globally fairly low. And I struggle with that personally all the time. And I think you have chosen your career because you care and you want to make an impact. But do you ever feel like I feel sometimes, which is, wait a minute, I’m operating as a cog in the capitalism wheel that is ultimately soulless and void of meaning and what am I doing here? Or are you like, no, I’m making a difference and I’m going to make that cog sing. Do you have that tension?
Megan Hansen: Oh yeah. I Would definitely be lying if I didn’t say I didn’t ever feel that way. And it’s interesting because we were talking about this before we started recording. My current company is an AI firm that supports private equity and there’s not a whole heck of a lot of purpose per se, as one thinks about kind of global, making the world a better place purpose in the core of what we do as a business. I’ve also worked at places like Mod Pizza where we were intentional in ensuring that a third of our hires were opportunity hires. And it was a very clear connection to how you were helping people’s lives and everywhere. And I’ve worked everywhere in between all sorts of different places. And I think for me, while it is fun and there is something about being in an organization where that through line and the purpose is so pronounced, it’s also fun to be in places like Entre where I am now, where it’s about how do I touch individual lives?
There are only 400 people in my organization right now, but if I can help all 400 of those folks have this energy, like we were talking about earlier, go home and feel like they are doing good work and they feel seen and they bring that into their families and their friend circles and their lives, I think that is a very noble thing to be doing. And I do think I’m making the world better by doing that. And just I think the older I’ve gotten, the more I also I think have kind of centered in more on my sphere of influence earlier in my career. And we’ve known each other for a very long time, so you probably remember some of this. I think I had a little bit more spit and fire about wanting to change the world, the whole thing.
And I think I’ve centered myself more as I have, we’ll call it matured, and I feel like I can still do that, but I can be more impactful within my sphere of influence. How do I think about really making a meaningful difference for the people that are closest to me and let those people then be the ones who go and make difference elsewhere. And it’s more like, I mean it’s super cheesy, but it’s like that pebble in the lake, the ripple effect, and you don’t see the people that are degrees out. But I believe that there are ways that I have helped folks I’ve never met because of the work that I do and the space that I’ve created for the people in the organizations that I serve. So that was a little roundabout. But yeah, I think at its core, I very much sometimes feel like what is this rat race that I am in and what is this role that I play? But I am a faith sold centered human. And so I do think a part of it for me is also just believing that there things happen and connections are made, and it’s okay if I don’t see it directly, if I am creating the world that I want to be a part of. I think others benefit from that too.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: I think it reminds me of the quote, think globally, act locally. It’s like that.
Megan Hansen: Yeah, totally.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Totally. So let’s think globally and act locally about AI right now asChief people officer at an AI company, I would imagine I get asked about AI all the time and I was shocked and concerned least to say the least about the AI summit in Europe earlier this year with JD Vance’s first global appearance where he goes up there and he yells at everyone for over indexing on the ethics of AI in previous years. And JD Vance wasn’t the only one with that messaging. I mean before he showed up French leader, many people at that conference were saying, we got to deregulate, we got to focus on profitability. And so this ethics profit tension with AI is at the back of everyone’s mind like Armageddon or are we good? What is it like to lead in a company that is an AI company of your size given that tension?
Megan Hansen: Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, I think ironically, I picked up a book not that long ago and I started reading it and it’s called, what is It, crossing the Chasm. It was written I think in the nineties maybe. And they talk about ai, and it’s so funny because they basically presented as this thing that couldn’t cross the chasm because there wasn’t enough momentum behind it. And I was like, ah, yes. And here we are. We’ve crossed the chasm. This genie is not going back in the bottle. And I think that we need to be really thoughtful and have these conversations around ethics. We’ve been having the conversations within our own organization around acceptable use and governance. And I think there are some of those things at a local level within the organization, what can you do? But there’s also, I think there’s a lot of parallels if you think about GDPR and some of the security laws that are out there.
There are a lot of parallels that I think we can apply. I mean, even when I was at university, I originally was studying to be a physician and a lot of our conversations was around ethics and medicine with genetics. Oh my gosh, we now have this capability to do a lot of things with genetics and what does that mean? And again, I think at its core, I have to believe in the good of humanity and that we will win out. And maybe that’s super naive, but that is the choice that I am making. But I also think that we can’t pretend that people aren’t going to be looking for ways to leverage AI to improve their jobs, create capacity. And I think the more transparent we are within our organizations with people and the fact that we are comfortable with them doing that, the more awareness we have with how people are using it, the more we will be able to size our policies and the more we can probably shift and shape what is happening within our nations because we have to allow people, I think we have to allow people to use it.
I think the school’s a great example. I have two teenage girls, and I know there was a point in time where it’s like you can’t use AI in high school. And I was like, let’s be real here. Our kids are going to for sure be using it. You can say you don’t want them to use it all you want, they’re going to. So instead of saying don’t use it and then just let everyone use it, and then we all, it’s like this dark web and black market, how about we actually show people how to use it in ways that align with the knowledge and skills and abilities that we want them to have when they come into the workforce. I’m going to be hiring people that I want to know how to use ai, so how about we allow the school systems to teach them how to use it versus trying to pretend they’re going to learn without it.
I remember we used to not be able to use calculators in school. It’s like I carry a calculator around in my pocket on the daily. So AI, I think is going to be in that similar sort of arc of we need transparency around it. I think we need to give people space to explore at an individual level. I think we need to be looking for the bright spots. Where are people using it in all the right ways? How do we amplify that? How do we tell those stories? How do we draw other people into that? As always, I think there’ll be places where we go, yeah, that doesn’t feel right. And so we need to create some structures and land on agreements around what is not okay. But I think it’ll be a time before we get that all figured out. But at this point, our organization is pretty open in the sense of saying like, Hey, we want you to be using it.
We want your job better than anyone else does. We’re going to give you some basic tools we’re going to create. I’m a big fan of freedom in the framework, so how do we create the sandbox that we want you to play in? We’re going to tell you this is we use an enterprise Gemini. We don’t have an enterprise chat GPT for our employees. We do use it on our product, but not for our employee populations. We’re like, Hey, use Gemini versus Chad, GPT, but go use it. And we gave people training and we have leaned in and given people the space to further expand and evolve and create agents. And if you can create something or find a tool that removes some of that administrative work and that frees you up to go and do other work. Awesome. Great. Let’s lean into that. I recognize we have a 400 person company, so I think it’s easier for me to probably do some of that than it is like IBM, but I think it’s about giving people space and trusting that we’re going to land in the right spot.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Did you follow the Sarah Franklin scandal? I’m going to call it Scandal, which is a hilarious name for what it was. Sarah Franklin, CEO of Lattice, which is the HR software company. She came out with the news on LinkedIn, this is nine months ago now, that they were going to create profiles for AI agents and be able to performance review and track and keep them accountable. Did you see that?
Oh, well, it blew up in their face. I see that. And the reaction was, you can’t do that and robots aren’t people. How dare you. And they rolled it back very quickly. Within a couple days they said, okay, we’re going to think more about this. And then six months later, Carl Eschenbach at Workday made the same announcement and they were like, well done, Carl. What an innovator. You’re incredible. And it’s like she had taken the hits for an idea that people had not wrapped their head around yet, and then Workday made the announcement. They’re much bigger, obviously, but everyone reacted very positively and there was no rolling it back at that point, right? This change management, when it comes to ai, it revolves, it’s a little step by step to get people on board because there is this fear in the back of their mind. And one of my AI pet peeves right now is people who try and pretend like it’s all rosy. The big consulting firms who were like, AI is not going to replace people. It’s going to enhance people. I’m like, no one buys that. Everyone knows that it will replace people. To your point about transparency, why are we not telling the truth? I mean, the emperor has no clothes on. So how do you manage that as a chief people officer at an AI company as you adopt ai? Is that a conversation you’ve had to have?
Megan Hansen: Yeah, we talk about it. I mean, I think I have the advantage of being at a growth company. And so I think we look at it a lot as how do we create instead of having to go hire new heads, how do we create capacity within our existing employee population by in essence, give everyone an intern On some level, it was like, that’s how I think about AI on some levels. Let’s just give everyone an intern and it’s your AI agent and they’re going to not get everything, and you’re still going to have to be in there. But it creates that space without us having to go hire new people. So we’re not having to remove roles or shift because we’re small enough that we have people that can then shift up and into different administrative things. I do think a lot about my kids entering the workforce because I think the layer that it’s going to take out are interns because to my earlier point, AI is now your intern.
So if no one’s getting internships, because we’re going to all have these AI agents, which PS we hire interns, we still are using them, but there’s a world where that is the intern and entry level. We all paid our dues. I was a recruiting coordinator. That’s a job that I think AI can very much be leaning into. We have great recruiting coordinators. I love them to pieces. And I think as we see that potentially playing out, there’s opportunity for folks to then move into alternative roles. So I worry less about my existing staff. I worry a heck of a lot more about these next generations, and are they going to have to jump into the workforce at an IC four? How are you going to get some of this experience that all of us, or do you not need it anymore? Or does college or high school become more of that experience?
And ultimately, I never had to pluck feathers from a chicken and work in a factory. I jumped in into knowledge management role right out of the gate. Is this AI revolution going to be a step change like that where it wipes out this entire of work that a lot of people have at least started their careers in? And then what does that mean for our education system? Which ps, I don’t know. Do we still have one? That’s maybe a different conversation for a different podcast, but what does it, I think the burden then does shift to our education system to prepare people to enter the workforce at a different step than it did before. Because you’re no longer the person who is, I mean, I was making copies and sending faxes. No one does that anymore either, because now it’s all internet. So there’ve been these small changes, but this is a huge one, and that’s the piece that I worry about.
It’s less about my current folks and it’s more about what is to come, but we also have this talent shortage. So maybe this is actually, I don’t know. I’m going to be the person you hate right now. Maybe really good news. This is all really great and there’s no problems. No, there is, but I do think that it could, if channeled appropriately, I think it can help with some of our talent shortage issues while also needing to be very thoughtfully brought to bear organizationally. So we don’t just create homes for existing folks but not be able to bring anybody new in.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: But the talent shortage right now is largely in manufacturing roles. And totally, it’s not these, I mean, having said that, healthcare, but we are already seeing how healthcare is being vastly more efficient thanks to ai. So that’s a great question. I mean, I’m also interested in the corporate world’s responsibility in reforming education and the future for the children, because I don’t think education’s going to cut it. I mean, they moved 10 times slower than corporations, and I just went to my daughter’s school this morning and saw what was going on. It’s the same exact thing that was going on when I was her age, and I’m 40 something. So we’re not, the public school system at least has not changed in 40 years as far as I can tell. I mean, we’re still making photocopies. We’re still handing out pieces of paper. We’re still using the projector with that projector, yes, with the special pens.
Megan Hansen: Yeah. And oh, okay.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah, yeah, we got blackboards, Et cetera and so forth.
Megan Hansen: But whose responsibility is that? I mean, I think that’s where it gets, I love the Edelman Trust Index. I’m sure you read it every year too. And this year the focus was on how people are disgruntled doesn’t surprise me. For the last, I feel like at least five years, the focus has been a lot on how people are really just focusing in more on what they expect from their organizations because they’re not getting things from government, they’re not getting things from religious institutions. They don’t believe media. And so there is this burden that has been placed at the foot of corporations to try and be everything and fix everything for everyone. And yet most organizations, like smaller organizations are not equipped to do the majority of that. I sit on a board with a bunch of other CHROs and CPOs, and there are some big hitters in that room, like the woman who’s the CPO for Toyota, and they’re doing some really cool stuff, leaning all the way into literally elementary school.
They’re leaning into curriculum, they’re creating opportunities to try and pull people into manufacturing and STEM type of roles at a young age, making sure that it is something that is appealing. It is something that not just, I mean for a long time I feel like the conversation was women in stem, but I think now it really is kind of these hands-on how do we actually create or reduce some of the stigma maybe around roles that require people to use their hands being lesser. And in reality in particular with ai, I think there’s going to be even more. There’s still going to be things that you have to do with your hands. So how do we help people lean into those types of roles versus everyone wanting to go in and be an engineer, so they’re leaning in. And I think when you’re a really big or corporation like that, you have the resources to lean in at that sort of level.
If I was going to try and pitch like, Hey, yeah, let’s go lean in the elementary school, really, we do not hire at a level that would justify that being where we put our energy, but perhaps there’s a future state where organizations need to be in more consortiums or in how do we maybe join efforts more and think about things more in a universal sort of way. I don’t know. We could go down a total raffle here because I think the other problem is that our not-for-profits, NGOs are really disconnected from each other. And so there is no universal way for folks to try and solve problems together. Everyone just kind of pops up their own and there’s really just disorganized.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Well, I think all of these questions boil down to one common theme, which is competition.
And we operate in an animal instinctual, competitive mindset most of the time when we are in fear, and there’s a lot to fear right now, even if it’s real or not real, it doesn’t matter. We’re in fear. And I think that there’s a lot of societal habits have encouraged more fear like having a cell phone and the notifications and the Instagram and the social media and the comparisons. And in order to be better, I need to be better than not better than my previous self in a comparison and competitive environment now that we’ve created of our own nightmare making and creation that now we operate from that mindset. So NGOs and educational systems and corporations obviously, and employees within corporations are all competitive with one another. I mean, we talk about the number one complaint that people come to us for help solving is departmental silos.
And they say, we are one team. It’s one effort and all in this together and so on and so forth, and collaboration, et cetera. But at the end of the day, when there’s three senior directors and one open position for vice president, I look to my left and I look to my right, you guys are going down. That’s not conducive to one team because we are competing for resources in a system that has a certain limit to the resources that we’re in. So it requires being above the systemic structures that exist to put us in that place, conscious living, conscious thinking, faith-based mindset. But it isn’t necessarily obvious or intuitive that that’s how we need to be operating. And a lot of people don’t, right? So thus the situation and the stories perpetuate the stress.
Megan Hansen: Totally. It’s hard. It’s funny because one of the thoughts that I’ve also been having is how AI I think will potentially impact our org structures and what we think good looks like forever. It’s been this pyramid with the CEO EO at the top end. You’ve had these plethora of roles at the bottom, and then you’re constantly narrowing in because there’s fewer managers spans of control by very nature less and less and less as you go up. But does that all change? Could it? I think it could start to look a lot more boxy as we progress. I think there’ll be, like we talked about a lot fewer of those entry level roles, and I think there’ll be a lot more self-management. I don’t know if that’s going to solve the silo problem per se, but I do think it’s going to change a lot of the things that have been the conversations for decades.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Well, yeah. And so have you read Reinventing Organizations book?
Megan Hansen: Oh, look here, you’re giving me so many good things on it.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: So many. That’s a really good book. Teal Organizations, that’s what that book is about. And then the holacracy movement. But a lot of these things are trends. They don’t stick. And I know you have a very interesting take on trends. I think chief HR officers and people, officers often are the keeper of trends or the absconder of trends. Tell us about how you view trends.
Megan Hansen: Yeah, I mean, I think E is a great one. I think it’s very easy in particular for our CEOs who travel a lot to be reading an HBR or to go to a conference and talk to some friends and hear about a thing and then say, yeah, let’s go do that. And so Jamie Diamond’s doing a thing, therefore we should go do the thing. There is this general sense of appropriately, I think paying attention to what others are doing, but then sometimes inappropriately wanting to directly apply that into our organizations without thinking about who we are and what is our culture. And so I am super committed and am quite proud. My organization I think does a really good job of this, of really being grounded in who you are outside of the trends. So I think doing good work on the culture that you want to be creating and being, it’s like you don’t go into the grocery store when you’re starving. You’re just going to buy all the stupid stuff, right? You’re going to end up walking out with a Kit Kat half eaten. Not that I just did that recently, but I may have,
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: I’m sorry, Megan. That’s exactly what I do.
Megan Hansen: I Always go into the grocery Store. Well, I’m going to give you an alternative. Yes, please, yes. Build a shopping list before you go in and then actually buy the things on your shopping list and go make the meals that you said you were going to make. I think a part of the challenge that we have as a nation, and I know this one better than most, but I do think there’s a global component to it, but in particular in the United States of America, it’s the fast food mentality. We are really, really quick. We are all about speed. It is what has made capitalism what it is. And in so doing, we sometimes skip the eastern practices of reflection and planning and thought and applied to our culture. I think a lot of organizations lack a really strong ballast for who they want to be. That shopping list outside of the grocery store, outside of watching you pick up the Kit Kat, and I’m like, damn, that does look good.
That was not on my list and I didn’t need the Kit Kat. And I actually, it goes against what I’m trying to do right now, and my goals are actually antithetical with the Kit Kat. So if I just go pick it up, I saw Jessica with it. I am working against my goals if I’m strong in my convictions. And if organizations have that set of, we have a really great set of values that we reflect on and we spend about a year reframing them, making sure that they were true to what we wanted to be, and we try to bump almost everything up against ’em. And we were really thoughtful too, and we want one set of things. I don’t want eight things, I don’t want this and that and all the others. It’s one set of things and it drives all of our decisions, employee behaviors, company behaviors, et cetera.
And knowing that helps us deflect the ideas that are trending, that are antithetical to what we’re trying to achieve, and then attract and pull in the trends that are happening that are going to actually help us achieve those things. But I think way too many companies lack that conviction in who am I outside of what is going on around me? And so they end up getting swayed and sucked into doing things that perhaps they don’t really want to. And sometimes employees love that because you have companies that are then doing things that they didn’t really want to that benefit employees. But then as soon as that organization sees an alternative window, they jump through it and they’re like, jk, we didn’t really want to be doing that. So now we’re going to go into the thing we really wanted to do in the first place.
And so you have employees that feel kind of whiplash, whereas if it’s like, Hey, I want to go do this work because I think it’s the right thing to do. I think DEIB obviously under a lot of scrutiny right now in the US and I think companies who were doing the work before George Floyd’s murder and who had conviction in it before it became the thing that everyone was supposed to go and do are still doing it because it’s a part of who they are and it’s how they want to show up in the world. And it’s not about doing what they think they have to do. It’s about doing what they believe is the right thing to do. And the more you have companies that kind of focus on things like that where it’s like, I’m doing it because it’s the right thing to do, the less you are swayed by the external market shifts and trends. And I think the better home you create for your employees because they know what they’re opting into and they know what they’re signing up for, and they get a consistent version of you as an organization in that relationship versus one that is just kind of being blown around by whatever the current waves are. How many other acronyms can I potentially work into that?
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: I’m reflecting on is having conviction can also be weaponized against you.
Megan Hansen: Totally.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: I mean, if I’m on this side of the aisle and you’re on that side of the aisle and you have conviction about your side of the aisle, I can call you stubborn and it can be used against you, and then it can also be honored and celebrated if I’m on your same side and I see your conviction
Manifesting, I just think it’s so interesting how I just did an episode on the other podcast I have called CEO Daily Brief, which is a five minute daily podcast on the airline’s response to tariffs. And you’ve got Ed Bastion, who’s the CEO of Delta who said, I’m not paying tariffs. I don’t care. That’s not my thing. If you guys make me pay tariffs, I’m going to hold delivery on those planes. And he’s always had a problem with Trump, and they’ve had these battles since 2019, I think. And then the United Airline CEO was just like, we’re good. Just adjust our, we’ll adjust our forecast a little bit and we’ll just cut some fat out. And who’s Air Force guy? So isn’t that interesting Now, which one of those has conviction and which one doesn’t? I mean, maybe they both do.
Megan Hansen: I don’t know. I mean, I would argue perhaps they both do, and perhaps that’s okay. And then employees could potentially move with their feet if they are not aligned. And customers can choose with their pocketbooks if they’re not aligned. But if you as a leader as a CEO or as a product officer or chief people officer or whatever your space is, as long as you’re bringing things that are going to benefit the organization, the business case makes sense. I think it’s okay for there to be difference. Is this not what we were fighting for with diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging? It is on some level about it’s okay for people to have differing perspectives on things. It doesn’t mean we all have to have my perspective. And I think that’s where we lost some folks in the mix was that it started to feel like everyone had to have our perspective. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think there are places where there are clear rights and wrongs and there are justice in the mix, but for a lot of it, it’s perspective and it’s choice and its optionality. And I think the clearer you are with where you sit on those things as an organization, the less churn you introduce into unnecessarily into your organizations and in a world full of a lot of uncertainty. I think it’s important for us to be driving that for our people.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Absolutely. And it’s funny because it makes me think of Johnny C. Taylor announcement and SHRM annual conference last year where he said, we’re moving from DEI to I and D, and how much blowback the SHM organization got for that. And then I interviewed him for this podcast and I said, tell me why you did that. And it was this perfectly logical, very convicted, that’s not a word. That’s not the word that I’m trying to say. But he had conviction in that moment. But he looked like a flip-flopper, right? And that’s what people were throwing at him is, oh, you changed your mind. He’s like, no, I have not changed anything about what I believe about DE and I, but here’s what I’m seeing as being effective versus an effective and actually creating change and impact and results on these metrics that I care deeply about.
Megan Hansen: I love May, Angela, I’m going to butcher it, not exactly her quote, but you do your best until you know better, and then you do that. And I think if we are not as HR leaders, as people leaders, as culture leaders, if we are not the ones looking for ways to continually shift and get better and create change and tell those stories and bring people along for the journey, how can we expect anyone else to be?
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah. Well, I was just talking to a friend of mine this morning who had said something to her three-year-old that she regretted, and I said, this is awesome for you. Now you get to go tell your three-year-old that you made a mistake, and that is going to blow her mind, and that’s going to be such a growth moment for your relationship. Totally. And for her, it’s great. I mean, to have the humility to do that, and yet in the corporate world, there’s only one VP spot, and if I say, I made a mistake, I might not get that spot. And so we often get rigid in our self-defense of anything that we’ve done, even when we know we’re wrong because Right.
Megan Hansen: Although research shows that trust is really the core of high performing teams, and you can’t ask other people on your team to be willing to make mistakes and to lean in and experiment without an expectation of failure. And we need to be able to model that in order to create environments where we’re trusted by our people. And I do think admitting failures and being willing to change a perspective is actually a really important part of that equation. We just don’t do a very good job of it, but we should do more of it.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Well, and it’s a gray area because part of building trust is being reliable. And so if you make a mistake, you’re a little less reliable, and so maybe you’re losing trust. I mean, it’s so hard to be a human. It’s so hard, Megan. No, being human is really, really rough. Really’s hard. Okay. So I have one last question for you, and this is my favorite question, and it is, what is something that you don’t get asked very often in these types of interviews that you wish you were asked more often?
Megan Hansen: So I actually think it dovetails really well off what we were just talking about, which is no one really talks about how hard this job is, and no one really asks why. And I obviously am biased in my perspective because I’m in this seat, but outside of the CEO role, I don’t think there is a harder job in corporations than the chief people officer or the chief HR officer. And it is at its core because we have all of these stakeholders that have competing and often strong perspectives on everything that we do. We have our CEOs, you have the rest of your senior leadership team. We have a board in particular, if you’re a public company, you have your own team, you have the rest of the employee population, you have external stakeholders, you’re thinking about candidates and prospects and potentially even investors because they care about what we’re doing and ESG and all the things.
So the job is really about trying to find this space where everybody can win. And that happens not that often. And so you’re often feeling like you’re failing because frankly, you’re probably failing somebody in that mix. And that’s really, really hard. And that is really, really taxing. And I think it does require a perspective, and perhaps it’s why I have the one that I do around failure, is I have to believe that it’s okay to fail and I have to believe it’s okay to grow and to change and to continually be assessing what we do because that core is my job.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: And I’m a huge fan of Josh Berson. I feel like I’m name dropping a lot on this episode.
Megan Hansen: No, You’re just sharing your wealth of Knowledge.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah. Podcast guest number three that I’ll name drop Josh Berson. But I listen to his podcast, which is very good, and he said, there is no role in corporate America that people who have never done feel like they’re qualified to do more. Everyone thinks they can do it. Everyone thinks they can do your job
Megan Hansen: A hundred percent all the time.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: They’re a people leader. So I got it. I got it. People leading. Got it. Right. So that drives me nuts. Being the CHRO was the hardest job I ever had. It was also because I work for an unethical leader that I was constantly fighting with. So that’s challenging. There’s that, and that, I think makes it harder than ever. Do you like your CEO?
Megan Hansen: I love my CEO.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: It’s nice. It changes everything, doesn’t it?
Megan Hansen: Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. I don’t always agree to be super clear.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Totally different question.
Megan Hansen: I very rarely enter into a thought process with the same perspective, and I don’t always agree, but he is really, really smart. He cares deeply about the organization, and he is willing to move off of his position if the data is clear as to why. And I respect all of that tremendously.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: I love that. I like my CEO too. It makes a world of difference.
Megan Hansen: High five to good CEOs.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: High five to us, although I’m not A-C-H-R-O anymore, so my job is way easier. Although now I’m a chief strategy officer, which is Its own kind of thing, probably, but not as hard as CHRO. I still give you that.
Megan Hansen: Yeah, I mean, again, I’m biased. I recognize that. So y’all can come at me, but yeah, it’s hard. It’s a really hard job.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Well, thank you for doing it, Megan. Thank you so much for being on today’s show. I can’t believe to Always a pleasure to connect. Done, but I’m so glad. I know. Me too.
Megan Hansen: Thank you so much for having me. Glad to be here.
