From Managing Teams to Measuring Impact W/ Brad Wilkins

Okay, I've given someone a reasonable amount of communication. I've given them a reasonable amount of training. I've articulated the why, whether it's connected to their internal locusts of influence or not, that's up to them. Eventually you get the number four, which is they can't. They can't in this setting, in this kind of environment, actually do the job. [MUSIC PLAYING] Hi, all. Welcome to another episode of Wear Not Recording. Today we talk with Brad Wilkins, VP of People and Operations at Cognite. And today we cover how to get people to take you seriously as an HR professional. And how AI is going to be changing job levels. Stay tuned for a great episode. Don't forget to subscribe to stay up to date with our latest releases. And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Athena, the company that pays for my salary. If you are looking for a better way to do compliance, check us out. Brad, you have a tome. I want to know what you're working on, in particular. I want to know what the most interesting thing that you're working on is. Yeah, I think like a lot of companies right now, we are focused on how do we shift from AI as a tool to AI as a mindset. It's really about embedded AI in everything that we do, which is not about like, how do I use Gemini or how do I use Claude? It's actually rethinking roles, rethinking processes. I was in fact just talking to someone for a leader of our academy just a little bit ago, and I challenged him. I said, hey, who are the four learning groups? You know, like, oh, partner as customers and employees, but he's blanking on the fourth one. I said, the fourth one are large language models, because I think the academy and training functions are going to be training the agents, not even human beings today, right? And it's just like, you could watch his brain processing it in an exciting way, right? How all of a sudden the agents are going to begin interacting in a Terminator-ish. I know. I know. Well, you're doing all that. And I think the right people are looking at it in a super exciting way, because it means that you're getting rid of a lot of them or not. And that you're getting rid of the a lot of the admin, repeatable, kind of commoditized tasks, and allowing your work to elevate them. Much more interesting, strategic, empathy, creativity, things that the agentic stuff can't do for a long time. And I think the right people are super excited by that. The people who have kind of made a career out of just moving things, the office-based guy, connecting things. There's a little upgrade. What's been interesting for me, as I think about this stuff, is how it's going to change job levels, because we used to have at Athena anyway, we have these fairly strict six levels that you can be all the way from analyst up to VP. And the problem is, several of those levels, the blocker is you need to be running a team. But what does it mean when you don't need to run a team because you run so many agents that it's doing the work of a team? You're doing director-level work and having director-level impact without any director reports. So that's something we've been thinking quite a bit about, and how impact salary bands, especially AI-specific roles, I have very strong conviction that all the salary bands are made up. We're just making it up. It's just how much are you willing to pay to have it right now? Yes, 100%. 100%. And it's funny you mentioned the word impact, because about 10 years ago, we were on the relative bleeding edge of this when I was the chief people of the office at Alta Source. We actually got rid of the performance review process. And again, this is somewhat about words, but again, back about mindset. And we changed it to be called impact review. And we really refocus everyone's energy from what were people doing to what was the impact of what they were doing. So no longer to your point. It wasn't just, oh, I had a 20 person team. It's like, if you had a 20 person team and the delivery of impact, business quantifiable impact was x. And the other person had a 2 person team. And the x was 2x. The second person was actually more valuable, right? In the-- whether you job levels, whether you compensation, all these different things. Fast forward 10 years from now, a lot of people talk about impact. It's actually one of our core values at Cognite. And so when we're asking, do we do performance review? It's one of the questions, right? Like measurable impact. And again, it's changing mindsets and changing modalities from this idea of just work and teams and all the classic scalable things that were these inputs into these job levels. And then the other interesting thing you mentioned, job levels, I see a lot of noise about like, oh, there's a cap for these entry level jobs because they were taking away all this work. I actually think more about just jumping the middle of the fray because they're coming and they're native AI, right? They're learning in university how to do AI in a way that the middle levels of 2, 3, 4 levels today are trying to figure out and catch up. These kids coming out of school are going to just leapfrog right over you and be able to do what you can't do if you don't very quickly assimilate to where the world's going. I think that's exactly right. I think first we're going to start seeing a lot more director level ICs. I think you're just going to have to. They are farther in their career and having higher impact to your point, even if they're not running a team. And then yeah, I do think that that AI savvy is going to let a lot of people leapfrog and what's interesting to me is I mentioned somebody else recently. So I have a college age brother and his college classes are educating him on AI and how to use it. So they are going to be more experienced with AI, I think than many people in the workforce in about two or three years. I think they're going to come in just hit the ground running. It's going to be wild. My son is seven. I'm in a five year old and a seven year old or they're about to be literally in the next week or so. And I was at his school the other day and they had the bean counting thing where how many beans are in the jar. And my son literally turned and said, hey dad, can we figure that out with AI? He's seven years old. And so I said, yes we can. So we took a picture of both sides. We plugged it into perplexity. And it gave him his estimate. That's how he introduced score. I don't know if that's cheating or not, but I think it actually was-- It's resourcefulness. It's resourcefulness. And he said, yes, it was resourcefulness. And I think the example you shared with your son is actually so critical to what I think is the inflection point here. I think it's literally just asking the question, could AI help with this? Right. Is a skill set in its own, right? To pause and think, could AI do this? Is a different way of thinking than someone who it doesn't even occur to them, hey, let's pause and let's just try. But I'm Melanie, I would even challenge it further. Please. Why? Why couldn't AI do this? Oh, why, oh. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, under the assumption that-- The ideal sum is everything can be done by AI, right? And then prove the negative, right? And so it's again, and that's where it's like, oh, I'm using AI as a tool versus AI as native or embedded as the core foundation of everything that you do. And now you're rationalizing it's like, oh, in the same way you had to rationalize a head count. It's like, well, why would I-- You know, why can't AI do this? Why do I really need to rationalize it? [BLANK_AUDIO] or a higher or whatever it may be. And by the way, there is lots AI can't do, right? So it's not this, you know, we're not in the pool of robots necessarily yet. But it's really that. It's working off the assault point there and then working backwards from that versus, 'cause if you go to someone, they're like, oh, how could AI, they're like, no, no, I don't think it could, let me hire another person or let me, you know, hand down manually. And so you almost need them to work off the reverse hypothesis. - Well, let's dig in there a bit because I do think, listen, AI is important, it's taking over, this is a huge changing point for everyone. And also, there is other life going on outside of AI. And so I'd love to hear, so I'd love to hear from your perspective, you know, outside of AI, other than AI, what problems are you solving right now? What is taking up the most of your time at work? - Yeah, so, you know, we are in a very class or a cool, okay, point right now, as cognite is about 800 people, so a really interesting company founded in Norway, just moved its headquarters to the United States, just got put in the upper quadrant of IDC, and incredibly successful at what we're doing. But we're moving from what I call startup, and I don't call it, people calls, everyone calls. Start up into what I kind of define a scale up, right? And where is that line? It's a big, but the way I differentiate those two things, a startup you value superheroes, right? People who will run their walls, get things done at all costs, they're wearing hats, they're doing three things pretty good, at a scale up, right? It's about repeatable processes, predictable, scalable things, right? Instead of wearing three hats and doing it pretty good, you're doing one thing, but now you have to do it really, really well, right? And so all of a sudden, if two years ago at a startup, you were doing this thing, whatever X is, but you were doing it pretty good, and everyone told you you're amazing, 'cause you were doing little things with it, and now you're about to hoard, and it's like, wait, I'm still doing this same level of competency, but now you're telling me that I need to develop myself where I'm barely meeting expectations. There's an incongerance as a human being to that. It's like, wait, what just gifted? And we're in that tornado, not only that transition from a Scandinavian company to, and we'll always, I think, have some of our core Scandinavian roots, for sure, and I think it's one of the things that one of our superpowers actually, but to also being in the US and some of those differences in speed and expectations, and as we bring people from the outside, you've got the very natural, the people from the startup, how, here's how we do it. New people are saying, hey, here's how I did it on the outside, and there's a natural productive tension that has to occur there, and that's where the real magic can happen, but we're in that tornado stage, where no one's quite figured out exactly where it is. And then there will be people who came from the front side of things that were incredibly valuable, and getting us here, that might not make it to the other side, because that's not what they want to do, right? - Yeah, but I would want to, I would love to double click on that. How much effort do you put in trying to help people bridge that gap to that next level, versus helping people understand, if maybe it's better for us to part ways at this point? - Yeah, I would say concurrently, our preference always would be take legacy knowledge and developing grow someone, right? And that's true here, and I've done multiple kind of scale ups at this exact stage, right, for this, I was at Adventure Capital firm, but before that, I was at Loadsmart, we went from 350 to 700 plus in 12 months, right? So I know this journey all too well. - Oh my gosh, that's so wild. - But our general sense is, is like, we'd love people to kind of come on this journey with us, but again, at the same time, it's about realistic job preview, and realistic understanding of like, okay, here's what it means to be part of a larger scaled up organization that things are more repeatable, that if you're gonna deliver XYZ, it's gonna be consistent with how we're doing it in other parts of the team, or other parts of the world, or whatever we be. And then having direct kind of empathetic conversations with people, is that something you want to do, right? 'Cause you think about, I got all these cheesy things about why people don't succeed at a job, right, it's four reasons, right? There's only four reasons that someone doesn't succeed at a job. They don't know what to do, communication, right? So it's like, hey, let's be really clear on what the expectations are. They don't know how to do it, right, which is what you're alluding to. Hey, what kind of development can we do? They don't know why to do it, right? So what's my motivation? If I do, you know, I take all these adjustments and I move into scale up like, what's in it for me, or not just what's in it for the company? But then eventually you move through that progression, you're like, hey, I've given someone a reasonable amount of communication, I've given them a reasonable amount of training. I've articulated the why, whether it's connected to their internal locus of influence or not, that's up to them. Eventually you get to number four, which is they can't. They can't in this setting, in this kind of environment, actually do the job, and that's okay, right? I mean, like I could want to play in the NBA. There was no amount of communication training and motivation that is going to get me at 5.9 into the NBA, right? It's just not coming. So, and that's obviously an extreme kind of silly example, but the more you could help people work through that as managers, right? And ideally before you hire someone, you normally work that in a reverse progression, but when you have existing employees, you really want to work slowly through that. And then when you get to that camp, right? That's where I think Cognite really probably better than any company that I've been a part of, is does a great job. Like we don't do Pips here, for instance. We have conversations. I'm very anti-PIP, so I love to hear that say more. I mean, I think anyone listening to this call who's been in HR tell me that you know less, you know, more than 1% of your Pips that have ever been successful in your career. Like, and so yeah, so it's really about those empathetic conversations, understanding like, hey, here's where we are, here's where you want to be. The motivation is disconnected or the competency or capability gap for where you want to be versus, hey, here's where your capabilities are. And the more that we can do that with clarity and back to what we're talking about a few minutes ago with impact, start being able to provide measurable kind of objective, consistent data points along the way. The more that it becomes easy for the employee to figure out what is the best thing for them personally and professionally. And that's the fun thing I love about Human Capital, right? It's this impossible Chiodian thing because there's so many intangibles here at work, but then at home, right? That's all these different things that we have no control over. And we just try to increase predictability to create positive outcomes. But we know it's impossible. I love that framework that you provide. Like, there's four reasons why people don't succeed at a job. The reason why I like that is that I find that too often when HR professionals are having a conversation with a key stakeholder, the CEO, or whoever, they struggle to articulate the thought process. It might be like, no, because it's right. This is right. Or like, I know, like, you know, you're not being fair to the employee. And none of those really work. But the way that you just did that, right? Where it was like, let me show you my expertise. And let me explain to you that I have been doing this for a long time. And I have whittled it down to four reasons why someone doesn't succeed. It's these four things we're hitting this one right now. We should either decide that we want to invest or we decide that this is not the right priority right now. So we're willing to part ways with people over this. Like, I just, it just gives it so much more gravitas. And I'm going to say it's very tough thing, which is, I think that sometimes people don't take another person seriously because they don't sound serious. So you might actually have really great wisdom and what you are saying is right. But if you don't say it in a way that makes it abundantly clear that doesn't make it sound like you know what you're talking about, it plants a seat of doubt in that person. No, no, 100%. I mean, one of my hobbies is I refer to college basketball, college at high school, basketball. So ironically, there's a lot of transfer. It's there too because you make a call. And this sounds silly if you don't ever think about it now the next time that anyone wants to basketball game, they're going to pay attention. But the referees, when they come to the table to report a foul, right, they actually practice hours. I mean, hundreds of hours, their signal of like, "Oh, hit whatever it may be." So they look credible, right? Because if I come to the table like, "Oh, 21, hit him." Like that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, what a great analogy. What a great, that, like, so that people can really understand what we're talking about here. And yes, if a referee came to the table kind of like doubtful, you'd be like, "I don't know, now I don't trust you." But when they come at a man, you're like, "Okay, well, you know." - Yeah, it's exactly. - Yeah, it's a, it's a great analogy. I also really liked what you talked about with the fourth one being, maybe they just can't. I think it's really important because I think so many people grew up with their parents telling them, "You could do anything that you put your mind to, you know?" And listen, I love the, the aspirational mindset. I love, I think that everyone should try. But I think it's also important, like, first of all, do you want to be doing this? And like, are you sure that you can do this? And by the way, like, maybe it's not that, maybe a better framework isn't for that person if it's hurting their feelings. Maybe it's more like, is this the best use of my skill set? Is this really where I'm going to thrive? And sometimes, you know, your skill set is not best suited to this role. And so, and that's okay. It doesn't mean that you're a bad employee or that you're not good at your job or that you don't try hard. It's just maybe this is not the one for you. - No, and I think where that really starts to become more challenging. That's easier when someone gets hired into a role, I think at a scale, right? When someone's like, "No, no, I want to do what I was doing two years ago." Right? I like being more superhero and I like doing three things. And a minimal viable products of things. And so that's the more, kind of, pulling someone through that not whole of like, we're not going back to that, right? It's, we're, here's where we're going. And some people can get there and some people can't and it's very natural. I totally hear you. I know we have just a few minutes left. So I'm going to circle it back to one of the Spiceier things that you talked about that I don't think people talk about enough, which is the fact that you all don't do Pips and you're just like very direct when when the time comes. Can you for the audience just walk us through your process? How went once you decide? Oh, this is not going to work out in place of a pip. What do you do? Yeah, so again, we generally kind of work through some and so one each people to a business partner kind of has their own style and they're, you know, they're work with different Managers of different maturity level. So there's there's not a roadway necessarily to go about it, right? And that's I think back to this idea of empathy and humanness, right? Like understanding each particular case, you know, someone who just got hired who's struggling is very different than someone who's maybe been with the company six years and, you know, contributed a lot of great value, right? So ideally, right, you've kind of worked through that progression or some variation in your own terms of that progression where by the time you get to that camp conversation, it's a mutual conversation, right? And are there Rarely honestly and I think we all can agree if you actually can get in front and actually get your managers to have these meaningful conversations to be defined the role clearly. Hey, am I giving some reasonable amount of training and development and coaching am I connected to the why and they understand what their motivation is. And if you get to that, and you can have that conversation very directly with the employee, okay, here's all the things like what's going on? Do you agree? Right? And even at a company level, we're at the size and scale right now every single exit conversation before even HR will engage in it goes through the CEO himself, right? The CEO will ensure that we were empathetic and fair. Wow. Yeah, that's pretty big. Yeah, so it's interesting and we don't do a ton of terminations here and our regrettable attrition is less than 5% and so it's we can make the means you're recruiting processes working. Generally, our recruiters are incredible and our head of TA is amazing and then that's continuing to evolve as the kind of back to the very beginning of our conversation. Roles are changing the needs are changing and things like that. And so interesting because I know the opposite situation where some CEOs they want to interview every single hire that comes to the door, right? Our CEO wants to make sure that hey, if we embrace someone, if we take the commitment as cognite to say, we're going to be part of your career journey and you're going to be part of our success, right? That if we decide mutually, both of us that this is not going to fit anymore that everyone's been fair and consistent along the way, which I think speaks back to kind of some of the Scandinavian roots that we have of just consensus and fairness and just kind of balance and blend. Yeah. And so it's a really neat superpower that we have of this like data and AI tech company that's leading the quadrants in all of our categories. And yet beneath all of it are these really human values that allow people to thrive and enjoy what they do. I really love that. We color code our feedback to help with like move these along. So anytime a manager goes feedback, they have to market yellow oranges or red yellows nice to have oranges. If you don't improve, you know, fired, but you won't be eligible for an increase of promotion red is danger danger. If you don't improve, improve meaningfully and quickly, you'll lose your job. And so it's sort of like if you've had red a couple of times, like you know that it's not working out. And so it's less of a surprise than what we part ways. But this has been such a fun conversation when it's so many different directions wasn't expecting it. It was a happy surprise. This was great. Thank you. Not a fantastic thanks melody. Really appreciate it. If you're tired of service level atra podcast, look no further. We've got your back with We're Not Recording. Subscribe to us on YouTube and follow me on LinkedIn.