S4 E84 | eXpert Tease: Linda Brenner reveals why she believes not all roles are critical and not all people are vital for your success

https://vimeo.com/542368604
Welcome to the CXR channel, our premier podcast for talent acquisition and talent management. Listen in as the CXR community discusses a wide range of topics focused on attracting, engaging and retaining the best talent. We're glad you're here.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:18Hi, I'm Chris Hoyt, President of CareerXroads, and your fitness instructor for the next 10 minutes as we chat with one of my favorite personalities in the talent industry, Linda Brenner, the co-founder and managing partner of Talent Growth Advisors. Now, this is a rapid fire segment aimed at giving you just a nugget or two of someone else's experience. And the lessons that they've sort of learned along the way now we pick the focus of these topics in advance, and through our 2021 priority survey that anyone can participate in. Already hundreds of Tella leaders have chimed in on the topics of diversity, ethics, change, management, internal mobility, and more. So if you haven't already, drop your thoughts in as well by finding the 2021 priority survey within the research and report section of CXR.works but do quickly. We're actually going to close that out this month and publish the results. So if you're here with us live in the studio audience, you can drop a question for today's guests in the chat section. And if we've got time, we'll try to answer it for you. If you run out of time, you can always add it to our open and public exchange [email protected]/talenttalks now, feel like I've already burned through the first five minutes of our chat. Let's get right to it. Linda, how are you?

Linda Brenner, Talent Growth Advisors 1:25I'm great. Thanks for having me. I'm super excited for our rapid fire session.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:30You ready to fire away?

Linda Brenner, Talent Growth Advisors 1:32I am. Yes.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:33Look for those who are not lucky enough yet to know you, Linda, let's get a little background like who is Linda Brenner? What do you do?

Linda Brenner, Talent Growth Advisors 1:41So I lead Talent Growth Advisors. We're a management consulting firm that blends finance and talent expertise to help our clients improve the speed and quality of hiring. So I've been doing this business for 17 years before that I worked for Gap and Pepsi and Home Depot in different operations, talent acquisition, talent management roles.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 2:04You've been doing this a while

Linda Brenner, Talent Growth Advisors 2:06I have been doing this a while I am what you'd call grizzled, cynical, bitter, maybe angry.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 2:12Maybe a little, a little, just a little peppering of anger,

Linda Brenner, Talent Growth Advisors 2:14Maybe a little of both.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 2:18So what that tells me is, you've learned a few things along the way. Yes. So we chatted a little while about how you don't need every single role. Right to to necessarily be vital. Like, is there? Is there? Is there something in there? Like what would you say that not all roles are critical? What exactly do you mean?

Linda Brenner, Talent Growth Advisors 2:37Well, I would say that the old paradigm of running HR, where we throw everything we've got at all the senior roles, we send the jobs to search and spend, spend $200,000, we give them mentors and MBAs and all that. And then we spread our resources more thinly as we get to middle management, and then the bottom, we just whatever's left, we just spread it like peanut butter and call it a day that I would argue never worked. Although I certainly thought I was doing a good job back in the day using that kind of framework. But what we help our clients do is connect the roles that are essential to building business value, which in almost every industry is intellectual capital. So if you're Merck, its research and development. If your Home Depot, it might be merchants, if you're Raytheon, it's your missile engineers. If you can't get hiring and retaining those jobs, right, and kill it,