Head of Talent, Chili Piper

 

[0:01:00.0] RS: Joining me today, for the latest barn-storming installment of Talk Talent to me is Chili Piper’s head of talent and former class clown, Tyler Parsons.

 

[INTERVIEW]

 

[0:01:10.2] RS: Tyler, welcome to the podcast, how are you?

 

[0:01:12.4] TP: Thank you, good to be here, I feel like I should say a joke now or something.

 

[0:01:15.7] RS: That’s okay, you don’t have to. I planted the class clown thing, I should mention that it was an official title bestowed upon you, it wasn’t just like, “That’s how I identified” in fact, it sounds like you identified as anything but that.

 

[0:01:28.7] TP: Yes, I mean, I was honored to get any superlative in the high school. I was like, “Oh wow, they like me, they really like me.” Yeah, when they released a list, I was like, “Okay, most likely president, here we go, we’re going to make it.” It was like, “Oh no, no. You’re class clown.” I was like, “Okay, I’m so glad that you took my ambitions seriously.” I’m just kidding.

 

[0:01:45.5] RS: Were you making snarky comments to the people? Why do you think that was given to you and why was it so unexpected? 

 

[0:01:53.1] TP: Yeah.

 

[0:01:53.8] RS: I’m asking the hard-hitting questions right out of the gate here, Tyler.

 

[0:01:57.3] TP: I love this, yeah. This is why I’m where I am today. I have a very dry sense of humor, pretty biting, I was always deeply sarcastic, still am. I think that just played really well in high school because high school kids are pretty mean. I’m not mean but, you know, I think my sense of humor can be a little biting so – 

 

[0:02:15.8] RS: you played to the room, it sounds like.

 

[0:02:17.1] TP: Yeah, you played to the room, exactly, know your audience but maybe that’s why they gave it to me. I don’t know.

 

[0:02:25.0] RS: Does that come up a lot? I mean, it will now, sorry for dredging this up from your past but does that, when you’re – did anyone get class superlatives, use superlatives and this is something you’re like, “Oh yeah, I’m miffed about this 20 years later.”

 

[0:02:36.5] TP: It occasionally does pop up. No, it’s actually funny, I’ll bring it up occasionally in work meetings because work meetings get intents and I have to kind of remind people, “No, no, no. I promise, I know a good joke.” It’s almost my stamp of like, “No, you’re still a real person, you’re a human being in there.”

 

[0:02:54.3] RS: I had an equally confusing senior superlative. I was given “Most likely to write a bestselling novel,” which is great, except I didn’t know why. I wasn’t like the creative writing kid or anything, but someone came up to me and was like, “Rob, I need your photo for the year book,” and I was like, “Why?” He’s like, “You won a senior superlative.” In my photo in – they had like a page in the yearbook that’s like, “You won this,” and I’m giving him like a Jim Halpert like, “Huh” look, like, “What?” super confused. I think I maybe deserved it as much as you did or perhaps less because I haven’t written a novel yet and let alone a bestselling novel.

 

[0:03:33.7] TP: I was about to ask, where is the bestselling novel? Let me buy it. My yearbook thing is, there is so much in your experience, they pulled me out of class and they said, “Can we have a quote for the yearbook?” I was like, “Oh God, yes, I won something, woo! Highlight.”

 

[0:03:45.4] RS: I won something.

 

[0:03:46.0] TP: Yeah, then they said, “Okay, you won class clown, can we have a quote?” I was like, “What? I don’t know how I got that award.” I applied it in some silly way and that’s the quote in the yearbook next to my picture. “I don’t know how I got this award.”

 

[0:04:00.3] RS: The tone doesn’t come across, it’s like very stone faced in retrospect.

 

[0:04:04.8] TP: Right? I should move to the UK, I don’t belong here, yeah.

 

[0:04:07.5] RS: You’re wasted on these people.

 

[0:04:09.5] TP: Yeah, well, thank you for asking about my peak, my life peak.

 

[0:04:12.5] RS: Yeah, of course. Having established that, let’s talk about where you are now. You are head of talent at Chili Piper, I want to hear all about your role, before we get too deep in the weeds, would you mind sharing a little bit about the company and what you all do and then we can get into the Tyler of it all?

 

[0:04:28.9] TP: Yeah, sure. Chili Piper, we’re a series-B startup right about a 144 people now and what we do is meeting lifecycle automation for any sort of sales or revenue team. Our marquee audience is honestly demand gen personas, we go after sales development teams and essentially, we make meetings happen, is the high-level answer.

 

[0:04:53.9] RS: Got it. Then, how do you conceive of your role? What is it you do there?

 

[0:04:58.5] TP: As head of talent, I was hired as our first people operations hire. My job, I would say, is about, gosh, 30 to 40 percent recruiting and managing that team and the rest of it is partnering with executives and leaders to – they will build out their people strategy, whatever that means, building the onboarding programs, designing employee progression plans, spearheading company culture initiatives, all that good stuff. We’re a fully remote company so there’s all sorts of fun, new cultural challenges to dive into, which is a big reason on why I joined Chili Piper to begin with.

 

[0:05:30.4] RS: It sounds like you’re doing maybe equal parts recruiting and just overall people ops or is it more one than the other?

 

[0:05:37.5] TP: Yeah, initially, I was hired to spearhead recruiting and in my offer process, Nicolas, my boss, our founder asked me, he said, our co-founder, I should say, “So, what do you really want to own?” I said, “Well, people, the whole thing. I want to be responsible the entire employee life cycle,” because I think, if you’re going to be in charge of recruiting it makes so much sense to have that in the same brand as versus in charge the entire lifecycle because I really think the whole experience should feel cohesive.

 

Long story short, I mean, they didn’t have a people leader, for me I was like, “Oh, it’s a two-for-one special, great.” I got my development that I was really excited about and they got a two-in-one people leader.

 

[0:06:13.6] RS: I couldn’t agree with you more that they ought to be wrapped into one, just because all of the downstream things that happen, when someone signs up, right? That impacts recruiting and your ability to recruit. If you are not retaining people then you’re back hiring for them again. Even if it’s not your responsibility, for example, if you are director of talent acquisition and you’re purely focused on recruiting, it impacts your life.

 

I’m curious though, it’s so interesting that you kind of got a promotion, really or, I guess, at least, additional responsibility, before you even started, is that fair to say?

 

[0:06:47.5] TP: Yeah, definitely fair.

 

[0:06:49.3] RS: Did they sort of just openly ask you, what do you want to do, they just sort of codify this role around you. It sounds like they were hiring you for one thing and then, “You know what? Maybe Tyler would be better off taking on all of this stuff?”

 

[0:06:59.8] TP: Yeah. It’s funny, I’ve never asked Nicolas directly why it happened or why he did it. If I had to guess, like I said, I think it’s back to the piece that I saw a need at the company. I know my background before I joined Chili Piper, I worked with companies who were building out their first people functions and a lot of times, companies choose between hiring a head of people first or a head of talent first.

 

I really fall into the camp where I think the head of people should come in first. Get your culture locked down, get your impression plans locked down and then hire talent into the function as well. Well, what happens so often is that companies hire a head of talent first because the first thing they care about when they think HR, which I hate but HR is recruiting, we have to hire people in scale. Hire a head of talent first. Again, I really believe that if you – you can put all this time and energy into hiring the talent, but if you don’t develop it and enable it and retain it, then you’re spinning your wheels on recruiting.

 

That’s where my passion is and I shared that with Nicolas and the whole executive team and interview process, this is what I think we should really be building and doing. I guess I sold them enough of my vision for them to let me try it.

 

[0:08:05.2] RS: I love that. What were some of the things that you wanted to implement right away on the people ops side?

 

[0:08:10.1] TP: Yeah, first thing’s first was just getting the recruiting house in order. They had brought Greenhouse like two or three months before I started, and we were still using out of the box Greenhouse functionalities. The first order of business was getting in there and making really discreet interviews stages, standardizing scorecards, just making it to where you could actually report on how our recruiting team was even doing because at that point, it was just the wild, wild west. And to a degree, it still is because it’s a startup. Getting hiring in order first was number one. 

 

Number two was understanding where we were against our head count plan because in startups, everyone just says, “We need 30 hires yesterday.” It’s like, “Okay, well, that’s not the reality. What’s the actual need?” It was a lot of partnering with executives and saying, “What is your critical hire right now today? What does it have to be?” and prioritizing effectively.

 

Then, the last thing, which is understanding where these candidates are going to come from. Since I was a one-woman show for a long time, a little few months, it was agency partnerships and establishing those right away.

 

[0:09:10.4] RS: This is coming up more with folks, this approach where pushback on a hiring manager looks like, “What are the actual things you need to accomplish, what are the projects you have, and what is the talent you need for this?” and it’s such an obvious question, in retrospect, hearing that but I think you’re right. The “We need 30 hires yesterday” or having a headcount is like a vanity metric. It’s like, I have this much influence or sway or power in the team and so it’s like, “I want to have a 50-person company,” or “I want to have a 10-person team,” as supposed to like, “Yeah, but what would you even do with 10 people if you had them?”

 

[0:09:45.9] TP: Yeah.

 

[0:09:47.1] RS: You’re in this position where you can be influential to the roadmap of the company just by virtue of making people put the roadmap in terms of the people who do that work?

 

[0:09:57.1] TP: Yeah, I mean, you’re spot on, it’s a really common tendency and this is no T or shade on any leader ever, because being a leader sure is really fucking hard, to be clear but, it’s really a natural instinct to solve your problems by throwing more bodies at them. 

 

Classic example is sales, we have to triple revenue. “Okay, great” Let’s triple the sales team, what if we did that? Well, of course revenue would triple. The real question is, “No. What if you – instead of hiring 20 more account executives, what if you hired one or two really strong sales-enablement people, trainers, what if we did that?” And to your point, it’s asking those questions and building your headcount plan slightly more strategically, getting to the core of critical need, because then it makes everyone’s time more valuable. Made my life a little bit easier.

 

[0:10:46.3] RS: Yes, did then, those 30 hires yesterday, did that turn into like a manageable number and a more tactical number after you kind of had those conversations?

 

[0:10:54.3] TP: It’s funny, after this whole thing, you would think I would say no. Honestly, no, the total headcount number didn’t change a lot, but we did shift a little bit about where we were growing first and more importantly, we shifted like when they could expect the hires. Because there’s another misconception for people who haven’t done a lot of hiring that our company is the best thing since slice bread, why wouldn’t you – everyone in the world want to work here?The reality is, you’re in a really competitive market where everyone appears just as cool as you, although, I should really know, no one is. It’s that reality too of timeline expectation.

 

[0:11:24.8] RS: Yeah, that education piece seems so important. A lot of folks don’t understand just the rigors of talent and what that means to turn a role on, were you sort of sharing, “Okay, here’s the timeline, here’s looking at historical data, here is historically how long it’s taken you to hire such and such. You can have three engineering hires but realistically, you won’t have them in seat until this state.” Is that part of it for you?

 

[0:11:48.1] TP: Yeah, I mean, back in the beginning, it wasn’t because we got our Greenhouse and since it was so new and we weren’t even logging anything or using it effectively. I didn’t have data to really go off of. A lot of what I was doing, and I credit all the leaders of the company for giving me this clout in the beginning, they had to just trust me.

 

I was like, “This isn’t reality,” and they trusted me enough to accept my feedback and now that we have been tracking things more effectively, we’ve brought in a new recruiting operations manager so we’re spearheading that function too. Now we can actually put our money where our mouth is and be a lot more proactive than we used to be.

 

[0:12:25.2] RS: Yeah, makes sense. I do so enjoy talking about hiring manager diplomacy, is like what I like to call this just – it’s not enough to be a really excellent operator at like, for example, recruiting, for example, sending a cold email, for example, closing a candidate. These internal relationships you have to develop are so important. 

 

Another area, where I think you can have push back is just in terms of codifying what each role actually means, what are the competencies of a role in the interest of removing bias, in the interest of letting them see, hey, you actually don’t need this hire. How is that kind of shaking out for you at Chili Piper, just – while we’re on the topic of helping individuals be strategic about their team’s growth. 

 

[0:13:10.7] TP: Totally. The first thing is, establishing the correct, I guess, relationship between talent and leadership. I am absolutely adamant that talent and leadership is a partnership. I really do not like cultures where recruiting is an order-taking function and they sit there, they take notes, they’re not as questions, you just go and find the hire and that’s it. We are most effective when we are least with strategic partners because it is a deeply strategic function. That’s number one.

 

Number two is, like you said, getting the core of the actual critical need of the role. What is this person solving? What’s the problem? Then, we talk about the wants because I tell the hiring managers, we have actually a training a few weeks ago and I said, “Let’s talk about designing spec, what are the critical needs of the role, right?” In account executives, it’s closing business and giving a positive relationship to customers or experienced customers, even when they don’t buy the product, that’s the core role. Do you agree? They’re like, “Yes, I agree.” Okay, anything else that you are saying in this spec is a ‘want’. Everything else is want. 

 

That’s a really interesting thing to challenge hiring managers with like, “What? No. They have to have gone to Harvard and played lacrosse.” You know? It’s like, “No, dude, they really didn’t.”

 

[0:14:29.1] RS: I worked with so few Harvard lacrosse players and I like to think I’ve had a pretty fruitful career, you know? Turns out, not a must-have. You know what? You’re right, Tyler, we’ll take field hockey players, we’ll take crew.

 

[0:14:40.8] TP: Yes, I did exactly. Field hockey or crew is fine. Yeah, well, you know why we don’t work with Harvard Lacrosse players? Because they’re busy in their country clubs not working, because they’re already retired at 35. I’m just kidding.

 

[0:14:52.4] RS: Yeah, exactly.

 

[0:14:53.2] TP: That’s offensive, we don’t need to put that in there. 

 

Everything else is a “nice to have”. From there, once you’ve landed on the spec and you’ve aligned on what is the need and what are the handful of wants you are able to ask for then we talk about the process and designing it specifically around getting to the needs quickly and then getting to the wants in hierarchal order of what we want most, bearing in mind that you are probably not going to get every single want. 

 

With those three things in concert when it works well, it works beautifully but you have to have that relationship piece established first. 

 

[0:15:28.0] RS: Yes. When I hear you describe how deliberate you are about competencies, about must haves, and then even thinking of how you came to Chili Piper like you came for one role and then they were like, “Hey, you know what? Let’s build this role around you,” strikes me that employee development is very important to you?

 

[0:15:45.4] TP: Yeah, it absolutely is. 

 

[0:15:47.0] RS: How do you sort of conceive about this at Chili Piper? 

 

[0:15:49.7] TP: I think organizations throw so many resources into bringing people into the organization, obviously recruiting, and they spend so much money making people good at their existing job, through LND and all that stuff, developments titans, but I don’t think companies in general do a good job of looking at their existing talent as plastic. You might be a UX designer right now but what if you’re a really, really amazing potential product manager? We would never know because we hire a product designer and they’re always a product designer in our head, and it’s not true. Then what happens is when people have a wild hair like, “God, I just want to design a product” well then, they go to another company because they feel like they cannot do it internally. 

 

What we’re trying to build at Chili Piper and we’ve been so far successful in doing is creating a culture where if you want something new, you always ask for it internally first and if it’s in the realm of possibility, it’s in our growth plan, which probably is, then we try it. We give you the test drive and if it works, great, you got the role and you’re happy, everyone’s happy. If you didn’t, fine, go back to your existing role or we’re talk about an exit plan for you. 

 

[0:17:03.1] RS: It’s so true. I hear this constantly from folks, usually off mic, where they’re like, “Yeah, I feel like they’re always going to view me as this recruiting coordinator who is making 55K a year, which is what they got me at nine years ago” and you’re never going to like break out of that mold for how you came to a company. You came in marketing, you’re born a marketer, you’ll die a marketer, you know? But I mean, what’s so hard about asking people what they want to be when they grow up, right? 

 

[0:17:31.9] TP: Yeah. 

 

[0:17:32.2] RS: Or just finding ways for people to do their best work. How do you kind of occasion those conversations and I guess, one, create a culture where people can offer that and, two, support it? 

 

[0:17:43.5] TP: We rolled out, I think it was after my second or third month at Chili Piper, the Piper Plan Initiative, which is obviously literally named which we love. With the Piper Plan Initiative, every person in the company gets their own little very fancy Google doc and they are asked a series of extraordinarily simple questions. The first among them is, “What do you want to do?” Literally, what do you want to do? Which direction do you want your career to take? 

 

What do you think you’re good at? What do you think you could be better at? What steps can you take to improve the things that you want to get better at? It’s very simple and we have everyone in the company fill those out, it’s private to them, their manager, me, and our CEO. Then they speak with their manager once a month in a very intentional way about their growth because so often you get stuck in the weeds. To use your recruiting career for example, “How many candidates did you schedule this week? Is it working? How are you doing?” We never talk about, “Are you enjoying doing this?” So once a month, they talk to their manager. 

 

Once a quarter, they speak with me. Up until now, we’re actually hiring someone to do this. It’s a full-time job because I don’t have time to do it anymore, but we have those intentional conversations once a quarter. It’s amazing because in those meetings when I did it for the first time, the amount of people who said, “I’ve never been asked this question. I don’t even know where to begin.” It’s wild! 

 

[0:19:06.1] RS: I was just thinking that. I was thinking I’ve never been asked that. 

 

[0:19:08.4] TP: It’s crazy. 

 

[0:19:09.2] RS: I’ve been in a lot of one-on-ones and they are various individual contributor roles or manager roles and the one-on-one has such a nasty tendency to just be like an update on your last amount of work since you’re the last one-on-one, right? It’s like, “How’s things going?” “Good, I’m working on XYZ” and that managers need to be a little bit more deliberate about that time and be like, “Yeah, I know you’re doing a good job or else we’d be having a different meeting” you know? 

 

[0:19:32.3] TP: Yeah, exactly. 

 

[0:19:33.9] RS: Yeah, no one ever asked me like, “Okay, Rob, right now you’re a digital marketing manager. In two years, do you want to be senior digital marketing manager or do you want to be director?” 

 

[0:19:45.0] TP: Well, yours is bestselling author obviously, that’s what you want to do in two years.

 

[0:19:49.2] RS: Yeah, this podcasting thing is for the birds man, I need to write a book. I had this idea. It’s about this recruiting podcaster by day. 

 

[0:19:58.0] TP: Oh my god. 

 

[0:19:58.7] RS: But by night – no, okay? I just – the amount of movies that are about down on their luck screen writers, you know, I guess they say write what you know. Anyway, no one ever asked me if I even wanted to have a long-term career in marketing or if I was just 24 and it was a good job for me at the time, right? Many people are afraid of the answers, many people don’t know what to do with the answer, “Oh yeah, I don’t want to be this when I grow up but this is good for me now,” or people are afraid to say that, I don’t know. What have you found? 

 

[0:20:28.4] TP: If you create a culture where it’s okay to say those things, then it takes all the fear out of it, or at least most of the fear out of it. It starts with your leaders, if you as a leader can practice vulnerability, my entire team knows that I want to be a VP of people. That is the north star, that is what I’m driving towards and since they know that, there is that sense of like again, vulnerability, camaraderie, it’s like, “Oh, well I know she’s on a growth path too.” 

 

Sometimes I do things like, “Oh, that was dumb,” or “That didn’t work” and if I’m able to speak with them about it from a place of growth I’m like, “Well, I messed that up. That’s fine.” it creates a culture where it’s okay and if you have a culture where people can sit down with you in a private space and say, “I’m really unhappy. I’m not enjoying what I’m doing. I’m good at it but I am not enjoying it” or “Maybe even I’m not good at it. I think I could be better at this.” 

 

If you give that person a space to say that not only will they appreciate you in that moment, you also have the potential to form a really ongoing fantastic employee relationship because what if they transition to your role and they’re so happy and then you’re a part of their success story, you’re not a part of their failure, which is huge. 

 

Then to tie it back into recruiting, the Piper plans are amazing because it’s such a clear pulse on the existing talent we have in the organization. I can look at our priority ahead, come plan and say, “Oh. Well, I know for a fact that we have two or three people who are probably going to be in management in the next six months based on what I’ve said and what we’d talked about. I can deprioritize some of these middle management roles. Let’s prioritize this instead. It’s two birds one stone situation.

 

[0:22:03.2] RS: Yeah, that is such a good point that it provided you can see a world where they get into that role that they have ID for themselves, that’s just long-term head account planning, right? 

 

[0:22:11.9] TP: Yeah and again, this all sounds very perfect and ideal as we are saying it, this is how it functions in my head but the reality is, you know we’re still a hyper growth startup. We make mistakes a thousand times a week but in general, this is what we are driving towards and what we’re doing, which is exciting. 

 

[0:22:27.6] RS: Yeah, this is the vision. 

 

[0:22:28.7] TP: Yeah. 

 

[0:22:29.4] RS: Are people responding well to this? What are the kinds of things you see in this surveys? I guess you know, we don’t want to share anyone’s private ambitions but just generally, what are these things that sort of surface? Are people reactive to it? Are they kind of appreciating it? 

 

[0:22:44.8] TP: Across the map, which is so interesting. There are some people who are on step 30. They’re in SCR and they’re already sitting the VP of sales seat in their head and they have everything mapped out, very type-A and then there are people who genuinely do not know what they want to have for breakfast tomorrow morning, which is so fine. And that’s one thing I always say in these meetings is this is not meant to cause stress, it’s meant to hold space for you to explore these things. It’s okay to not know what you want to do but let’s at least try and move the needle and say, “Well, what does bring you joy? What are those pockets of light in your day and what drains you more?” 

 

It runs across the board but since we are a startup, we do skew more towards the ambitious side of things, people who have their three month plan, their three year plan and everything in between. They know exactly when they’re going to retire, where they’re going to live, so sometimes it is a matter of reigning people back and saying, “Why is VP of sales the goal?” “Well, because I’m in SCR now and that’s just what you do.” “Well, no. Who says? Not every SCR become VP of sales. Don’t have a goal just because it’s arbitrary because you feel it’s expected. What genuinely brings you joy?” And then it’s my job and their manager’s job to foster that curiosity and foster that discovery period for them. 

 

[0:24:02.5] RS: Yes, people feel compelled to put themselves on that ladder, right? Look up the ladder and think that’s the logical progression for me, which as we all know, as anyone whose working more than a few years knows, that’s not how a career works, right? I guess you snap into that mode when you’re faced with, “I’m meant to share with HR or with the people ops folks what are my actual goals” like, “Oh, well I want to sound like a good employee and I want to sound like I am loyal and committed and ambitious, blah-blah-blah,” but it sounds like you’ve been pushing people to sort of crack out of that a little bit. 

 

[0:24:39.2] TP: Totally. Yeah, a good employee is someone who is really motivated and excited by their work to the point where they treat it like a craft and at Chili Piper, we luckily have found a lot of people who treat their work like their craft. We have a number of people who are thought leaders in their own spaces. 

 

Jenna, our VP of CS, she has an entire registers where she talks to chief customer officers and they talk about the customer journey. Our director of managing, Kaylee is also I guess what you call LinkedIn influencer with her podcast. When you work in a company where people love what they do in a genuine way and you allow other people the path to grow towards what they love, that makes a good employee. I don’t care how many meetings you booked. Of course, if Nicolas could hear me say that, he may roll over in his chair but – 

 

[0:25:27.2] RS: Asterisk, we care how many – 

 

[0:25:29.0] TP: Yes, asterisk, you are the CEO and we care very much how many means you make as long as you’re happy, we love you. Yeah. 

 

[0:25:35.1] RS: I mean and so, the tie into long term head account planning and also just enabling people to do their best work here is just so clear but I don’t hear people being this thoughtful about really enabling their talent to be critical and reflective on what they actually want. 

 

[0:25:54.3] TP: Yeah. 

 

[0:25:54.8] RS: It’s just delightful to hear you kind of share this approach. 

 

[0:25:58.2] TP: Well, thank you. That’s very kind. My love language is words of affirmation, so I feel very affirmed so thank you for saying that. Do you know yours? 

 

[0:26:06.3] RS: The way I show it or receive it, those are different, right? 

 

[0:26:09.3] TP: Oh my god, so you’re into this, the way you receive it. 

 

[0:26:11.9] RS: The way I receive it. I think it’s words of affirmation. I’m not sure. 

 

[0:26:15.0] TP: My god, I love that about you. 

 

[0:26:16.2] RS: It’s not – oh my gosh, thank you. 

 

[0:26:17.9] TP: Did you get my joke? 

 

[0:26:19.7] RS: Yeah. 

 

[0:26:20.2] TP: Good, thank you. I’m so glad. 

 

[0:26:21.2] RS: I give it in works of service. That’s like how I show love. I’ll be like, “Let me do this thing for you.” I don’t know how I receive it, it’s probably not like physical gifts. 

 

[0:26:30.0] TP: Yeah, that one’s hard. 

 

[0:26:31.4] RS: It’s not really quality time just because we live in a world where quality time is like it’s getting better but has not been possible for like a year and a half but even before that, I don’t think that wasn’t mine but that’s important too and like, even on one-on-ones and managerial work like it’s love language but it is also just how you are – it is like validation. It’s like appreciation, right? It’s not just a romantic thing, right? 

 

[0:26:50.9] TP: Yeah, your appreciation language. Yeah. 

 

[0:26:53.0] RS: It’s every interpersonal relationship is like steeped in this, right? 

 

[0:26:57.2] TP: Totally, so since we’re talking about management and you mentioned this earlier in one-on-ones, I know my team’s affirmation languages because I feel like you just have to know where they are to be able to meet them where they need to be. We’re a full remote culture, so physical touch, high-five people, that’s hard but another thing I really love with what managers do is ask people in every one-on-one, “How do you like your job? Do you like your job this week?” and it’s totally okay to not like your job some weeks but being intentional every week. 

 

My team knows this question is coming, “Do you like your job?” to the point where they laugh at it when they hear it but one of these days they’re going to say, “I don’t like my job this week” and that is when you have a more meaningful conversation and more importantly, you’ve set the stage where that conversation is okay. 

 

[0:27:34.9] RS: Yes, exactly and that could be, “Oh, it’s a really stressful week” or “I’m having to spend a lot of time on this thing I don’t like doing” it is not just eventing session, right? Hopefully something comes out of that. 

 

[0:27:48.2] TP: No, never. Yeah, it’s always if you need to just vent at me, I’m here to listen but I have to solve the problem too, so let’s be solutionary until we get there together but yeah. 

 

[0:27:58.5] RS: Yes. Well Tyler, we are creeping up on optimal podcast limit here. Before I let you go, I do want to ask you, I enjoy asking people this. For those who are out there listening to your and they’re like, “Tyler is the coolest. I want to be just like her” what advice would you give to someone who want to maybe be a little more creative, critical about what they want in their role and kind of wind up in something that fulfills a lot of their career needs? 

 

[0:28:23.9] TP: Yeah, I would say first, just be brave enough to be honest with yourself about what really does bring you joy and more importantly, be brave enough to identify when it’s not aligned with what you’re doing right then. Then just foster a group of champions around you who believe you and know how wonderful you are and run for it. I’m fortunate to have mentors around me who have helped me through not always my Chili Piper stuff but everything.

 

It is just a matter of identifying what brings you joy and start to just insert it into your existing job as much as you can. If you can’t, then maybe it is time to find a new one at Chili Piper.

 

[0:28:58.8] RS: Tyler, this has been such a delight chatting today. Thank you so much for being here and sharing your expertise and for your candor and everything today. It’s been great. 

 

[0:29:08.3] TP: Of course, thanks, Rob. Good luck on your novel. 

 

[END OF INTERVIEW]

 

[0:29:14.7] RS: Talk Talent to Me is brought to you by Hired. Hired empowers connections by matching the world’s most innovative companies with ambitious tech and sales candidates. With Hired, candidates and the companies have visibility into salary offers, competing opportunities, and job details. Hired’s unique offering includes customized assessments and salary bias alerts to help remove unconscious bias when hiring. By combining technology and human touch, our goal is to provide transparency in the recruiting process and empower each of our partners to employ their potential and keep their talent pipeline full. 

 

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