Annie Trombatore is the Chief People Officer at Vox Media, home to some of the most iconic modern media brands, including Vox, The Verge, Eater, and The Cut.
With a background that spans both product leadership and people operations, Annie brings a builder’s mindset to HR—designing people systems that empower employees much like her product teams once built tools to empower users.
In this conversation, Annie Trombatore, Chief People Officer at Vox Media, discusses the evolving role of HR, the impact of AI on people operations, and the importance of effective internal communications. She emphasizes the need for HR to align closely with business goals, adopt an AI mindset, and empower managers to lead authentically. The discussion also touches on the challenges of navigating sensitive communications and the necessity of building trust within organizations.
Answered on this Episode
- How is AI transforming the role of HR and people operations?
- What does great people leadership look like inside a company like Vox?
- How can leaders empower managers to communicate with clarity and trust?
- What does the future of HR look like in a digital-first, AI-enabled workplace?
Advice From Annie
- Adopt an AI Mindset
- AI won’t take your job—but leaders who know how to use it will. Instead of resisting, HR teams should learn to leverage AI to free up capacity for trust-building, coaching, and strategy.
- Shift HR From Admin to Strategy
- The HR function must align directly with business outcomes, moving beyond administration to deliver value that impacts the organization at its core.
- Empower Managers as Communicators
- Managers are the most important channel for internal communication. HR’s role is to support them with context and tools, not to control the message.
- Lead With Autonomy and Trust
- Micromanagement kills creativity. By giving teams clarity, context, and freedom, leaders create environments where people—and ideas—flourish.
Connect with Annie: LinkedIn
Full Transcript:
Designing People Systems That Drive Business Results
Intro (00:01)
How do we create a new world of work? One where companies succeed because of their leadership, not despite it. I'm Aaron Levy, the founder of Raise the Bar. And over the last decade, I've been immersing myself in this question. In this podcast, Raising the Bar on Leadership, we talk to people leaders, founders, and culture experts about how they've created a people first culture in the workplace, the challenges, the hurdles, the wins, and the failures. Join me in this movement towards creating the new world of work we want to see.
Episode Intro (00:29)
We're joined by Annie Trombatore, Chief People Officer at Vox Media, the company behind iconic brands like Vox, The Verge, Eater, The Cut, and many more. Annie has built her career at the intersection of editorial culture, product development, and people operations, making her one of the more compelling voices in the modern people space. Today we touch on all of these topics as it relates to the people space, company culture, and the impact of AI on the future.
of the HR function. It was a really fascinating conversation. I love the lens that Annie comes into the people function in and the advice and gold nugget she gives. I hope you enjoy it.
Aaron (01:10)
I'm happy that we're here. We're doing this. We're having this conversation recorded for others to hear. We've had several really fun conversations already. So excited for this one to happen. So as I was doing a little, a little bit of background research on you, looking at your path to chief people officer is kind of unusual. You know, you were at group nine media where you transitioned from chief product officer to chief people officer and product. What inspired that transition? How did you make that leap?
Annie (01:38)
Yeah, it seems odd, but it's actually not. I think it all makes a lot more sense when you know two things about me. One that I love change, maybe a little too much. Sometimes my team is like, okay, enough with the change. And I've always been obsessed with human behavior. It's what I studied in school. And so everything I've ever done in my career has that line of, you know, liking to think about how humans and groups kind of maneuver through digital experiences, physical experiences, and what role I can play in that. And so.
When you say that it's a massive and crazy pivot from product to people, my response is generally something to the effect of, I still feel like I'm doing the exact same job. In the product space, what you are doing is marrying business needs and what a user wants, presumably, to consume on your site, in your world. And you're trying to find a solution that drives the outcomes you need that's somewhere between those two things. And when you are a Chief People Officer, you're doing the same thing, but your users are your employees. And so it's just...
the same problem solving muscle, the same kind of problem solving between like a budget and a business need and a human want and trying to drive a solution that can get the desired outcomes for the business and for the people. So truly I go to work every day and don't feel like I'm flexing really any different muscle. It's just a different application of the same muscle.
Aaron (02:58)
It's so fascinating the way you presented and as you were talking about it, like I said, it's really the same thing. took a beat and it was like, I wonder why I always love layouts and UI UX because it was like, how do humans like to look at that? Look at the world around them or the website or the application and like to take action because of it. You're doing that. You're applying that on the people's side. How has, how has that background of product influenced how you lead the people function?
Annie (03:27)
I think it's influenced it in several ways. I think even now in the last like six or eight months with the proliferation of AI, you're really seeing my world's kind of ram into each other a lot more than they did previously. But if you were to just look at face value of the difference of how maybe a traditional HR person would run a team and how I chose to run the team, I was coming at it from a side where I'd been a leader across the business. I was really plugged into the business goals.
And so my primary focus is on how can we actually, as an HR team, understand the business really deeply, not just like hear the pitch from this brand on what they're working on, but really know what's driving our business model and come at the solutions that we're creating for people in teams with that in mind. And so what you get is a lot more operational focus. You get a lot of prioritization on the business partner model.
I know plenty of organizations happen, but our business models are, at times, tend to kind of veer almost into more of like chief of staffs for the businesses that they support because they're really, really plugged in. know the numbers that team's trying to hit. They know the goals. They're real strategic partners. And that comes from me kind of being on the other side of the house and not wanting someone who just comes in with these solutions that feel cheesy or don't understand the culture of my team or, you know, seem like they're out of a playbook.
And someone who's actually saying like, no, I've been on the ground with your team. This kind of thing would work for them. Maybe it doesn't work over here, but it works over there. So I think it gives me a lot more of these people focused and not thinking of our company as a monolith, which I think is helpful and hurtful in a portfolio, right? It can mean a lot of customization, but it can also mean meeting teams where they are to drive better outcomes. And so at the 50,000 foot view, I think that's the biggest difference is I'm not the person that's like…
Let's have this super well-oiled playbook and let's roll it out across the company. It's like, let's have configurations… Think of it kind of like config variables, on a, you know, in a product where you're like, we've got 10 flavors of this, which four are going to make sense for this group, which combination will make sense over here. And so again, sometimes that can mean we're doing some extra work, but.
I think the outcomes that we drive are more successful and feel authentic. And when we get it right, it doesn't feel like we're trying to drag people along these L and D journeys or drag people along the company culture initiatives. It feels much more authentic and from within. And I think that comes for me from being on the other side of the house.
Aaron (06:02)
At the root, it sounds like we're focused on the business priorities, full stop. And then everything else is designed around the business priorities versus like, hey, we have a people strategy and functions and like we're doing those, right? Like we have that playbook of what I do. And I hear that so much and see that so much. We hear, you know, chief people officers in our community say, well, how do we get the CEO or the CFO to really care about what we're doing or how do we get that to the table? And one of the things that always comes back around to is like, whatever is happening on the people's side has to...
directly support what the business is trying to achieve. And so it sounds like you're coming directly from that lens of like, what are the business outcomes that we're trying to produce? And for you, it's across the portfolio. So it has to be a little bit different for each portfolio company.
Annie (06:44)
It does and I think it also comes with, you one of the biggest things that I've seen with people who kind of join my team from other places and kind of jump in and are like, okay, this is a little different. It really is because a lot of the core product tenants around stakeholder buy-in and stakeholder management and partnership and, you know, understanding team goals before you come with a solution that's pre-packaged. Those are all the same as the role of a product manager, right?
But they're applied to a project that will drive a different kind of outcome, right? An educational outcome or a collaborative outcome or kind of a reorganization outcome within a team.
Aaron (07:21)
Yeah. And I want to go back to the AI thing, cause I'm thinking of that... I'm thinking about how you've been organizing your people team. And one of the reasons I like it is, when we had that lunch together, I was like, oh, we need to talk more. Uh, just cause the way you think about people is what 10, 15 years ago, the people function started to change, right? Went from HR generalist and like a HR expert running HR systems to the people function. And, you know, there were, there were businesses going in that progressive way and now AI has come into play. Over the last
three, six, maybe 12 months, there's been a real push of the people teams leading the AI within the organization. So I'm curious, as you mentioned, the world's colliding of AI and people and product. Will you tell me a little bit more about that and what you're seeing happening?
Annie (08:05)
Yeah, I'll actually start zooming back like 15 years and then I'll come to the present. But zooming back 15 years to when I came of age and product, product was actually at the precipice of a big change. It was kind of right when product teams were going through this big adjustment period where historically there had been like these big deep UX research teams that would build this massive spec and then throw it over the fence to the engineering team to build. And often there would be like
collisions there, right? Because you're like, you've just built this entire robust product without consulting the engineers who build it. And now everybody's, you know, not driving towards efficient outcomes. And so I kind of was that coming into product right at that new wave time where it's like, no, sit next to the engineer, like get their input, figure out how to move quickly and do these like quick things to see if they work. And so all of the change that we're seeing now is very familiar to me. It's very much like that kind of shift…
culturally in terms of how you work, I think what's changing in terms of the people function is that there's no barrier to entry in terms of products you can build. If you can think from a kind of a product or people oriented mindset, you can command AI, you can make a GPT to do a thing, you don't need engineering skills, you don't need to have some robust platform. And I think that's where it's really exciting in the people space is so much of what we do as a service to our audiences, an internal audience, in the case of a people team.
And there are just new ways to now reach people and much more effective and frankly, in some cases, productized ways that don't require anyone to have that skill. And a very easy example of that is like a team that has an L and D arm that does a lot of training that does things like that. You've got all this material and that material sits in some Wiki somewhere on some notion instance or somewhere. And you pull it out when someone doesn't do the right thing. You say, here's the document about the process.
But now you can make a GPT that says, talk to us if you're trying to performance manage someone and we can talk to you about what that looks like. We can help you write drafts using all of that material that we have. Sure, we're going to warn you within that product to come back to your business partner before you go do anything very direct or, you know, serious, but we're going to help you use the methods that we have, that we drive forth in our training and incorporate that into a note that gives good feedback.
or giving you talking points for your next one-on-one so you can address that issue in a way that aligns with what we've trained. And so those are all things that a few years ago you would have to maybe find a partner that is building some kind of tool to help you do or one of those live coaching apps. But now we can just use our own internal resources to within a few days, stand something like that up and make that available to all of our managers so that they can operate much quicker, much more autonomously, which is super important.
if they're gonna actually be accountable for managing. So the more we can give tools like that, the more it really just opens the doors for people to move faster and work better.
Aaron (11:04)
How are you getting your team to adopt that mindset and start to put it into play versus like I've been in rooms where I hear a problem. I'm like, well, just, like go use claud or go use perplexity. Like here, here's two prompts to do. How do you get them natively doing it themselves so that you're not kind of pulling levers?
Annie (11:25)
So it's hard because I think that no matter what role you play, there's a lot of fear, right? And I think in people teams, it can be even more prevalent, especially because of the fear of biases and algorithms and all those very valid concerns about how tech can proliferate in some of the wrong directions. So I'm not saying that it's easy, but I have approached it more as, you know, I've just been honest. I've been talking about it for a year nonstop. My team might be sick of me talking about it and pushing it on them, but here we are. To me, it's a moral imperative.
And I've tried to share it with my team that way because they are people, people they care about. And it is our job to teach people how to use this technology. If we don't lead by example, we are not going to be successful teachers. And if we don't teach, then those are the people who will struggle to get work in, you know, three to five years because there's a quote I'm going to butcher, but I'm sure you've heard it. It's like, it's not AI that's coming for your job. It's like you are not using AI that will make your job be able to be replaced, right? And so I think for me, from where I sit, even though there's a lot of fear and it's a lot to manage through and the comms are difficult and it takes a lot of repeated focus and sensitivity and care, I feel very obligated to provide that to people because regardless of if it's our company or another company, we want them to have long and successful careers. The AI revolution, if you will, is not slowing down anytime soon.
Aaron (12:54)
How do you see your role, like we were talking about it, your role within your team and supporting them to use it and like supporting your audiences? How do you see the role of the people function supporting AI across the business or do you think it's business unit by business unit?
Annie (13:10)
I don't think it's business unit by business unit because I think that, actually, let me back up. I think it's both. I think it's a combination of business unit by business unit, but I think it has to start top down with the imperative that you will do something in this space. My team shouldn't be figuring out what brand A or brand B is doing with AI, but my team should be there saying, what are you thinking? How can we help you with your?
your communications, how can we help you think through the impact of this and where people might be fearful and where people might jump in and how can we think of where you might run into some legal implications or where you might need to do a little more research. so I see us as a ⁓ support role, but an informed support role that can help with the change management and transformation of it all, because in certain spaces, it might be pretty transformational and not every leader is going to have the fluency around change management.
to drive that forward, they might be able to drive like, we're use this new tool forward, but like the ultimate like bigger picture of how do we continue to focus on this over time and implement change over time has to be driven, I think top down, not just from me, but from our CEO, from the executive team at large, if it's gonna be a priority of the business.
Aaron (14:27)
It gets me thinking back to how human behavior is now fundamentally changing in the workplace. You and I talked about the book Sapiens and we talked about the history and the arc of human behavior. I'm curious what you're seeing as, or what you anticipate behavior's changing as we're having a new technology in our world of work.
Annie (14:50)
I think my answer for that is like a short term and a long term. I think short term, there's right now in this moment, a lot of resistance because people who disagree with the way that the technology can be misused, which is all incredibly valid, are feeling like if they are kind of conscientious objectors that they're helping fight for the thing that they want, which is a safer future. And I completely understand that viewpoint, but that viewpoint isn't going to stop the train from moving. It's moving, right? And so.
I think that in the short term, there's a lot that's going to get in the way of how people think about navigating. But in the longer term, there will be a tipping point that people have to embrace. And that's where I think you're going to see the behavior change the most. Because I actually think, not like to tout about product mindset, but I think that it's like AI effectively turns everybody into a product person and those who are capable of that kind of thinking.
Are the people who are going to be able to be successful in transition because you're thinking a lot more like a product person than a content creator in some of these ways. You're kind of seeing a hybridization of like those two skill sets. If you're talking about, you know, the editorial side, or if you're talking even just in my team alone, it's like, you're not just creating a one pager on the annual salary review process. How can you use the technology to be even more supportive and make the experience better in a world where like,
where the interfaces have changed and there's just so much change to technology. So that might be like a really bad way to answer that question, but it feels like there's just gonna be this shift into how you command the thing versus how just how you tell a story, right? And how you can then use like multi-channel things to tell stories is gonna be the behavior shift that we will see.
Aaron (16:40)
Yeah, that, that I love. We're always trying to get people to take action, whether we know it or not. Right. Like when we were creating a one pager 10 years ago, like we just did it because that like, let's copy what the other one pager was. But the truth is, it is like, if people didn't read it, then it doesn't matter. And so what you're saying, and what I'm hearing from this is it's going to just give us more tools to design the stories we were trying to tell. Like I talk about this all the time when we, when I, we have new team members start and they're not getting someone to respond. Like someone.
They're not a sales email. They're just talking to somebody and someone doesn't do what they want them to do in the email. Did you design it to get the outcome you want? I think I'm hopeful then that what you're talking about is like it's designing all of us, it's helping all of us design how we sell the outcomes we want. I think, I don't know, Dan Pinker, someone said like, you we're all selling and it's the truth, right? Like it's just what we're selling. We're selling a story. We're selling an idea. We're selling somebody to, you know, understand how this new process flow works so that they can adopt it and do it themselves.
Annie (17:40)
Absolutely. I think one of the biggest, as anyone who works in the people space has seen, is like getting people to hear what you're saying or getting people to use the tools that you have is half of the challenge, right? Almost every problem that comes through our doors is something that we've already thought about and thought of how to handle. But no one went to the, you know, Wiki page that talks about this and looked at the guidelines and then thought about their response.
Aaron (18:06)
They're all idiots. Why aren't they doing what we told them to do? That one time.
Annie (18:10)
To be fair, people are really busy, so I have a lot of empathy for what people are up against, especially in the media space at this point. But it is another tool and it's a fast tool and it's a tool that if used well, I think can weed through a lot of the need to pre-read and need to do the memo and all of those things just get to the outcome. What does someone need when they come to us with a performance issue? They need help giving feedback. How do we make that distance the shortest?
And this is just another tool to do that.
Aaron (18:41)
I guess on top of this, what we're talking about is how do you provide clarity? How do you make it actionable for people? And I guess one of the things I'm wondering about is where we are today, you run a portfolio of companies in a sense, a portfolio of brands across different populations with different needs and different desires and different, right? Like you said, you have just the variety of brands. How do you keep internal comms clear and actionable?
as you are trying, you know, have to convey messages across all these different stakeholders.
Annie (19:17)
I'll just say straight up that it is a challenge. I oversee the internal comms team as well. And so it's something that we're spending a ton of time on regularly thinking about what role the company should play in what types of comms versus what is more meaningful to be cascaded through management layers at brands. And I don't think we have the perfect answer, but I'll tell you one thing that has been the biggest kind of offer to me is just that you...
You have a lot of managers and I, this is not going to be a surprise for you. I'm sure you've had podcast guests talking about this before. Most managers are not thinking of managing as a huge chunk of their day every day. Most managers are thinking of whatever business line they run and managing to that number or managing to that outcome as the bulk of their job. But in reality, to effectively manage people through anything, they need to be much more plugged into the management side. And one of the things that we've
I found over the course of working at many different companies with the same challenges is that managers role is really, really, really important in communications, especially the senior level managers, because no centralized corporate calm is going to be able to give the context that is hyper relevant to the group or the brand, to the culture, to the way they receive information, to the norms of how they communicate. And so what we try to think about is what is like the
basic message that needs to come from corporate and then what does the flow look like from there? And how do we think about it? Not just as like, okay, what's the email that gets followed up by the manager or the department head that has the right context, but also how does that person get brought along on the journey? So they buy into what we're saying at the corporate level, because I think too many people think of it like the physical trickle of the comms from layer to layer, but don't think about it like my mid-level manager over here who I'm asking to carry the brunt of the work.
and getting people on board with this new idea or this like company pivot, do they believe it? Do they have buy-in? Like, do they know the backstory of why we made these decisions or they just like screw corporate made this decision? I don't know why. Like, because then if they're cascading that attitude, that's not going to get your employees feeling bought in. And so we're, for us, where our focus has been a lot more on like, what is that management layer that's responsible for carrying the weight of telling those stories the right way?
And how do we spend time with them? How do we make sure they understand enough about the decisions we're making? They have the talking points. They have a chance to ask questions, kick tires, share if they disagree, so that we can get them in a place where they can kind of be our front line against those types of conversations to bring people along.
Aaron (21:58)
Yeah, mean, what I'm wondering is like, what have you found that definitely hasn't worked? And what have you found that maybe is working?
Annie (22:08)
What definitely hasn't worked is, and I say hasn't worked in like a general term, because I think that it's still important that we do things like give people talking points or like help people draft notes if they want support. But what hasn't worked is like micromanaging the way they talk to their teams. And I think that especially as you get bigger and bigger, and especially as you have these like core services teams that are centralized and comms teams that are centralized,
there could be a lot of pressure to like over script and over and over kind of corporate the comms. And especially in a group like ours, every brand has an incredibly unique subculture and that's important and that's beautiful. And that's what needs to be maintained for the brands to have the authenticity and the audience relationships that they have. And so, I think what does work is having conversations about the thing you're trying to get someone to communicate.
so that they can then in turn do it with confidence in their own voice instead of trying to stick to like a PR script or like talking points. Now the talking points can be helpful for them to reference back. So we still do them most of the time, but that isn't enough,I guess it is my big learning that if you truly want people acting like ambassadors of that message, you've got to spend the time and there's no replacement for that time, right?
Aaron (23:27)
Well, and if we dig into that, if I imagine a chief people officer listening to this and saying like, Hey, we're about to communicate some big change. There's a reduction in workforce or we're about to pivot how we do product and engineering and AI. And they're thinking about that. Like the nitty gritty I'm wondering is, okay, is it, what does that like communicating with them look like? Like, can you share examples of what that looks like? Is it, is it one time it's like, Hey guys, here's what's happening. Let's all get together in a room. Is it one on one with that? Like, I'm, what does that, what does it look like?
Annie (23:57)
I think it's one-on-one. I think that's where having the business partners and the comms folks really understand what each brand is going for is helpful. But it has to be one-on-one because there might be, for example, one brand that hasn't been affected by layoffs in a big way. And they're probably not going to get too upset about layoffs happening in a distant part of the organization that they barely interact with. But then there's teams that have had them happen a lot.
those teams might be like, okay, is the number one coming for me? Like, is this like step one of a multi-step layoff plan? Like, am I next? This is all hypothetical, but like, that's why the one-on-one matters because one leader might be like, it's fine. I can just slack my team and say, nothing to see here. And another leader might say, actually, we need some talking points for a bunch of these questions that we're gonna get because my team is gonna be super sensitive to this message. And I wanna know, like, I wanna work through how to talk.
And so I don't think there is a solution other than that one-on-one with the right level of leader to get to that right outcome that feels authentic for the team, answers the right questions, and doesn't make that leader have to kind of just pass the buck and pitch it back to like, corporate made these decisions, which isn't what you want, right? You want your leaders to feel like part of the company and represent that continuity to your employees.
Aaron (25:19)
Have you found that it's that one time or is it just case by case? Like, this person needs to talk again before we can roll this out with anybody else because she needs a moment to absorb it herself.
Annie (25:33)
I think a couple things. I think it kind of depends on the situation, right? Like layoffs are something that obviously is happening across a lot of industries right now, but there's so many other changes, right? There's strategic pivots, there's new tool rollouts, and there's various levels of sensitivity there, right? Like a benefits change, we're probably just gonna go to our senior leadership group together and say, hey, we're changing these benefits. This is why, ask us questions if you have them. You can expect the same type of change next year. It's kind of a more run of the mill update.
But people who, we're pivoting, you'll start to learn and see patterns in what groups kind of have similar reactions to situations, at least for us. Like we have certain brands that kind of recognize themselves in other brands, for example. And so if they see a big shift happening in a brand whose business model is pretty similar to theirs, they're gonna worry more about like, okay, this indicative of what's to come.
coming for me if it's a reorg or if it's a strategy pivot. And they're going to be like, when's my leader going to tell me if the beat I'm covering changes? And that's where their minds go as where, you know, a brand that has a completely different business model isn't going to maybe be triggered by the same thing. And so that's just one example. But I think in a lot of cases, you start to see some of those patterns with the types of comms you do. Another big example is just like, there's a huge difference between how our teams do...
create content respond to certain things versus, you know, core services teams who are inherently closer to some of the financial things and not as close to some of the editorial realities and some of the brand moments. And so if you really try to one size fits all that, you're just, it's going to flop for every audience, like for sure.
Aaron (27:15)
Yeah, and it's gotta be just even harder because you have so many, as you said, not just one creative brand, you have several creative brands who all, like that's why your business is what it is.
Annie (27:27)
16 and a podcast network. Yeah, it's a challenge, but I think it becomes less of a challenge the more you think about bringing your brand leaders and your department heads along for the ride and trust them more to do their own comms. And it can feel risky at first when you move from a centralized corporate communication on something to a more brand specific communication on something. But if you can get there, it really pays off because it feels
much more genuine, the leader is bought in, they have a chance to feel like they're on board. And now it's not always possible, but it's definitely the ideal.
Aaron (28:05)
It sounds like the theme that you have for your team is like, equip them as leaders, not as doers. So equip them as people to like, I guess the differentiation I think is like a manager, right? Who just does the work for their directors versus a leader who likes, you know, sets the picture. And I could see an internal comms person be like, this is my job. This is why I got hired. You're telling me not to like to give them everything that they need. It's like, well, what they need is what you're telling them they need is like…
They need to be heard and they need the tools, but they don't need you to write it all out for them.
Annie (28:40)
Correct. Yep. And like we do sometimes still help with drafting and things like that if it calls for it or someone's looking for, you know, copy support or anything else, but especially in a brand with editorial teams, like our brand leaders are like our journalists, like they're, they are perfectly capable of crafting a story and a narrative, like better than I am better than our comms person might be right. Given their audience, especially. And so I do think we can over index for like,
thinking people can't do a thing that we have a central support for instead of thinking as our central support as like, you know, we're here as support, like we're forgetting the key word of like support teams, like, like you are still the leader of your brand and you should go lead that brand. like, they want that too.
Aaron (29:25)
And like we're talking about one message in hundreds of messages that they're giving, whether, you know, perceive, like whether they perceive they're giving the messages or not on a daily basis. So they're already doing the leading. And what I'm hearing from you is like, we got to give autonomy. We got to give autonomy to people to do the work.
Annie (29:43)
100 % 100 % and it can be a hard shift and it can be, you know, in some cases, it can be really welcome autonomy, but in some cases, certain messages can feel like, I'd rather that come from corporate. I don't want that coming for me. And so it's not it's not necessarily just an easy shift, but it also comes back to what I was saying before around managers and like, clear expectations for leaders and managers of like, sometimes your job is like singing the company song sometimes your job is having the tough message, even if it's not your own. And I think that a lot of people who just fall into management don't realize that when they say, I want to be a manager, it means I'm going to now do some of the stuff I dislike the most in my day to day as a big chunk of my job. And that's like the part that I think more people could, more companies could do a better job of clarifying when people are moving into management roles. It's like, why do you want that? Like if you genuinely care about managing.
Great, but like, do you know that you're going to need to make really tough prioritization decisions and you're going to have to be the one that communicates those really tough prioritization decisions and you're going to have to be the one that gets really hard feedback really regularly if you're going to be successful. And some people will be like, wow, that's not what I signed up for. You're like, no, that is what it is. Like you have to do that if you want to be an effective manager. But I don't think those conversations happen often enough early in people's journeys. It's just like, my God, you're doing so great. You're promoted to manager. Here's your extra.
You know, 8%. Good job. Keep it up.
Aaron (31:14)
Yeah, that part kills me because we get it on the other end, right? Like we do leadership development, we do manager training. And one of the very first things we do in our coaching skills bootcamp is like, what motivates you to lead? Like, why are you showing up and leading? Because if you're not clear on that, like everything else that we work with you on, like all the skills that you build, you're not going to do anything with them because you're not going to care. like we try to tell...
There are two questions that go through my mind when you're promoting someone. And the first question is, do they actually want to lead? Or do they think they need that role to advance their career? Because they might say, yeah, I want that manager role, but they don't really want it. They just want to advance their career, and that could be done in other ways. And two, do they have the skills? And the skills can be trained. The want, you're not going to tell somebody to want it more. If they don't actually want to lead, everything else just flops.
Annie (32:09)
Well, and I think that the challenge becomes that a lot of companies also just don't have the infrastructure to provide a different path. And so it's like, do you really want to manage? And it's like, well, of course I do if that's my only chance for growth, but like give me another path for growth and maybe I would take that. And I think, you know, that it's not some novel concept. It's something that's been talked about in people's faces for years, but it's just, it continues to proliferate as a practice of just like people taking the promotion because they think it's the only way to grow.
and not really knowing what they're getting into in terms of management being really hard and really not fun a lot. Like it's really rewarding, but it's not a lot.
Aaron (32:47)
Yeah, I mean, I say like, if you're proactive and you take 20 % of your time to lead people now, then you're going to save more of the fires on the backend. And if you're not proactive, then you're going to have to take 100 % or 90 % of your time when the fires come up and you're going to have to drop everything else. And that's just because someone quit or because a big problem happened. Yeah. I'm thinking of just like, there's been a theme through this conversation so far and through our other conversations, I couldn't put...
the right language on it until like about now where the lens and the frame that I hear you coming from, like if I think about the spectrum of autonomy and structure, and I think about most people teams, even people teams, right? They're no longer HR teams. They still tend, like they're innovative and they're forward thinking about what they're thinking about, but they hold on to a lot of structure because like this is what we do, this is what we're good at. And like, we're going to hold on to that and we're going to...
put this DEI training out, or we're gonna do this roadmap, but like it's us doing it and we need to get other people on board versus what I'm hearing you say and the lens I'm hearing you from is we're actually gonna shift from less control and seed control to our other partners and stakeholders in the business because we're supporting them and getting them to the outcomes. And I think that's just a, it seems to me like a complete different shift in how to approach any conversation on a daily basis.
that then puts the onus on the people who are coming to you for help or the people who you're trying to help to say, hey, like we're in this together and we are supporting you. This is ultimately your business and your decision.
Annie (34:25)
It is, but I also think that that view that we take is more aligned with reality. Like this is why you see people teams frustrated that they're not getting the, what they want out of the programs they're launching or that people are not taking it seriously or people are like not inviting them into the room for the real conversations and coming to them once they already have made decisions and saying, just help me execute. Like that is why
…the HR model that isn't support focused is fraught. It's not going to happen because the business, the greater business, is never going to look at HR and be like, you guys are the most important team. Like we want to listen to you every day. And you have, so you have to do it by earning trust and by being supported and being a valued service. Otherwise you're really just not going to make progress. You're going to launch a bunch of programs and you're going to be able to say, look at all these programs I launched and what are you going to show for that?
Aaron (35:20)
Yeah. You've got a real energy around this and I'm wondering what excites you the most about your job or the upcoming things that you're seeing about the future of your job?
Annie (35:35)
Hmm, that's a hard question. I personally have this energy about anything where I can put some order to chaos. Like I like the messy. That's why I love the change. I've said, you know, to my husband a million times, like if, when this nice run of media someday runs out for me, like I have to be mid stage. I have to be scrappy in these companies where you can
have a little bit of mess, if you will, and put order to that chaos and see the impact of the work that you're doing. Even if, you know, not everything you do as a people team is popular, I'm aware of that. But I can, I can very much feel like both things are true, right? Like I can make an unpopular choice, we can do something unpopular, but I can do it better than it would be if someone wasn't in my seat, making it less chaotic. And so
I don't know if that's like a very good or like fulfilling answer, but it sums up me, think better than, than anything else I've said, which is like, I really do thrive in the daily problem solving. And I look forward to every day for that reason. And the people space is really a space where every day brings something new.
Aaron (36:52)
Yeah, and across 16 brands, that's gonna, yeah, that'll do it for you. That'll give you.
Annie (36:58)
I've been just stuck just in the media in general. I mean, I've been in the media now for 15 or 16 years and it's always cyclical, right? Like it's, you go through the app phase and then it's all mobile web and death to apps and now apps are back. And it's like, there's always these like pivotal technology shifts. Like what's Google doing with SEO? Like, now SEO isn't driving enough publisher content. Like there's always these things that meaningfully have to evolve your business. And it's like truly why.
I feel like I've been able to stay in this space for so long because every year it feels like a different job.
Aaron (37:32)
Yeah. You seem like someone who just loves playing the mess, is fun. I find the complex problems and the unique problems very interesting and fascinating. This has been a really fun conversation. I know there's going to be a lot of gold nuggets that come out of it. I think as you're listening up, you're listening to the lens and the language and the different shifts that Annie's been sharing. I'm just grateful that you spent some time with me and shared your journey a little bit.
Outro (38:03)
Raising the Bar on Leadership is produced by Raise the Bar, where we help organizations level up
by empowering their managers with the tools, skills, and training to be better leaders of people. You can get in touch with us at raisebar.co. Thank you for listening and go put your learning into practice.
