Recorded Webinar

Transcript

[00:00:00] Laura Meverden: Hello everyone, we are so glad that you are joining us today for the live webinar, Smart Strategies to Get HR Initiatives Approved, with our two special guests, Donald Thompson and Ben Brooks.

[00:00:12] Helen Fong: Welcome everyone. Hello, and my name is Helen.

[00:00:16] Helen Fong: And what I am here to do is make sure things go as smoothly as possible.

[00:00:20] Laura Meverden: Thank you, Helen, so much. And my name is Laura, and I am going to be your host, sort of like your cruise director. And we are going to start with a poll. So getting to know you, the audience. All right, so here's the question.

[00:00:34] Laura Meverden: How would you describe your employee development efforts at your organization? Non existing or trying, slowly growing, robust with multiple components. All right, they're starting to come in. All right. So we are going to share the results here and we're trying, that's what is the biggest and then slowly [00:01:00] growing.

[00:01:00] Laura Meverden: Okay. So I would like to introduce to you Donald. So Donald Thompson is the CEO and founder of the Diversity Movement the 2022 Fast Company included in its micro video platform of world changing ideas. And he's also an author, Underestimated: A CEO's Unlikely Path to Success and, on top of that, he writes weekly leadership columns for lots of, publications.

[00:01:27] Laura Meverden: Donald, can you share with us what is your why? Why is this so important to you?

[00:01:32] Donald Thompson: So one of the things, and I'll be really brief, is I want to take my time, talent, and make sure that people leaders have the same business impact of those that are on the front lines, if you will, of sales of marketing of different things.

[00:01:46] Donald Thompson: And so if I can take my time and abilities to help foster that with some things I've learned over the years, absolutely want to do that.

[00:01:53] Laura Meverden: Thank you so much. Now we're going to go back to Ben Brooks. [00:02:00] Ben is the CEO and founder of PILOT, which is the award winning virtual employee development program, what I'm working for now, and he is also one of HR's top 10, 100, I'm sorry, I'm going to say that again, one of HR's top stop, top 100 HR tech influencers, that's a lot, but here, and he has done lots of stuff for diversity and conclusion, but really He took a leadership and management role at a lot of different companies, and he co founded the LGBT Employee Resource Group when he was at a consulting firm.

[00:02:32] Laura Meverden: So, Ben, I know this topic is so important to you. What is your why?

[00:02:37] Ben Brooks: Well, thanks, Laura. Thanks, Helen. Thanks, Don. I'm super happy to be here. and just excited to be in this conversation you know I put my life savings you know Don mentioned time and talent and treasures the other T in that and and we both have put money in our businesses and respectively and, I really I just saw so many people having bad days at work which meant having bad days at home and, as a result, [00:03:00] having a bad life or not feeling good about themselves.

[00:03:03] Ben Brooks: And there's a sense of empowerment and swagger that I know people can have as a coach. And our mission at PILOT is for everyone to feel powerful at work. So my why is to help people feel powerful at work. So they feel powerful in other parts of their lives.

[00:03:17] Laura Meverden: Thank you, Ben. So we're going to get started here.

[00:03:20] Laura Meverden: I'm going to turn it over to Helen.

[00:03:24] Helen Fong: All right. Well, just throughout today's webinar, we encourage you to send us questions for Donald or Ben in chat

[00:03:31] Laura Meverden: thank you, Helen. So we're going to get to our first question. So what are some things HR professionals need to think about before asking for budget?

[00:03:42] Laura Meverden: And I'm going to, I'm going to ask Don, would you like to respond first? .

[00:03:46] Donald Thompson: Yeah, I'll step into this one. And then also I'm taking notes on things that Ben describes as well. But the clear thing to me is that we need to help our HR professionals to link the budget ask with the business [00:04:00] outcome that aligns with existing programs.

[00:04:04] Donald Thompson: that the C suite already cares about. It is very difficult to get new money for new things versus new money to expand things that are already top of mind, already on the strategic plan for the enterprise. And that's one of the things that we want to help our HR professionals understand a little bit better in terms of how to get that financial win, but linking matters.

[00:04:27] Laura Meverden: I love that existing existing things that are going on that they already care about. All right, I'm going to turn it over to you, Ben.

[00:04:35] Ben Brooks: Yeah, if any of you are thinking about budgets right now for next calendar year, just put a plus one in the chat or if your colleagues are working on budget or finance is sending you templates or you know that you're gonna have to do that in January or you already did that a month or two ago, if that's happening, this is a time not everyone's on a calendar fiscal year, you may be on a fiscal year starts in July or in September.

[00:04:57] Ben Brooks: But these sort of, this is definitely part of the reason that Don and I [00:05:00] had suggested having these topics was this is a right now thing for many people in the field. I think plus one to everything Don said with relative to, linking to something existing. Organizations including the executive, you think employees are burnt out, executives are burnt out.

[00:05:14] Ben Brooks: So when you suggest something new, they're like, oh my gosh, like another thing, I'm exhausted, right? So you want to double down and it's, this specific is even using the language. that if your chief customer officer talks about, creating a digital customer experience, you want your initiatives to be related to creating a digital customer experience.

[00:05:33] Ben Brooks: I mean, just, on message, right? Think of someone media training you to be on a cable news show. You would want to have your talking points in this exact sound bites that shows, you get it, you're a team player, this is aligned. Sometimes it's as simple as a couple of keywords, but then of course you also want to, in advance, do your diligence and do your homework.

[00:05:53] Ben Brooks: So often when we make these asks, we're not quite ready for some of the objections we might get or the known [00:06:00] questions. You know, you imagine, I don't know if you ever sold and if you're a Boy Scout or Girl Scout, you sold cookies or popcorn or things like that as a kid, you may have a parent that always have, well, where's the popcorn grown?, or how much is this compared to the how much it cost at Safeway or King Soopers or something.

[00:06:13] Ben Brooks: Think about what you're going to hear because people are pretty predictable often. So if you know that your finance team always wants to know, have we done a price comparison out there? Or, that your senior HR person always says, have we talked to references, or if you know that someone says, Hey do we have re you know, we're going to get data out of this because they worked in our industry, right?

[00:06:34] Ben Brooks: Those are also part of the doing your homework things, or even doing the homework internally, where they'll say, have you spoken to internal comms about this? Have you talked to the marketing team about this, think about the things that you're going to be asked or the hoops you're going to jump through.

[00:06:48] Ben Brooks: and jump through them before being asked because that accelerates the budgeting process. Don, what else would you add to that?

[00:06:54] Donald Thompson: Yeah, no, thank you so much, Ben, for those comments. The other thing that I would add is know the best practices [00:07:00] for your industry. So just say, for example, you're trying to create programming to increase retention in the organization.

[00:07:08] Donald Thompson: right? Make sure you have relevant data of what industry leaders are doing and some of the things the competition's doing. Those things resonate with the C suite. They want to be on brand, on target with industry leaders, and they don't want to lose competitive advantage for talent, for example. And so linking those things with that competitive measuring nature of the C suite, I think is also very imperative.

[00:07:30] Donald Thompson: And the final thing that I would say is don't be afraid to ask what you need. It's usually the challenge of being really cautious because times are tight, because a recession may be coming. If we believe that HR, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, People, Ops are strategic, then we need to ask as a strategic partner in the organization for what we need to be successful.

[00:07:58] Donald Thompson: And that is really [00:08:00] important.

[00:08:01] Ben Brooks: Yeah, you don't get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate. Negotiation is a part of advocacy, you gotta start the negotiation. Often times I see a thing in HR is people will only ask what they are sure that they will get. Or if they're sure they'll get a yes, which can deal with some, you know, do we have the resilience, the confidence, whatever, if, a good test, we say in the PILOT product with employees about advocating for themselves, a test is when were you last told no? Cause if you haven't heard a no in a while, you left a lot on the table. And sometimes people are shocked in HR when they just ask, sometimes people just say, sure, or yes, you know, we don't need to presuppose if you set this up properly. Sometimes they can be like, okay, and it can be literally that simple sometimes it's not for sure, but I think, to, you know what Don was saying right.

[00:08:50] Ben Brooks: If you don't speak up about this, and if you're not bold, because my guess is, if you were to look at what HR is gonna be responsible for your organization next year, it's as much as this year, if not [00:09:00] more the expectations are getting higher, are your resources becoming more abundant, and there's, and a lot of this is a bit of a mind game.

[00:09:07] Ben Brooks: Some of the, finance does these controlling things. Oh, everyone's got to have their budgets flat last year. That's an opening position, because I promise you not everyone's going to have their budgets flapped next year. Some might have even lower, right? But don't get too much of, to be too much of a rule follower on this thing either, because budgets are a bit of a game internally, and money is tied to power, it's tied to values, and tied to things, so you've got to get in there and really scrap and fight for it, because I bet you your head of sales knows how to get budget for things, and do you know, or your head of IT, or your head of operations, and Do you know how to do the same?

[00:09:42] Laura Meverden: Thank you, Ben. And Don, you have a, keep going, Don.

[00:09:46] Donald Thompson: One thing I wanted to just piggyback, and we could probably talk all day on this one question. Back to linking, you want to develop partners in the budgeting process outside of the HR domain. Yes. You want to really understand how the chief [00:10:00] marketing officer thinks about employee branding.

[00:10:03] Donald Thompson: internal communication. And if you can now tap into joint programming with other stakeholders within your organization, that's a breath of fresh air to your CEO, right? We're going to need a hundred thousand dollars because we're doing a joint promotion with our marketing organization to ensure that our employees our best advocate for our brand for new hires and all of our external stakeholders.

[00:10:28] Donald Thompson: So having those co sponsors now puts you in a position to where you're creating teamwork, you're creating collaborative energy. And I don't know a CEO on planet earth that doesn't want to see their teams work together better. And so anytime we can do that and co pitch and link together is going to be a breath of fresh air for the leaders on your team.

[00:10:49] Ben Brooks: Yeah, because then they're investing in the collaboration, not just the initiative. That's right. Because they want to, it's typically if you're in the C suite, you're dealing with a lot of groups not getting along and [00:11:00] silos and drama and things, and you're like, finally, like, wow, I got someone in HR and in marketing and DEI all coming to me saying, we want to do this thing.

[00:11:09] Ben Brooks: Independent of the thing, they're investing in the fact that y'all are aligned, right? And they also know that they're not going to have a problem that if they say yes to you, that's going to piss off two other people, right? Because they can be, there's a disincentive, right? In greenlighting an initiative for you.

[00:11:23] Ben Brooks: So I think that co sponsoring is a key thing. And you know, you, and you got to think about the, the empathy for the executive. We often think about ourselves. Oh, what will it mean for my career? Can I get time on their calendar? What's this going to look like? Think about them, what they're dealing with.

[00:11:36] Ben Brooks: Right? If you have, your prep, your ask should not be a 13 page deck, right? It should probably be one page. I often joke that the higher the person is in the organization, the bigger the font you should use, right? You think that you want to have all this detail? They can't handle it, right?

[00:11:52] Ben Brooks: They get all this detail. It's got to be simple. It's like, who is this targeted towards? How are we going to measure success? How do we pick this vendor or this [00:12:00] program? How much is it going to cost? Who else is supporting it? How will we stay aligned? Who's going to run this? Think of those facts in advance, those sort of key questions, including the competitive part.

[00:12:10] Ben Brooks: What are our competitors doing? That's right. Competitive intelligence is like catnip for executives, right? They go nuts. So it's like, oh, well, everyone else in our industry is doing this and we're laggards. No one wants to be a laggard, you know? So use that to your advantage, but you got to condense the ask.

[00:12:25] Ben Brooks: And by the way, if you really want to be at a senior level in terms of these sort of asks, stay out of slides and get into docs. Docs get more money than decks. Because you have to write, this is the Amazon method. You write it out, it's a key, it's sort of a memo, it's the thinking, you can give it to them as a pre read, then you can talk through it.

[00:12:44] Ben Brooks: But that's typically when you see things, when I work with boards of directors, Fortune 500 CEOs, they're not making lots of slides. It's mostly writing. That's how the business of asks and briefings and it's concise and it can be printed out or done asynchronously. Don, [00:13:00] is that resonating with you? No,

[00:13:01] Donald Thompson: I'm shaking my head because I'm loving it.

[00:13:03] Donald Thompson: Here's a way I want to think about it and share with you. The actual briefing doc gives subconsciously more credibility from the executive because that's the information they consume and seek on their own from other places. If your executive is working with a Deloitte or McKinsey or different things, they're not going online and reading a 40 page slide deck, but they are reading a white paper, they are reading an industry briefing.

[00:13:27] Donald Thompson: So you're aligning to the way that executive already receives and respects information is subtle, simple. and really smart. And so Ben, I love that a lot. Like I, that's right on target.

[00:13:39] Ben Brooks: When Corey asked a question in the chat about what would you reckon for an organization that's, that isn't transparent around budgets or if the hoops feel invisible.

[00:13:48] Ben Brooks: And this is super common. We talked to someone, we had a portion of people that, you know, Oh, the budgets are this or that or if you're new, maybe you haven't bought something before, right? That's another thing. The thing we always talk is find someone who does know how [00:14:00] to buy stuff. Who's the person?

[00:14:01] Ben Brooks: Who's the money honey that knows how to get it done, right? And you go to that person and you say, how did you do this? What were the steps, right? You learn from past experience is going to be the best thing because there's a lot of process that's not written. Oh, it says in SAP, there's going to be these things in Ariba we click, but really you got to go to Jeremy because Jeremy is the controller and it doesn't get into SAP unless Jeremy blesses it through email.

[00:14:24] Ben Brooks: You need to find out those things. And then of course, Part of advocacy is making things explicit. Oh, we're going to get budget numbers by when? How are these formulated? Right? Oh, is this factoring in these, things that we've been asked to do? So that's also part of it is just if you don't know, you have to ask or be explicit or they say, we haven't figured it out.

[00:14:45] Ben Brooks: You're like, well, what I'm thinking is a $500,000 budget. And that's what I'm going to plan around unless you tell me differently and that's kind of taking back that control. Don?

[00:14:53] Donald Thompson: The thing that I would add there is don't be afraid to ask what you don't know. It's the timing of [00:15:00] when you ask what you don't know.

[00:15:01] Donald Thompson: If it's two days before the presentation, before your briefing doc is due, that's a little bit late. If it's a couple of weeks before, or even a week before, depending on time and schedules, now all of a sudden your email correspondence or that meeting you have with your business leader is here's what I'm thinking.

[00:15:17] Donald Thompson: How does this land to you from the perspective of what's gotten approved before? You now have prepared yourself to get feedback from others. And so your early preparation gives you the opportunity to socialize what you're planning, what you're so that you can properly tweak your messaging. It's not usually the ask that's incorrect, it is the way the message is delivered that is incorrect.

[00:15:43] Donald Thompson: I'll give a very quick example from a DEI construct. If I go into a meeting with middle aged white male executives, and I start talking about white privilege, why lose an audience, quickly, which is not my goal. If I start talking about privilege that we all [00:16:00] have, I was raised in a two parent home, I was well educated, and now we're talking about something that we all share commonality, now we can have a conversation about the responsibility of privilege.

[00:16:12] Donald Thompson: It's no different when you're asking for money. It's not to ask for money, it's am I in alignment that these three things we want to do in HR this year align with your strategic objectives. When that executive says, yes, that makes sense. We need to do that. Great. Now the follow up question is, can you help me be smart about the funding mechanisms for these objectives we agree with?

[00:16:37] Donald Thompson: Help me be smart. What executive doesn't want to tell you their knowledge, their wisdom, how to navigate the organization? We have to be powerful enough as leaders. to tap into the simple ego parameters that most C suite leaders have. And they are more than willing to help folks that are asking smart questions and are well prepared, versus [00:17:00] people that are demanding something that may not be aligned with a win for that executive as well.

[00:17:06] Ben Brooks: It sounds like that's sparking a conversation rather than filibustering, which I think when we're nervous about making an ask, we have all these slides and we sit down and we go through them and we've got all the, and the executive comes in late and we try to hurry up and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And at the end, there's like 40 seconds left.

[00:17:23] Ben Brooks: And then we make the ask. And then we sit there and we're like, well, I know it's a lot of money and we negotiate against ourselves. And so you want to have a volley, a conversation, and I think make things explicit. As well, right? If you don't know, that's a big coaching thing. That's a big part of miscommunication, et cetera, is not making it explicit.

[00:17:41] Ben Brooks: I'm here today to ask you for advice and to make a recommendation of something that I want to spend money on. That's right. Like just put the, as I used to have have a boss, she said, you know what? I had these long emails of like walking her through the thinking. She said, look, I'm a busy C suite executive.

[00:17:57] Ben Brooks: This is really helpful information you're giving me, [00:18:00] but you're always burying the ask at the bottom. I want the ask from now on at the very top. My ask is this and here's the background below because if you ask, she's like, look, if you're asking me for 10, 000, I don't have, it's not worth my time to spend 20 minutes reading an email for 10, 000 at a 4 billion company.

[00:18:15] Ben Brooks: It just doesn't calibrate. Right? But that was also part of calibrating on other asks that are approved that if she's used to approving $10,000 asks like this, that's great, but also it's going to be different. I ask her for a million. Realizing that's going to be talking about, you know, our customers want to do pilots of PILOT, you know, they're not going to give PILOT to thousands of employees.

[00:18:33] Ben Brooks: They're going to give PILOT to 150 or 200 employees to start. So if you know that your executives like to try things and prove them first proofs of concept, you know, trials PILOTs, Don't go in with a plan to do a five year contract for something that's never been tested in your environment and that they're going to be risk averse about.

[00:18:52] Ben Brooks: Think about how they typically approve or how they buy. and map into that, which may be different than how the vendor is trying to sell it to you. It [00:19:00] may be different than how you thought about it, but that's the important, the secret of getting ahead is getting started. And it's better to get started with a trial or proof of concept or a pilot now than it is to spend a year or two going through a massive sort of enterprise deal and process and, kicking over a bunch of beehives and wasp nests in the political landscape as you try to, make something happen.

[00:19:21] Donald Thompson: Yeah, Ben, I love that. And in keeping with the name of your firm, PILOT that is such a smart way to get things done because you create evidence and buy in.

[00:19:31] Donald Thompson: Yeah, there's not a lot of institutional risk for the executive that's deciding so let's say for example you're in a situation where you're a little last minute, and you have some ass going into the end of the year. A lot of organizations have use it or lose it money year end dollars that they're trying to work with, and then most organizations of any size.

[00:19:51] Donald Thompson: Have a threshold that is round off error, and whether that's that 5,000 or 10,000 or $20,000, what can you do at low [00:20:00] cost high value to prove something out? Not only the program, but how effective and efficient are you? When giving budget to try something, how do you communicate that value? And you can say, I want to use this as a test.

[00:20:17] Donald Thompson: I want to use this to make sure that when I come back and ask you for a half a million dollars, that I know exactly what will work and doesn't work. And so I want to take the 15 to 20 to do some really smart research within our organization. That's how the leaders think to where you're defraying the risk, but you're keeping that door wide open for upside.

[00:20:38] Donald Thompson: so that everyone can win better but more predictably. Most leaders, when we talk about courage, most aren't. When we talk about the willing to innovate, most don't. What people want are predictable things that look innovative and special. And so what you've got to do is reduce kind of that risk of failure for that leader, and PILOTs, proof of [00:21:00] concepts, research projects that can lead to a bigger play is just a smart way.

[00:21:05] Donald Thompson: And then the last thing that I'll say is, then you don't have to feel like you're selling something. You're researching a joint decision you'll both make in the future. That changes the dialogue that you're having with the leader, because now you're just trying to test some ideas. and keep them in the loop for advanced learning of how we can do something together that's bigger in the future, but be smart, right, with the finances of the business.

[00:21:28] Laura Meverden: This is amazing, and there are lots of P words there. We have PARTNER, PLANNING, BEST PRACTICES, PROVE, PILOT, and don't forget to ASK. So, we're going to move on, if that's okay, with our Can I make one other And we're gonna go

[00:21:44] Ben Brooks: Can I make one other quick last comment? Go ahead. Okay. Yeah. So just from building on what Don said, that, there's a, it's very easy on anything new.

[00:21:51] Ben Brooks: There's a lot of scrutiny. We don't scrutinize the fact that we use Outlook for email every year. It just is there. But something new comes out. Oh, but what if this [00:22:00] happens? Or what if this, people might not use it or the data might not work. It might not work in our culture. And so there's 10x scrutiny on anything new.

[00:22:07] Ben Brooks: Something exists. It's there. So part of it is you want to move out of the kind of like what if game to let's see. Let's try. I remember I was in a room with a fellow HR leader, and he's literally like screaming in Vatican me there you're handing employees a loaded gun and I said well first of all there's no Thank you ammunition involved in this. This is a social learning platform. But secondly, like, let's learn. We have controls. If someone says or does something inappropriate, we have policies around that. We have monitoring, right? But there's a reticence to Don's point around everyone wants to be innovative, but they don't want any risk of something could go wrong or be imperfect.

[00:22:44] Ben Brooks: So you have to bridge that gap for them to sort of show. And the last point I'll make, and Laura, I'll be back to you is just around pooling money. So you may, HR is a budget is a percentage of your sales, general administrative expense of the company is, is [00:23:00] pENNY, NICKEL, DIME, typically, right? The average HR expense per employee at most companies is a few thousand dollars a year total.

[00:23:08] Ben Brooks: So the thing is, there's learning and development budget in IT and in operations. There's discretionary third party services budget all over the place. So if you get those co sponsors that Don talked about, ask them to also bring in some of their budget that HR is going to pay for some of this, but the sales team is going to pay for some of this, or the innovation office.

[00:23:26] Ben Brooks: Pool that money together and do some chargebacks. Laura, I'll get back to you. That's great.

[00:23:30] Laura Meverden: Okay. Thank you. And another P word, pool your budget. All right. So we're going to go to a poll and on top challenges. So what are the biggest challenges you face in building employee development programs? And you can select as many as you would like.

[00:23:49] Ben Brooks: This is helpful feedback for Don and I in terms of where we focus some of our answers in the next couple of questions, we will leverage some of this poll data.

[00:23:59] Ben Brooks: You may have [00:24:00] a little fatigue voting this week and it's been a big voting week for everybody. You know, a lot of get out the vote. You know, we're doing some more of it here.

[00:24:08] Laura Meverden: We're about halfway.

[00:24:10] Ben Brooks: Great.

[00:24:12] Ben Brooks: I don't know if Jeopardy music would be appropriate, but I've always thought, was there a little clip that we would use?

[00:24:16] Laura Meverden: Yeah, maybe. Da, da, da, da. I could sing, but that wouldn't be good either. Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Ben. All right, so let's go ahead and share the results.

[00:24:29] Laura Meverden: Okay, so you can see low employee participation with 81 percent but also lack of executive support. It's hard to plan content that's applicable to everyone. Programs are hard to scale. Thank you everyone for sharing. This is going to give us some great information for our presenters.

[00:24:48] Laura Meverden: All right, so here's the next question. What is the best approach to asking for budget that will cut through the red tape and get approval? Ben, would you like to start this one?

[00:24:59] Ben Brooks: Sure. I [00:25:00] think it's the Nike just do it. It's a little, in some ways it's simple. It's not easy. Golf is simple.

[00:25:04] Ben Brooks: Ball, stick, hole, fewest strokes. That's the entire game, right? But not easy if you've ever played golf. A lot of this is simple. You ask for it, right? And you're persistent and you follow up, you know, we'll talk more about how you do that. But thinking on the other side of getting that approval, Corey asking the chat, as a former HR exec, what does it feel like to get a really big initiative through approval?

[00:25:23] Ben Brooks: It's amazing. It's exhilarating. It's a champagne toast. It's going out. It's a fist bump. It's a hug with a colleague. It's an exhilarating thing just to get the approval. Now the work starts after that, right? You got to implement the thing and, govern it and do the change management. But it's a win in your career because not many people career wise as a competency or skill know how to get approvals.

[00:25:45] Ben Brooks: That's something you can market in future jobs. I know how to bring in things. I know how to get vendors approved. I know how to get budgets approved. That's going to be a competitive skill. But I think in terms of the best approach, we'll go back and forth on a couple of these, but I think a big part [00:26:00] of it is a clear ask.

[00:26:04] Ben Brooks: Yeah. All the time, there's a sense, HR will talk about, socializing an idea, which is fine for kind of a top of the funnel, you know, hey, here's the thing we're thinking about, right? And planting the seed and getting to be used to it. But eventually, you have to say, Are we going to do this? I, in fact, I think we should do this to solve this issue and it's going to cost this much.

[00:26:24] Ben Brooks: Do I have your approval? And that's a vulnerable spot, right? But you've got to ask if you've ever worked at a non profit board or fundraised money, the difference between raising money and not raising money is asking and then shutting the heck up. You have to ask, and I say, Don, I want to bring in the diversity movement into the company, you know, I want to use your micro learning library, I want to use your inclusive languages practices, I've done a bunch of research, it's the right thing, it's going to cost us $35,000, and I'm going to use it from this budget.

[00:26:59] Ben Brooks: What do you [00:27:00] think? And then Don, what do you think? What are your ideas on this, building off of this?

[00:27:02] Donald Thompson: Yeah, no, I'm just nodding in agreement, and the one thing I'll come back to is the polling, and that 81 percent of getting employee engagement. Yes. One of the things is we're pitching for budget for new initiatives.

[00:27:16] Donald Thompson: is we need to link back to the data points we already have about employee sentiment and how it is what we're doing enhance the information we know about our employee base because a lot of times our employees aren't engaged because they don't feel like the programming is tailored to them. They feel like they're being asked to do many too many things all at once.

[00:27:37] Donald Thompson: And they're not in part of the process, right? They're being talked to, taught at, versus engaged with. And so if we are aligning our budget in a manner that enhances employee sentiment, that is a link to something that the C suite is already looking at and measuring. The second thing that I think is really important, and I'll share this in terms of that [00:28:00] larger thought process, the client of mine that just got a new parental leave policy approved at a multi billion dollar enterprise.

[00:28:07] Donald Thompson: And it took about 12 months. From the time this HR leader started the process all the way through the board, through their CEO, through XYZ. Here's the thing that helped seal the deal is back to that competitive recruiting. If we don't do this, we're losing talent, retention numbers, and employee surveys are telling us that this is a missing element to our benefits.

[00:28:37] Donald Thompson: for our highest performing employees. So she mapped what she wanted to do externally recruiting, but internally, not just with the entire employee population, but against their top band rated performers. And that was something that pushed it over the edge for now that that company to [00:29:00] expand their benefits program.

[00:29:01] Donald Thompson: And so those are a couple of kind of, I just want to share like a real world example of linking all of these different things together so that we create that compelling case.

[00:29:10] Ben Brooks: And I think that that's so key because we think about all what could go wrong and how does my network, but what could happen if we don't do anything, you're gonna lose that top band that we're most sensitive about that's harder to recruit or more critical to our performance or our client, revenue relationships are tied to.

[00:29:28] Ben Brooks: So there's like the cost of the status quo or inaction that we have to bring into because we're only waiting and factoring doing something but we need to factor in not doing something or doing what we've always done, which clearly doesn't work and so part of that is pushing through and having the courage because if you're overly timid like I don't know this thing and we'll see where there's the ownership most executives have been around now have seen, initiatives, great ideas come in, but no one owns them. A value we have at PILOT is ownership. [00:30:00] And you've got to, prove that you're going to be the one that doesn't just get the contract signed and the P.O. issued, but do we turn it on the system on in a way that has people excited?

[00:30:11] Ben Brooks: Do they feel voluntold or like this is compliance training? Or do they feel nominated, seen, appreciated, invested in? Is this tied back to the bigger picture? A w em what's in it for me, for them about their career rather than feeling like it's charity for the company for them to do this, you know, DEI thing or this employee development thing.

[00:30:32] Ben Brooks: So I think that that's where also one of the objections of a experienced executive. They'll say, well, who's gonna own this? Who's the governance? Who's gonna drive this? How will we check in? And if you have that defined and it's clear that it isn't just gonna be something you're gonna flip on and then see if cobwebs grow in it, that, you know, we've all seen a lot of those.

[00:30:50] Ben Brooks: It really takes some love and care and it's something we do really well with PILOT when we roll it out is we've got all the change management and the communications. We build co branded registration pages and have [00:31:00] excitement. Because that's one of the things that's missing in the workplace right now.

[00:31:04] Ben Brooks: Hybrid and remote and virtual is great, PILOT's a remote first company, but we've lost some of the sizzle and excitement of being a part of something. We're worried about the economy, we got war, we got challenges, we got, inflation, prices, all these things. We've got to bring excitement back, and that's the thing that executives are also pretty sensitive about.

[00:31:23] Ben Brooks: Our employees having a vibe. You want to bring some of that in. It's not the, it's not the primary way you sell it, but you sort of use that as the second stage booster on the rocket. So the first thing is the business case. It's the hard numbers, it's the strategy alignment, but the second part where you have to keep selling them because you want to get money for next year and to expand on these things is then showing them the proof points, having them feel excited, or even giving them a part to play.

[00:31:48] Ben Brooks: And one quick story I'll tell you that we learned last week at one of our customers, their CFO ended up being part of the PILOT program. They got to do a fireside chat. And their CFO was [00:32:00] featured to talk about his career journey, how the unwritten rules will work at the company and the, in our, and our sponsor there, the COO said, you know, our CFO is not usually very visible.

[00:32:10] Ben Brooks: Right. He's like the numbers guy in the back office and all this stuff. And so he's now this raving fan, which, Oh, by the way, he's the one that also does the budget approvals. So these are all linked, right? And so that's where bringing them into it rather than go, Oh, here's some more resource It's like, no, we're going to make you look good.

[00:32:28] Ben Brooks: This is going to be part of your identity. We're going to have you kick off the program, or this is going to be associated with you in a positive way. It can be really great.

[00:32:36] Donald Thompson: I want to take something, Ben, from the chat. Sometimes it feels like we get in our own way. How do we grow confidence to make the big ask?

[00:32:43] Ben Brooks: Ooh, good one.

[00:32:43] Donald Thompson: Right? And that's a really powerful question because it does align us with us feeling like we deserve to be in the front chair, right, when budgets come, right? And so it is a mental model that we have to change. Here's the way I think about it and share with [00:33:00] others. Think about the people you're responsible for.

[00:33:03] Donald Thompson: Most of us are willing to go the extra mile to do things we're afraid of when we're doing it for others, when we're doing something for self, for our promotion, for our thing, then all of the imposter syndrome things can kick in. But when we're being a champion for someone else. We become fierce. Yes. And that is really what we have to do.

[00:33:25] Donald Thompson: We have to think about the impact of what we're trying to do on the balance of the organization, on the folks that are struggling, on the people that are asked to be empathetic leaders, but don't have the training to do so. Have a courageous conversation. What's that? And they've got 50 people in their group.

[00:33:40] Donald Thompson: If you're doing it on behalf of that constituency that you care deeply about, you will stretch. to the bigger ask because we all are doing this in terms of fighting for others. We're in this people centric business that we're all in because of that desire to make the world a better place and in our specific arena [00:34:00] to make work a better place, right?

[00:34:01] Donald Thompson: And so that's number one. The second thing that I'll say about the overall question is when you're presenting the budget for initiatives. Bifurcate that budget based on this is the learning objective or the outcome for the C suite. This is the learning objective, the outcome for our people leaders, and this is for our broader team members.

[00:34:20] Donald Thompson: When you break that out, it answers in advance. the fact that you understand that there's going to be different messaging, different investment, different tools for the different audiences throughout the organization. And so I like to prepare my financial ask in advance of the questions I can already assume that I'm getting.

[00:34:42] Ben Brooks: And I asked a question in the chat for everyone else. If you're not in the chat, jump in. When I, if I were to say to you, Go ask them for money. Whoever the them is and forever money. What emotion comes to mind or what emoji comes to mind? We got a couple like, kind of blue in the face, freaking out, teeth biting, a little [00:35:00] tear, right?

[00:35:01] Ben Brooks: Mind blowing up, right? So this is a scary, this is jumping out of a plane to skydive. This is, you know, public speaking level fear. right? The kind of squirrely, eyes we're seeing, all that. So realize that as much as we talk about, budgets and proposals and vendors and docs and decks and everything, there's a lot of like emotional work for you to sort through.

[00:35:24] Ben Brooks: So a dry run of it with a colleague, walk through the deck, talk it out loud, talk yourself through it out loud, get comfortable with it. Ask for money in other realms. I once, took a course and we had to ask people for money and give money away and all these different things and it just got me very fluid about it.

[00:35:45] Ben Brooks: And it used to be very terrifying for me. And I had my, my executive I work for the same one that I put the ask on top. We were in a staff meeting once and someone said, you know, why does, why does Ben just keep getting all of this? I mean, these are people that like [00:36:00] senior fortune 250, but it was like almost like children in a family saying he's the favorite son and why not me? And she turns around, she's a very demure woman from the upper, you know, lives in the Upper East Side, she goes, he's the only one that blank asks, and it, and it was so clear that, I wasn't even competing against them because they weren't even putting anything on the table.

[00:36:23] Ben Brooks: And they would only go to her if they knew it was a sure bet where I would get a yes approval, maybe 20 or 30 percent of the time, which often meant I need more information or refine this or change this. But that was a big part of it was I was willing to see where those boundaries were and she was consistently conditioned for me to come to her for things.

[00:36:44] Ben Brooks: And so it wasn't a surprise or super awkward, a little like development or performance conversations. If you do a performance review once a year, It's a really heavy anxiety provoking awkward thing. If you talk about performance and development once a month or every other month, it's a natural continuous thing that [00:37:00] has flow.

[00:37:01] Ben Brooks: Asking for money and budget and approval should be continuous flow.

[00:37:08] Ben Brooks: Now I know Laura, we got, I know Laura, we got to get moving to the next thing. So I want to yield back to you.

[00:37:12] Laura Meverden: Thank you very much, Ben. We're going to keep going. Thank you, Don and Ben. Those were great answers. Here is the next question that we're going to talk about. Which KPIs are most effective to prove ROI on the program and to secure future funding?

[00:37:30] Ben Brooks: Don, you wanna, should we define KPI and ROI just in case anyone's in alphabet soup right now?

[00:37:36] Donald Thompson: Yeah, so ROI, return on investment, and KPI, critical performance indicators. One of the things, and this will also answer something that I saw in the chat what do CEOs and leaders truly care about, right?

[00:37:48] Donald Thompson: What are those most important things? And measurement matters because it creates the accountability. right? And that is both for you that are securing funding for something in the future, but also [00:38:00] that's the way the C suite is measured for their bonuses, their performance, their growth, their incentives, right?

[00:38:06] Donald Thompson: And so those measurement programs are pretty critical. Here's the thing. Don't try to measure too many things.

[00:38:13] Ben Brooks: Yes.

[00:38:13] Donald Thompson: One of the things that, that occurs once people start to get into the data and different things, you need to figure out what are the points of leverage right, within your organization so that you're on the same page with the leaders, but you're not trying to track so many data points, that that becomes the function of calculating and pulling up the data.

[00:38:34] Donald Thompson: Number one, in terms of what are the most effective ways to think about return on investment, here's the way that you think about it. If, and I'll use retention as an example, you want to have a ROI data point that you can equate to a measurement and then a financial. growth or gain for the business.

[00:38:54] Donald Thompson: So if you know that losing a key employee costs three to five times that employee's salary, [00:39:00] if you reduce the number of turnover in your organization, you can look at the cost savings of that. If you know that there's a certain dollar amount per litigation. In an organization, then you can talk about the savings and the risk mitigation for teaching your organization and its leaders, inclusive language, giving and receiving better feedback, better conversational techniques and tools, because now you're linking it back to.

[00:39:27] Donald Thompson: financial measures that the business already understands. And so those are things when I'm thinking about return on investment and risk mitigation that I think are super important.

[00:39:38] Ben Brooks: And I, what I'd add to that is, tie it to a financial measure, but don't get so far out in front of your skis to say, this is going to move the stock. Like, a lot of things move your stock price. Your HR initiative is unlikely to directly and immediately move the stock price. So, tie it, yes, absolutely, to a financial measure, but don't set up such a gauntlet that you are like, because think of things like a promotion [00:40:00] rate.

[00:40:01] Ben Brooks: Okay, is this program going to affect our promotion rates? Well, it could, but what if your CFO does a promotion freeze because of the recession. Well, your promotion rates are going to be zero because there's a freeze. So you want to make sure that there's things that the initiative actually can impact or can control, right?

[00:40:21] Ben Brooks: So you don't set up too much of that. And you also want to like, part of the ROI is the learnings and the insights. If you're going to trial it, we're going to come out with like lessons learned. And a recommendation that can also be part of a trial or a thing that it's not a five year longitudinal study, right?

[00:40:37] Ben Brooks: You say, Hey, here's the thing we're going to invest in this because it's going to help us retain talent. And we know that turnover costs this much. And at the end of this, we're going to, understand, is this the right platform for us, how to implement it better next time around the targeting, etc.

[00:40:53] Ben Brooks: And I think all of the the kind of key phrases Taylor asked in the chat, you know, what are key phrases or wording in addition to the metrics that is [00:41:00] very important. You want to have, because, Executives exist in numbers. If you don't have numbers, they're going to think it's a bunch of BS.

[00:41:05] Ben Brooks: But if you just have numbers, they're going to understand it, but not be excited about it. So you got to kind of play to the head and the heart, but don't start necessarily with the heart. And then you would say, okay here's like a great story or as a thing, but I put in the chat, you know, this is going to make you, us look good.

[00:41:20] Ben Brooks: Elevate your brand. This is great thing to tie, to, we need to re engage people after the riff. This is, going to have us look responsive to the feedback we got at the last town hall in the exit interview on the engagement surveys. This is going to help us address what people are saying in fishbowl or glass door.

[00:41:36] Ben Brooks: So you get to these things where this is solving a problem or a pain point for them, or this is going to have us really stand out and recruiting from our competition that doesn't do anything progressive like this. That's right. Or this aligns with the larger brand rollout we're doing and this is the talent expression of that, or this supports what we know the board wants us to do.

[00:41:57] Ben Brooks: And this is a thing by the way. CEOs [00:42:00] spend a disproportionate amount of time worrying about the board. Like, they'll have a board meeting that's two hours that they'll spend two weeks prepping for. So anything that makes them look good to the board, keeps the board off them, off their lawn a little bit, or their porch, whatever they, it is, it's an important thing of like, this is something we could share with the board.

[00:42:19] Ben Brooks: This is something we could put in the CSR report. This is something we can put in our pitches, this is something we put in our careers website. They're CEOs and the C suite are always looking for data points and examples and evidence that things are going well. So putting this in that regard, I think is a key phrase that's worked for me.

[00:42:35] Ben Brooks: Don, what do you think of that?

[00:42:37] Donald Thompson: I want to expand on the board component that you mentioned. This is a way you can drop nuggets of insight to your leaders and become an internal influencer to them. If you send them a small briefing doc and say, here are the four key points around diversity, equity, inclusion.

[00:42:53] Donald Thompson: That board members are going to be asking people in the C suite. And here's the programming we're doing within our organization. Here's what we'd like to do [00:43:00] over the next 12 to 18 months, help them look like a superstar. And that is so important because now all of a sudden you're starting to talk in the language of the C suite, which raises your credibility.

[00:43:11] Donald Thompson: People want to fund projects that are led by credible leaders. because it reduces their risk. And so that, I just want to piggyback on what you described, Ben, because that, that really is the secret, quite frankly, is creating yourself and your internal image, right, as a business stakeholder. Yes. Not an HR professional, and I know that we're proud of what we're doing right like I get it, but we have to rebrand ourself right as understanding the people ops link to growing the firm and we do that in the way we interact with business leaders the questions we ask.

[00:43:50] Donald Thompson: and the information and insights we provide.

[00:43:54] Ben Brooks: And I think that, that, thinking that, that we're on their team beyond HR, we're helping them succeed. We're their career [00:44:00] coaches. We're advising them about what's going to make them look good, right? Making someone look good is really important at senior levels.

[00:44:07] Ben Brooks: So thinking, teeing up, this is the kind of thing we could get an award on, or we could present at an industry conference, we could have you mention on podcasts, or in particular, if you're the head of HR and you know there was a 360 on the CEO or the C suite or something, or even if it was about the head of HR and you know that there was like a missing piece.

[00:44:25] Ben Brooks: Oh, he's just a numbers guy and there's not enough around culture and people. Oh, this would be a way for you to demonstrate as a part of succession that you get it, right? You're going to take an objection off the table. And I'll tell you, I did that with the president of the business that I work for, the same HR head I talked about the president.

[00:44:44] Ben Brooks: He was known as the numbers guy, man, this guy could squeeze cost out of anything. He knew the industry well, he knew the products. But he was known as a person who wasn't great on EQ or emotional intelligence and people. So we got him to sponsor a big people initiative and to be the face of [00:45:00] it.

[00:45:00] Ben Brooks: He then got succession to the parent company, became the CEO at the parent company. His income went up 5x, by the way, as well. And so all of a sudden we were a key part of his success and getting things from him. But it was like all about understanding kind of his weak points, you know, thinking about success.

[00:45:18] Ben Brooks: Think about talent reviews, right? If this is where HR has unique knowledge. If you know from the talent review that the COO is known as this, or they need to work on that, or they're not good at this, link the ask back to the thing that you know that they know is their weak spot.

[00:45:36] Donald Thompson: That is, I'm smiling ear to ear.

[00:45:38] Donald Thompson: I want to just share an example. And in my experience, very similar in working with a chief operations officer for a business that is now getting promoted to their global CEO role in their business. But the relationship started with them needing coaching for being a little bit too harsh for X, Y, Z. But because we worked on some of those things [00:46:00] over the year, people have seen the Delta of that dramatic improvement.

[00:46:04] Donald Thompson: And now it's turned something that was a challenge into a strength and you being a part of that is huge. And then you have advocates in more powerful places in the organization. And so Ben, I just want to echo that, right, is using that unique knowledge, not in a negative way. Totally. But in a way to be super helpful for that business leader to progress and that is a secret sauce, right? That's a cheat code. When I talk about what are some of the cheat codes to winning, right? Being a part of someone's success is a cheat code.

[00:46:38] Ben Brooks: And that cheat code we build right into the PILOT program in the series we call winning with your manager.

[00:46:42] Ben Brooks: So sort of upward management. And where we start on that is we say the psychological contract that you want to create with your executive or your manager is I'll take care of you and then you'll take care of me. A lot of times we wait to be taken care of before [00:47:00] we'll do it for them. But if we're part of their headcount of their budget, they're already taking care of us with a job at the core.

[00:47:06] Ben Brooks: So we've got to think about the success. If you don't know the career goals and the pain points of the executive, do the discovery. Have drinks, have lunch, ask around. But that's where you get into, there's the discovery model, Sandler discovery model. Level one is like the basics. Do we know how many employees work here?

[00:47:24] Ben Brooks: Level two, what are the organizational challenges? Level three is personal. What's going on with them, right? We had an executive who was a president of a different division, hated the HR initiatives that were rolling out and actually talk trash about them. The guy who had been on a submarine for 20 years in the Navy, we always kind of joke, maybe the pressure got to him but what we finally realized is Joe actually became one of our biggest advocates for what we were doing.

[00:47:45] Ben Brooks: Yeah. I just had to let go of my ego and leading with the things that I wanted. I had to think about what kept Joe up at night and what got in his craw, right, what chafed him. It was financial acumen of our talent because we were selling to a different customer. We used to sell to a risk [00:48:00] manager, started selling to a CFO, but our talent didn't always understand the financial measures.

[00:48:05] Ben Brooks: And so I didn't talk about social learning and things that we were doing. I said, Joe, what if we could help with financial acumen? He became a super champion. And we even got him featured. I got him a four page spread in CFO magazine where our customers read that talked about what we were doing internally around financial acumen.

[00:48:24] Ben Brooks: So all of that was like leaning into what, that's what got turned him from going. He literally said, I will never use this. I don't believe in this. This makes no sense to becoming our power user for the company and getting and enrolling 20 other executives to share in social learning around that. But it was all about getting to the thing that mattered to Joe rather than doing the thing that mattered to Ben.

[00:48:49] Donald Thompson: I don't have anything to add to that.

[00:48:51] Ben Brooks: I know we got to go to the next thing. Laura, we'll hand it back to you.

[00:48:55] Laura Meverden: Thank you very much. So, Don, I [00:49:00] am going to turn it over to you for, to talk about the diversity movement and the great stuff that you are doing there.

[00:49:06] Donald Thompson: And I'm going to be super brief. This book, the inclusive language handbook, we recommend for everyone at each level in business to start to improve our language that brings people towards us.

[00:49:18] Donald Thompson: Versus pushing people away. And we just think it's a great starting point for executives, for frontline workers, for people, managers, so that we can have more effective conversations in the workplace. And we think that's a great way to start with your DEI and your leadership initiatives.

[00:49:34] Laura Meverden: Excellent. Thank you so much.

[00:49:37] Laura Meverden: Do you wanna talk a little bit about this slide?

[00:49:39] Donald Thompson: Sure. And again, just for sake of time, the diversity movement. com has a ton of free resources, videos, workbooks, online learning, because we're a monetized for profit business. But we're mission driven, and so we want to be helpful, and we think if we provide tools to leaders, we'll help you move forward, but we'll also develop trust [00:50:00] along the way, and check us out online at thediversitymovement.com.

[00:50:04] Laura Meverden: Don, thank you so much for that information. Fantastic. All right, and now we're going to move. Ben, would you like to tell us a little bit about PILOT?

[00:50:14] Ben Brooks: Sure thing. Thanks, Laura. If you've got your phone, if you've ordered a beer or a burger somewhere in the last three years, you know how to use a QR code.

[00:50:21] Ben Brooks: Get that QR code up and get that right there. But we've got a great ebook A Simple Path to Employee Growth and Impact. And we've, PILOT's all about taking something hard and complex and making it simple and easy to understand, and that means quick to act. We've got a great ebook here.

[00:50:37] Ben Brooks: I helped write this thing, very proud of this. And again, it's all about, how you can succeed by rolling out these programs, the support, the ease of use, et cetera. So we've got that right there. There's also a link that Liz put in the chat, so you can click on that. And Laura, I'll go to the next slide to talk about PILOT real quick. PILOT, just so you know, is an employee development program. We, our mission, we help people feel powerful at work and people buy it because it's [00:51:00] easy to implement, it's affordable, it's proven to work, and it's scalable to meet your employees virtually anywhere they are. We're working across five continents with a bunch of companies you've heard of and a bunch you don't.

[00:51:09] Ben Brooks: We make everybody a winner at your company through group coaching, employee reflection, a big peer community. Fireside chats, and of course manager feedback. And it's really helping to what our customers said a couple weeks ago is wake people up at work. We help wake people up at work and help employees finally own their careers and clean up their side of the street and meet managers halfway when it comes to their development, their experience, and their career advancement.

[00:51:35] Ben Brooks: So that's what we do at PILOT. And again, we built this PILOT partially based on my experience. I used to buy all these things when I was in the HR seat. Everything I bought was really hard to buy, really hard to get deployed, and really hard to get people to use, which is one of the main things in the poll earlier, getting employees to use something.

[00:51:52] Ben Brooks: We have designed this, and I know Don's method is similar with the diversity movement, snackable or micro, short things. Easy to use [00:52:00] clean technology, highly applicable and practical, like not boring, ABC content, right? Like hard hitting, evocative, useful, etc. So Laura, back to you.

[00:52:13] Laura Meverden: Excellent. Thank you so much. So there are different ways that you can that you can follow PILOT and The Diversity Movement. You can follow them in chat. You can request more information. We're going to have a poll that's coming up. You can also watch your email for recording of today's webinar. And then you can also join us for a partner webinar.

[00:52:35] Laura Meverden: It's not going to be live, but we will put it on social media and let you know how you can get the recording of that. So excellent. So if we could go to the next slide, Helen, and we could go to this. That would be great.

[00:52:50] Laura Meverden: So, on behalf of all of us at PILOT and the Diversity Movement, we want to say thank you and I'm going to turn it over to Don [00:53:00] for a quick wrap up and then Ben, I'm going to go to you.

[00:53:03] Donald Thompson: I'm gonna leave, I'm gonna leave the floor to Ben. Thank you all for having me. I would just say this very simply. We have a big responsibility as people leaders.

[00:53:11] Donald Thompson: and let's borrow one another's courage so that we continue in this moment to do everything we can with the tools that we have as we grow forward. So thank you all for having me. It's been really fun.

[00:53:23] Ben Brooks: It's been a lot of fun, Don. Corey asked in the chat, do you recommend ever bringing in a potential vendor to help build your pitch?

[00:53:28] Ben Brooks: Absolutely. They have a vested interest, but they also know what works and they can help make slides and they can give you data and they can give you this sort of answer. So absolutely. Leverage them to help you. You shouldn't have to pitch yourself. They're going to sell it better than you do, but you can go as a team.

[00:53:43] Ben Brooks: I think what I would think back to is think of in your career something great that happened somewhere. A program you got to use, a great platform, a training you went to, a conference that you got budget for. Someone in your organization had the courage to get that set up. [00:54:00] Somebody cut through the red tape.

[00:54:04] Ben Brooks: Someone got over their anxiety about making an ask. Someone cobbled the budget together. Someone did the research. Someone did that. And that benefited you. You don't even know who that maybe was, right? But this is an opportunity to pay it forward because so often we are all frustrated about the offerings our company has or how we do things or the way our culture is, et cetera.

[00:54:27] Ben Brooks: But, I think of this, I gave a keynote a number of years ago, and I said, if it's going to be, it's up to me. If it's going to be, it's up to me. So I want you to leave with, there isn't someone else out there in your organization, likely, who cares as much as you, by virtue of you getting on this webinar.

[00:54:44] Ben Brooks: There isn't someone who's going to be more bold than you, or more savvy, or more curious, or more clever, right? Or really, don't have the bystander effect, even in HR, of thinking someone else. is working on DEI or [00:55:00] someone else is going to fix our retention issue or someone else is going to address the engagement findings.

[00:55:05] Ben Brooks: That's really what I'd leave you with is a sense of responsibility. You're not alone. You will get co sponsors, right? You know, birds, get information, geese flock, right? You will get others to fly with you, but you have to be the one out front that leads and initiates. Love it.

[00:55:23] Laura Meverden: Ben and Don, I want to thank you for encouraging us all to be that someone and giving us all practical advice on behalf of both of these organizations and Ben and Don and the whole PILOT and diversity movement team.

[00:55:35] Laura Meverden: Thank you so much for joining us.

[00:55:38] Ben Brooks: Thanks, Laura. Great job. Don, a lot of fun. Cheers. Have a great day, everyone.