Show Notes
"Don't make an assumption, ask the question. Ask your senior people two things: what's slowing you down, and what would make you consider leaving. That pattern is your real priority list." - Alex Seiler
Alex's HR career started with a job creating employee ID numbers by hand at Citigroup.
Nobody dreams of being the employee ID guy, but he paid attention to what he was good at and let that pull him forward.
He still respects the people who do the unglamorous work the whole company depends on.
From there he worked across Citi, WeWork, and Control Risks, and he's blunt about what that taught him: every size of company has its own flavor of chaos.
Bring startup speed to a battleship and you blow past every stakeholder.
Bring the battleship process to a five-person startup and you bore everyone into quitting.
The skill that transfers is judgment about pace, and diagnosing the environment before you prescribe anything.
His rule for earning a seat at the table: lead with the business question, not the HR program.
He doesn't pitch leadership development to a CEO as a way to lift engagement scores.
He opens with the two VPs the company lost last year and what it cost to backfill them.
As CPO, he brought recruiting in-house, saved $500K, and put $360K of it into better benefits.
His hot take: companies buy engagement software to fix a management problem.
The survey says people are unhappy with their manager, and the action plan is to run the survey again next quarter.
The data was never missing. The willingness to have an uncomfortable conversation was.
"CEOs don't fund feelings. They fund downside protection and upside acceleration."
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