Using the Language of the Business w/Kathy Mandato
Episode Overview
Join us on this week's episode of Making Better as we sit down with the insightful Kathy Mandato. Kathy delves into the intricacies of HR and the significance of fostering a culture that's synced with your company’s mission. We discuss the transition from traditional perks to business-aligned benefits, considering the ever-evolving job market. You'll gain insights into the importance of data-driven HR initiatives and the skills needed to adapt and thrive in various corporate environments, from large entertainment to nimble tech companies. Get ready for a fascinating journey through the lens of an HR expert who understands the balance between nurturing high-performers and staying true to the company's core objectives. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more engaging discussions!
Make sure to check out this great book suggestion from the episode:
Exponential Organizations 2.0: https://amzn.to/3OdOMa6
About Kathy Mandato
Kathy Mandato is an incredible HR leadership who has led the people function at companies like Dreamworks, NBCUniversal, and Snapchat. She is now the Chief People Officer for the XPRIZE Foundation, where she works on the challenge of helping the most talented people on the planet solve the biggest challenges on the planet.
You can connect with Kathy through:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathymandato/
Full Transcript
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Kathy Mandato [00:00:00]:
Think about what the goals of the company are and how you are helping advance those goals through what you're bringing to the table. As an HR person, everything you do has to tie back to the goals, and they may be incredibly different from one year to the next. You know what you what you train on, what you what you teach people, what the skills that you expect from the marketplace when you bring people in, how you recruit, everything changes depending on what the goals of the company are.
Matt Gjertsen [00:00:28]:
Hello and welcome to the making Better podcast, where we talk about how to make ourselves, our teams, and our organizations better. Whether you are a business leader, a talent development professional, or an individual contributor, this show will give you actionable insights of how you can improve your own performance and the performance of those around you. Our guest today is Kathy Mandato. Kathy is a dear friend of mine, an expert in the people side of business. I first met her when she was the executive vice president of HR at NBC Universal, and since then she has only become more impressive, leading HR at tech giant Snapchat and now the XPrize foundation. This is the organization founded by Peter Dimandis to use multi million dollar prizes to solve challenges like spaceflight and climate change. In this episode, you will learn about some of the differences between working at large and small organizations, how to build strong connections throughout a business when coming from the HR side, what it takes to build high performing teams, and a lot more before we get into the discussion, I need to remind you that if this is your first time listening to the show, make sure you subscribe so you never miss a future episode. And if you were already subscribed, then I would ask that you please share this show with at least one other person, because that is how we grow with that.
Matt Gjertsen [00:01:51]:
Let's get into the discussion. So when we first met, you were working in a really large entertainment industry or entertainment company. You spent your whole career working in pretty large entertainment companies. Until a couple of years after I met you, you completely, what to me, seemed like completely changed directions and have been in the tech industry, have been in startups. What was that shift like?
Kathy Mandato [00:02:18]:
When I left the large entertainment studio I worked for, it was after being in that company for ten years and they were part of an even larger company that owned them. And while I loved every minute of it and I feel so fortunate and lucky to have had that experience, I knew when it was time to leave. And it was interesting because when I was interviewing for new jobs, I interviewed for large companies. I mean, it wasn't like I was pursuing only small and what I found was those smaller companies, the startups, for example, were like, well, have you ever rolled your sleeves up? And how do you handle a small company? And can you even do.
Matt Gjertsen [00:03:11]:
Of course, yeah. Have you done real work?
Kathy Mandato [00:03:15]:
And it was such an eye opening experience for me because it's not as though if you are in a large company, you're not rolling up your sleeves and doing something every single day. So it's kind of funny, but you are put in a position where you absolutely have to prove that you can roll up your sleeves. So I thought, okay, well, I've always been one person to say, how do I fill in all my gaps? How do I make it undeniable that I would be hired for small, large, middle sized companies? And I went about putting it out into the universe and frankly, finding opportunities that were with very small companies and mostly companies under 100 employees. One such company is the company I am at now as a full time regular employee. And how I did that is, frankly, I offered my services in ways that made it palatable for them to take a chance on me. I mean, I had five different compensation structures I was dealing with at the time just to gain that small company experience and to prove that I could roll my sleeves up. Yeah. And then once I did, it was easy to dive into, frankly, any type of company.
Kathy Mandato [00:04:38]:
But the world has changed a lot since that time. It's only been five years ago, but.
Matt Gjertsen [00:04:45]:
Yeah, the world's definitely changed a lot in those five years, especially on the people side, I would say when you made that change, so you mentioned that you had to prove yourself, that you were there to roll up your sleeves, but it's not like you don't do anything in these bigger companies. But I would imagine what is the big difference, especially from the people perspective, in the people function, when you talk about these tens of thousands plus employees, the kinds of things that are happening day to day, the challenges of the people function, does anything change? Is it like the scale of the problems when you go to these smaller companies, or. I don't know what's different?
Kathy Mandato [00:05:27]:
I'll tell you, I'll answer that in two ways. One, when you're in a large company, you have large resources, you have a team, you have people to delegate to. You have, in my case, these centers of excellence structure that you can rely on for things that you don't have the bandwidth for and or the things they want to kind of keep in those centers of excellence. So your job is kind of sliced and diced a bit smaller in some ways in some of these larger organizations. In my case, I had to give up some things that I was overseeing from an HR perspective. I used to oversee all aspects of HR in a large company, and then when I went to an even larger company, I had a more defined scope. Right, but you do. You still have the luxury of resources in a situation like that.
Kathy Mandato [00:06:22]:
Then when you go to a smaller organization, the resources are not really there. I call it h arts and crafts. You kind of have to put your hands in and do arts and crafts to get your job done and create things from scratch. And I think that really taps into your creativity more. It taps into, I don't know, your ingenuity a little bit more, and it's an exciting place to be in a smaller company. But your question about are things really different? I'm going to say not really. I mean, the reality is that the tone is set at the top. That's fair in almost every organization I've ever been in.
Kathy Mandato [00:07:08]:
How the CEO and the leadership team functions sets the tone for everyone else. Values matter. Defining those values and teaching those values matter. You know that because you helped me do that at my current company, and it has made a huge difference. People want development. They want to continue learning and growing, and people have needs, no matter if they're working for a small company or a large company. And I kind of see them as the same.
Matt Gjertsen [00:07:41]:
I think that makes a lot of sense. Earlier you mentioned how much things have changed over the past few years. I think one of those changes we've even kind of chatted a little bit about this is I think there's much more of a focus, I would imagine, especially at smaller organizations, but at all organizations on kind of people centric operations and being human and putting your employee first, from what you've seen, I guess one, how has that changed? And then how is that more than it's changed? How has the balance of that change? Because as the HR person, you have to be setting rules. You have to set guidelines for people to follow, but then you can't make them so strict that you're not being kind of human anymore. I don't know if that makes sense. Where's that balance?
Kathy Mandato [00:08:34]:
Family question. I've been talking about this a lot lately. Let's take a little journey in the way back machine, which is really only way back. Maybe ten years, right? I mean, everything changes. Let's do it these days. And I'm not going to name company names, but let me just say industries. So the tech industry, I kind of say the tech industry started this. Okay.
Matt Gjertsen [00:09:02]:
All right, I think that's fair.
Kathy Mandato [00:09:09]:
I'll just say when I worked at DreamWorks, it was one of the most absolutely competitive times in animation that has ever been. And we were always trying to figure out how to be as competitive as possible. Sometimes that meant creating all of the fun perks and benefits that your competitors were creating, but even trying to one up those right. So all of a sudden it became a game of how much can you give your employees?
Matt Gjertsen [00:09:36]:
Sure.
Kathy Mandato [00:09:37]:
And that worked for a lot of reasons. It retained people. It made people believe and feel that you cared about them as individuals, which we did. But there's only so much of that that you can do and maintain the budgets and the fiscal responsibility that you have as an organization. I think ultimately, sure, there have to be boundaries on those kinds of things, and people have to be in the company for the right reason. Not because you have a game room, not because you get free lunch, all of the perks and benefits that we love, but they have to be in the company because they believe in what you're doing. They have a passion for working for that company. They feel like they're being treated well and with respect.
Kathy Mandato [00:10:31]:
That's absolutely table stakes, in my opinion. But at the end of the day, the responsibility they have to you is that they're going to bring their best work every day and you're going to treat them well. I say that it's changed a lot because I believe that things did get a little bit out of control in terms of how much employees could expect to get. And when the job market is tight and you are competing for the same talent that everyone else is, then you bring more of that to the table. But when it becomes an employer opportunity and there's a lot of employees applying for the jobs that you have, you're not in the position of having to do all of the things you used to do. So the employees have to also flex how they're coming to the table. They may not get all the perks and benefits that they once had. Things have changed in that way, I think, quite a lot.
Matt Gjertsen [00:11:35]:
Even though we still live in a world where it's a relatively light, tight labor market, the economy has completely changed over the last year or so. And I think that's where you see it. Was that change in the economy where you saw, again, kind of from the tech sector, this real big pullback of a lot of those things that you're talking about here, where we're doing less perks, we're hiring less people, a really big reset, kind of to your point of focusing on what's the mission? What are we here to do? Are you here to do what we're here to do, or are you here because of free lunch and things like that? Obviously, all of this exists in a big spectrum, and it's not like that black and white choice, but there's definitely been a movement, for sure.
Kathy Mandato [00:12:28]:
I want to be a people first leader. I do. But I actually think you have a major obligation to your company to bring the right people in who have a passion for what you do and who are going to help you get from point a to point z or wherever you're going. So I almost want to say I like the idea more, frankly, of a mission driven culture where people are treated well, I think you can have both, right? But people have to be there for the right reason because that's where the motivation comes from, that's where the engagement comes from. You can't really train that into people. They're going to be excited because they believe in what you're doing.
Matt Gjertsen [00:13:14]:
It's interesting because a part of what I'm hearing you say, relating it to kind of the talent development space, is, I think one of the most common themes of discussion that I'm hearing in learning development and talent development these days is the need to be closer to the business and more focused on the business and that we operate on these silos and we just want people to learn. And so we're really excited about giving people all these learning opportunities without always asking the question of do they need these opportunities? How is this opportunity going to push the business forward? I'm sure that has to happen more broadly in HR as well. For you as an HR leader, how do you keep close to the business and make sure the things you're doing, like you said, you want to be a people first leader, but ultimately your responsibilities are to deliver people so they can execute on the mission of the business. How do you stay close to the.
Kathy Mandato [00:14:12]:
Business when people come to me and they go, oh, I want to be in HR. And I'm like, don't be in HR, be in business. It's fine to study HR, but when you are in an HR role, don't practice HR. Practice what's best for the business first and let that drive all of your HR initiatives and practices and programs. And it's funny because as you mentioned earlier, we all are in our area of the business. We want to drive forward our agenda. But if our agenda doesn't match what the company's agenda is we're just spinning our wheels and wasting time and wasting resources and money. So I always tell people, please think about what the goals of the company are and how you are helping advance those goals through what you're bringing to the table.
Kathy Mandato [00:15:00]:
As an HR person, everything you do has to tie back to the goals, and they may be incredibly different from one year to the next. What you train on, what you teach people, the skills that you expect from the marketplace when you bring people in, how you recruit, everything changes depending on what the goals of the company are.
Matt Gjertsen [00:15:24]:
Yeah, I think we've, and we've had discussions about that, and we definitely both agree it's really important to ideally have that. It's great when some of the most successful HR people and learning people I've seen have come from the business into the space rather than being in the space for their entire careers. And then the people who are in the space for their entire careers, they do definitely have that business focus first. I don't know what it is. I don't know if you have any thoughts on this, because I was talking to a budy of mine who's in talent development, and he works at a consulting firm and how he really felt that we needed to change the view that we were kind of less important or foundational or not central to the business, that we needed to do a lot of work to change, to change that feeling and kind of referencing this idea that when a lot of people, it's like the old adage of just like, if you can't do teach by being in HR, by being in learning development this idea, well, you're not part of the real business. You're off to the side. And he wants to change that. And there was part of me that was just kind of, that always kind of thinks.
Matt Gjertsen [00:16:46]:
Exactly. But we are the foundation. We're not the sexy part, we're not the exciting part. And so why try to change it? Just know what we are and own it.
Kathy Mandato [00:16:58]:
Especially, I would say, in the entertainment business, for as long as I was in that business, which was 25 plus years, there was many companies I worked for where they had no idea what HR actually did. And I would say, I've got to go in. And how I set the tone, how I set the example is what they think HR does. So I was actually teaching them what I could do. And I can't say I never had a seat at the table. I was always at the table. And I think partially because I was focusing on what they found to be important in the business, not, hey, I want to do this and that and the other. And they're like, why do we need that? No, that's not how to sell something in.
Kathy Mandato [00:17:38]:
You need to first approach it from what need they're trying to meet and how you can bring in a program. I try not to actually use HR words or nomenclature, too. Right. Consultant, speaker, whatever the case might be, because frankly, my first twelve years of a career was not in HR. It was in sales. It was in the ad agency world where I focused on, strangely enough, public relations in the ad agency world and being an account executive. And when I transitioned over into HR, I was sort of this weird alien from another planet because everybody was like, oh, you don't speak HR. And I'm like, yeah, I don't even know a thing about HR.
Kathy Mandato [00:18:22]:
I was lucky to come in at the manager level because I had been high title in my other job. And it was just a very interesting lesson for me to realize that people don't relate to you because you're in HR. They relate to you because you're helping them forward their goals and initiatives and their business. And so I think that that has to always be our mindset. And as long as it is, I think we will have that seat at the table. I think that people will see us as real business people. And if we can bring that operations mindset to the table and use, let's say, the word data, I mean, you and I are big believers in using data to sell in our programs. We are the people with the data.
Kathy Mandato [00:19:11]:
We are the function that knows people across the entire organization. We know everyone and not other leaders don't. They know their team and they know the teams they interact with. Very rarely does a leader interact with all teams like we do. So therefore, we have lots and lots of data that really matters to leadership, like retention data on why people are leaving, data on how people feel about the company through our engagement surveys. We need to use that, and not because we're in HR, but because we have it. And it's helpful to design programs and other initiatives that are going to move the company forward with the goals of the company. So I don't know.
Kathy Mandato [00:20:05]:
We should never think we don't have a seat at the table, because we do and we have to approach it.
Matt Gjertsen [00:20:13]:
Yeah, there's definitely that. And it's how we bring that unique data that we have to the table and how we talk about it. I think that's totally right. And talk about it in terms of there's actually a really great book that's back on my shelf called building a story brand. And it's about branding and marketing. And so that's why I'm reading it, to help build my company. But I think one of the key elements of it is that when you run your own business, when you're a consultant, which in many ways, I think a lot of HR internally is often acting kind of as an internal consultant because you're not a part of the core business unit, you're coming there and talking to them. And the trap that a lot of us fall into, business leaders, salespeople, that kind of thing, is thinking that the goal is for us to be the hero of the story.
Matt Gjertsen [00:21:05]:
So true that when we're building this story, we're saying, like, I'm going to come save you. And that is in sales, any kind of sales, whether it's me as a business selling to you, or you as an HR person selling to a director in your company, your whole goal is to craft a story where they are the hero. You're here to help them become the hero of their story. And when you can tell that kind.
Kathy Mandato [00:21:28]:
Of story, maybe a different way. Also, I totally agree with what you're saying. It's not your agenda, it's their agenda. What is their agenda? I love what you just said because it also reminds me of a very important skill that we need to have, not just in the HR function, but in almost every leadership function, is that ability to tell stories and to create those presentations in a way that people are going to listen. And having been in branding and advertising for quite a while, that was something I was trained in very early on. You always have to back up why you want to do something with data and the context, frankly, of why it's important for the company. And that's really another way of saying you need to tell the story correctly to get that support.
Matt Gjertsen [00:22:26]:
Yeah, absolutely. Shifting gears a little bit, especially throughout your career, but especially in the past few years, you've worked at some incredibly high performing companies with, you know, and I've. I've gotten to work with you. I've had the privilege of meeting some of these people, very high performing individuals. From a people perspective, is there any unique challenges about that kind of situation where you have. I kind of think of it as like density. It's like with a star or something, where it's just a big ball of gas and it gets denser and denser and denser and eventually it all explodes. And I can imagine a world where I've gotten the chance to work with some people, and sometimes they're big personalities and I don't know any kind of interesting, particular challenges to those kinds of situations from the people perspective.
Kathy Mandato [00:23:20]:
That company that I'm with now, yes, high performers. And it's very funny, I'm always saying this, there are so many parallels to the entertainment industry, and someday you and I should work on that. I'd love to do a presentation to just basically figure out how many things are just like in entertainment, because there are very many parallels, but also the fact that there were big personalities and very high performers in the entertainment world as well. That makes sense, basically, celebrities, et cetera. And now here I am with stars of a different type. These are people that come out of scientific organizations, governmental bodies, institutions, universities, places where I never thought I'd be talking to these people ever. And because I lead recruiting as well as HR every day, I talk to people who are running the energy department, running. They're leading a major department at MIT.
Kathy Mandato [00:24:25]:
I don't know, it's just a whole different type of individual. But I have enjoyed that greatly. And I sometimes go, I pinch myself. I'm like, I'm so fortunate to have this job where I can talk to all of these wonderful folks. That being said, there are good, wonderful traits that all of those people bring with them, but there are also things that you have to watch out for. Right. And again, I'm going to say, just like in entertainment, it could be ego, it could be people who think it's their way or the highway. This exists almost in every industry, right? Yeah.
Kathy Mandato [00:25:02]:
There are people who aren't able to speak to laypeople, but we need them to be able to. Right. So when we're doing the recruiting, we're looking for all of these things that someone can translate scientific data to a donor who maybe knows nothing about climate change or wildfires or whatever we happen to be working on at the time. So I would say ego. Finding people with humility who don't think they have all the know. One of the tenets that comes from our founder, Peter Diamondes, is I'm not exactly sure what Peter says, but it's something like beware of experts, people who say they have all the answers, because someone who comes in who has all the answers is not curious. They're not going to find new solutions to new major world challenges. We need people to come in who don't think they have all the answers and can see the possibilities.
Kathy Mandato [00:26:07]:
If there was one trait I think is the most important thing that we look for it's people who have enough scientific background to know, I guess, to have that bs meter to know if something's truly possible or not possible, but somebody who's willing to explore all of the possibilities. So beware of the expert. I think when you're interviewing people, look for that humility, and I think that would be the number one thing I would say. But we're lucky because we do have a really great leadership team. And I will say maybe we're just good at hiring, but we don't really have to deal with that on our team, I don't think.
Matt Gjertsen [00:26:51]:
Yeah. That's one of the benefits of having a smaller, high performing team is that you can be extremely discerning exactly in your talent process. Yeah. And I think there's a Neil deGrasse Tyson quote where I think he says the key is to know enough to think you could be right, but also know enough to know that you almost certainly are wrong. Yeah, I love that he says it a little bit differently, but something like that. Yeah. Excellent. Since you mentioned that you are sitting in front of both people and the recruitment side of it right now, do you have any thoughts on that? Basically, when an organization needs new talent, it has two options.
Matt Gjertsen [00:27:41]:
It can buy it or it can build it. Right? Those are the two options. And there's various reasons why you would do one or the other. Like you were just saying, you're looking at these individuals coming in and maybe they're an expert in their field, but they don't quite have the communication ability that you would want. Are you in any discussions around, kind of thinking through what are we going to buy versus what are we going to try to build? I think I've seen some of that when I was there.
Kathy Mandato [00:28:11]:
Yeah, absolutely. So when you come in to lead a domain, and that's an area of one of our areas that we cover, so we have seven of those. Right. They're very different, but that's where our prizes live. Under each of these domain areas, you have to.
Matt Gjertsen [00:28:31]:
And a domain would be like. It'd be like energy versus space versus big picture domains.
Kathy Mandato [00:28:38]:
Exactly. So, I mean, I could rattle through them very quickly. But you're right. Climate and energy, biodiversity and conservation, space, deep tech, quantum and AI, food, water, waste, learning in society. Anyway, under each of those, if you're leading that area, you have to have the expertise for sure. And you got to bring that scientific background because we really want to lead with our science and we require a phd generally for that role. So that's a way to kind of, I guess you'd call that buying versus building, but we have to do it that way at the top. Now underneath each of those domain leaders there are positions where you are not required to have that scientific background, but you need other skills and that's where we're trying to build and develop those internally.
Kathy Mandato [00:29:37]:
And sometimes we have to bring people in from the outside because we are scaling right now. But we do both, we do both buy and build.
Matt Gjertsen [00:29:48]:
I'm working on interview training, hiring and interview training with a couple organizations right now. And what you're saying really reminds me of the real importance of knowing what is the skill of this job for any role. Right. So for those people at the top, the domain leaders, the skill is being the domain expert. So they need to bring that in, whereas maybe someone lower down the skill is project management and they don't necessarily need the domain expertise. They can get that while they're there, but then they need to bring the project management expertise.
Kathy Mandato [00:30:22]:
Right.
Matt Gjertsen [00:30:23]:
When you're making that buy build decision, chances are you're not going to build the key expertise of the role.
Kathy Mandato [00:30:32]:
That's table exactly. By the way, I thought of the other domain and Dr. Jamie justice, I'm going to give her a special mention because I forgot her domain and what's crazy about it is it's our health domain and we just launched the largest prize ever at Xprize in her domain and I could not come up with that at the beginning. But yeah, it's called the health span x prize anyway. Yeah. So I think it's a combination of buy and build. Now we also have the other functions like marketing, accounting, our business and legal affairs department, all of those human resources, et cetera, where we do tend to grow people from within if we can. But we've undergone quite a shift in our own organization to where I'm going to say nearly half of our employees are new in the last couple of years and we have 100 employees, so that's 50 plus that are new.
Kathy Mandato [00:31:31]:
And that's been really exciting because they bring in exciting ideas, enthusiasm, engagement. We've gotten our act together in terms of how to interview better, to spot the values that we're looking for. Thanks to your training and your help with that, I'm better at looking at who brings curiosity to the table. Boldness, accountability, rigor, et cetera. In our interviewing process, we've incorporated questions about that. So I think we've just gotten better all around. When we buy the talent, I guess go to the outside for awesome.
Matt Gjertsen [00:32:10]:
Awesome. Well, Kathy, I want to make sure to respect your time. We always close up with kind of a similar set of questions. So one question I would have is, is there a particular book or podcast that you think everyone should read or listen to and why?
Kathy Mandato [00:32:28]:
Well, I did think about this, and I have to say, and I swear it's not because my founder wrote it. I swear because I read this book and handed out at least 125 copies of it in 2014 and 2015 when it first came out. And I didn't work at Xprize then, but it was written by Salima Smell and Peter Diamondis and Michael Malone. It's called exponential organizations, and it was a game changer for me. And the rest of the title is why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours and what to do about it. And the reason why that resonated with me is because I was in a traditional entertainment company when streaming was disrupting everything, and I had people who thought things were not changing and they couldn't think outside of what they'd known for their entire careers. But that was a major train coming down the tracks that traditional entertainment companies needed to see. And now we've seen the result of that.
Kathy Mandato [00:33:32]:
Right? So this was my way of waking people up using this book. And they just came out with 2.0, a second edition, and I just went through that and read that. And it obviously has new information in it, but it also has just reinvigorated and reenergized and reminded me of the tenets in that book that are so important. And that's where I saw beware of the expert. You got to be careful that you're not thinking you have all the answers, just one of the many things that you'll learn from that. But the reason why this book, sorry, I'm going down a long winded path here, is so important, is disruption has not stopped. Disruption was kind of a new word in 2010. Absolutely picking a number.
Kathy Mandato [00:34:28]:
But I think, like, back ten years back, everyone was saying, disruption, disruption, and it felt like it was overused at one point. But I'm telling you right now, AI is going to disrupt us in a way that we've never seen before. And if you're not ready and you're not prepared because you've kind of settled in and you're comfortable where you are, that's not going to work. So I would grab that book or a book that talks about disruption. There's a test in the book to see if you're an XO company, and I think it's really important to be ready for what's next because it's going to be huge. AI everywhere in every aspect of what we. Yeah. And for learning and development people, Matt, I would say they should be thinking about how they can train and bring education on AI into the workplace, no matter what the workplace is.
Matt Gjertsen [00:35:23]:
Yeah, I think that's a big one for sure. Awesome. You may have already answered this a little bit, but maybe you'll go in a different direction when I ask it kind of directly, what is one skill that has most helped you be successful in your life?
Kathy Mandato [00:35:37]:
Well, I don't know if this is a skill, but I've never been afraid to lose my job. And I think when you say what needs to be said and you kind of say the unsayable or you say what everyone else is thinking, but you have the courage to say it, you're seen in a way that you're seen as a leader. You're seen as somebody who's not afraid to put things out on the table that need to be discussed. And I guess there was a learning and development class that I took a long time ago where somebody said, this is an important skill. And I took that seriously. I think they said, discuss the undiscusables, be willing to do that. And no matter what level I've been at in an organization, I've been willing to do that.
Matt Gjertsen [00:36:25]:
I definitely think that's a skill.
Kathy Mandato [00:36:26]:
Yeah, you got to be careful, but people appreciate it. As long as you do it with a productive mindset, you're there to solve a problem. So I guess another skill I would say that's attached to that is problem solving. You just got to be a good problem solver and that's we all have the ability to develop.
Matt Gjertsen [00:36:49]:
That's what it all comes back to. Awesome. Well, it's always great talking to you, Kathy. Thank you so much for taking time. It's always great to get a different perspective, I think from a broader people perspective, a larger organizational perspective. Always great to hear. So thank you so much for being here today.
Kathy Mandato [00:37:10]:
I love working with you. Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity.
Matt Gjertsen [00:37:14]:
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