In First Person: Teuila Hanson, CPO of LinkedIn

REIMER: What has changed, and what has not changed, for CHROs in recent years?

HANSON: I’ll start with what has remained constant, which is being the voice in the room who thinks about the employee experience. You’re the one who raises your hand to say, “Let’s really think about how this is going to land with our employees,” or to raise the question about how much change you can drive at once, because change exhaustion is real. 

What has changed is that there isn’t a playbook for this moment. For CHROs, it’s about getting comfortable with sprinting and pivoting. Traditionally, the CHRO role has been a conventional and risk-averse role. It’s been the role that’s sort of the “steady Eddie” on the executive team. This is a moment of being unconventional. You’re experimenting, you’re using design thinking, you need to sprint and pivot. That’s a different muscle. 

For HR, it means understanding what is a smart risk. It means holding off on saying “No” as much as you can in conversations. People often assume they are going to hear no when they go to HR. So with my team, I tell them, let’s not start with no. What if this new idea is the only choice we had? How would we make it work so that we could sleep well at night knowing that we’ve done our jobs from a risk mitigation perspective but we’re also helping LinkedIn win? It’s a muscle that you want to build. 

REIMER: What do you see as the biggest leadership challenge for senior executives these days?

HANSON: It’s self-awareness, and how leaders are showing up. Yes, leaders must have technical acumen and understand how to drive results, but it’s really important for them to understand how they are showing up and inspiring and motivating their workforce. Even if they don’t have all the answers, they need to bring energy and show confidence and stability. The skill and ability to be self-aware is so critical, but it is still often overlooked. 

BRYANT: What’s the best leadership lesson you learned from one of your worst managers?

HANSON: I worked for a really tough senior lawyer in my early law firm days — the type of person who made your stomach turn inside-out before you went into their office. Early in my time there, I gave her a research project that wasn’t very good. She turned to me and said, “If you’re going to make it here, you need to justify your existence.” My heart just sank. To her, it was just about how much I could bill. 

But there was a silver lining, because the lesson that I got, in a very brutal way, was to understand that when you’re in business, you can’t forget that there are outcomes that you’re trying to drive. It is something I keep in the back of my mind, though in a much more productive way. And when someone on my team comes up with an idea, I always want to know how it’s tied to our core metrics and how it will help drive business outcomes.

REIMER: How do you hire? What questions do you ask in job interviews?

HANSON: I’m trying to learn how resourceful the person is, and whether they have the hustle mentality. In my role, I’m hiring vice presidents. I’m less interested in the big new program they launched in their organization with a budget of a couple of million dollars. I’m much more interested in how, even when they had zero budget, they were able to make magic happen in the organization. 

That speaks to how they can influence others and drive change. Were they able to tell their team or convince other teams to stop doing something to free up resources for a new initiative? When you find someone who can do that, particularly in a low-margin business, you better hire them because that person is going to be your go-to employee who will, through hustle and grind, find a way to make things happen. Those are your future leaders. They will be part of your succession plans. Those are the people who can get stuff done and not take no for an answer.