This is a short YouTube interview (Simply Put) hosted by Emmanuel Acho featuring Steven Mascola (Senior IT Director, Stanley Black & Decker) and Ali Yadke (Senior Product Marketing Manager, Salesforce). Mascola emphasizes empathy in leadership and describes using the Salesforce platform to break down HR and organizational silos by creating a "glass pipeline" to track employee lifecycle from candidate to retiree, producing a single source of truth. The episode closes with three practical tips from Ali: (1) "Build in the open"—increase transparency and collaborative feedback (e.g., Slack integration); (2) "Choose a partner, not just a solution"—pick platforms with pre-built connectors for easy integration; (3) "Find a solution that grows with you"—ensure scalability and enable automatic backups and restores.
Chapters
One of the critical skills that I think I bring to the table is empathy. It's really adding the element of balance to every relationship. If I can understand where the person on the other side of the table is coming from, then I can help them.
Building relationships on empathy. I see where you're coming from, Steven. What's up y'? All? I'm Emmanuel Acho and this is simply put your go to source for business tips based on understanding. Around here we get right to the point because hey, you're busy. You just met Steven Mascola, Senior IT director, Stanley, Black and Decker. Steven's bringing the inside info on making technology work for your teams. Ali Yadke, a senior product marketing manager of Salesforce, will join us a little later to translate Stephen's blueprint for the perfect business solution into simple steps. Now that we're all on the same page, back over to you, Steven. Lets go.
My name is Steven Mascola. I'm the senior IT director at Stanley, Black and Decker, responsible for CRM. My mother wanted me to be a lawyer because I talk a lot, but I figured that I'd rather do something like this because I love technology and I love helping people through technology. I own the solution delivery. My team and I are responsible for working with the implementation partners to make the solution a reality. Simply put, I support the people that make and sell Stanley, Black and Decker tools. The classic problem at Stanley in our HR area is that we've always run in silos. The systems that they were working in didn't talk to each other. For us, Salesforce platform creates a more seamless experience. I like to use the analogy of a glass pipeline. So when a customer comes in as a lead and then we track them as they become a potential customer, a full customer, and then a recurring customer. We've extended that analogy now to our internal team. So from our employees, we want to be able to track them in the same way from when they come in as a prospective candidate to when they're a candidate to their employee to their long term employee through retirement. We can provide toll gates of the journey and training that they should be doing at each leg so that they have the best experience at the company. The Salesforce platform allows us to move quickly and efficiently because it's so comprehensive, the platform is so broad and so open. It allows us to easily connect to all of the other systems in our ecosystem. A single source of truth cuts out the noise, it cuts out the argum, it allows us to focus on the challenge or the problem at hand and then Turn it into an opportunity to move forward.
You heard Stephen. Focus on the challenge and move forward. So let's move this episode along with our top three tips for choosing the right solution for your team. Hey Allie, you ready?
Bring em on. I'm ready with some how to examples.
All right. Tip number one, Build in the open.
Your teams are doing great work. Show it off. Leaders like Steven even help everyone understand where things sit in the release management pipeline. If you're not a developer, those development pipelines can look a little murky. But there are ways to be more transparent. Collaboration tools like Slack make it easy to track feedback from key stakeholders and prioritize what teams need a single source of truth for success. For example, a team can request new product updates right in a Slack channel. Each request goes straight to your engineering team's queue. While engineering gets to work, everyone else can track their progress in, you guessed it, Slack. The ability to weigh in early with feedback keeps development on track quickly and securely.
Let's keep it going with tip number two. Choose a partner, not just a solution.
Technology is great, a partner is better. Like Stephen said, everything you build should help you arrive at a single source of truth that can scale. Make sure you choose a platform flexible enough to play nicely with other key systems. Your team should be able to connect every system together fast. That means pre built connectors, not custom code.
Tip number three, find a solution that grows with you.
Because who wants to keep switching solutions right? Invest in something that will stick with you for the long haul. Over time you'll be making changes to your data. Turn on automatic backups. So if something goes wrong, like a major data set gets deleted by mistake, no worries, just restore it back to a prior state before the accident. Now your team can focus on delivering great experiences for your customers and your employees.
We live in a world where so much is happening so fast and that we're all connected. I love being a part of that. I love waking up in the morning and saying I'm going to make things happen with technology. I'm going to make people smile with it. Both at work and in my personal life. My name is Steven Mascola and you're watching Simply Put.
Well, Steven, I'm smiling too, so keep it going man. And thanks for the insights. Next up on Simply Put, building Faster with the Stanley Black and Decker Solutions architect. Stick around or click ahead. I'll see you there.
