Feedback is a Gift with Robert Buckley, Chief People Officer at Enveda Biosciences

All right, we have a big treat for you this week. We had the most amazing conversation with this guest who is the Ted Lasso of hr. And you'll see why as we get into the conversation. I was really blown away by his merging of data and people. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it in the HR space. And we work with a lot of HR people who are phenomenal at their job. This is not a knock on HR folks at all. I just think his way of thinking about the data and the blend of the data and the people is fascinating and really cutting edge. So I just love this conversation.

Robert Buckley is the chief people architect at Invada Biosciences and he shared so many interesting thoughts and ideas with us and dashboards and ways of thinking about measuring people leadership that I have never even seen before thought of. He's really tied it all together and he was an absolutely fascinating and super.

A fun guest. Welcome to Building Biotechs by Recrudomics Consulting. We've helped over 90 biotech, life sciences and venture capital firms strategize and hire thousands of employees to scale companies that impact human health. We speak with those at the forefront of growing biotechs to learn their tactics on building these companies from the ground up. I'm Karina Klingman, founder and principal at Recredomics Consulting. Enjoy the show. Robert, we have been looking forward to this conversation so much. Thank you for joining us.

Yeah, super glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me and always fun to talk about what's going on in HR and how do we just make everybody better in the function. So super glad to be here.

Absolutely.

Awesome. Well, we're really excited, so let's just jump right in with our first question. The same question every time. What did you want to be when you were 7? What are you now and how did you get there?

Yeah, well, I'm a footballer, so most in America think, oh, that means American football. No, it's the European football, the South American football. So I played soccer my whole life. It's the only sport I played competitively growing up. So I played year round, played on travel teams, club, high school, all that. I played in college and then I've been coaching for 20 plus years. So of course when you're little, you're like, everybody's going probably. So I wanted to be played pro.

That's awesome. How did you go from that potential career path into what you're doing now? And can you tell us about what you're doing now?

I will I'll tell you a funny story, too. So I coach high school. I've coached both boys and girls, and I'm coaching women at the moment. I've been coaching women for about a decade now. And on our high school, I got us on all of our training jerseys and everything. Women's football and then the boys team. It still says boys soccer, but we have women's football. So super fun. Well, when I was in high school, you know, thinking, what do you want to do with your life? And I got introduced to this idea of industrial relations, you know, union management, which is obviously in the news late this year in America with all the United Auto Workers strike and the potential UPS strike. And I had chances to play ball in college on scholarship. And I knew I wasn't good enough to go pro, so I said, well, I'll give this other thing a chance. And so I grew up in really small little part of Southern Oregon off a dirt road, way out in the woods and the sticks. And I said, yeah, I'll go to New York, second best college in the nation, at least at that time. LeMoyne College for Industrial Relations. And I'll give it a go and see what happens. So I wrote the football coach and he says, yeah, sure, come. And so I showed up, let me play on the team, which is great, and got enrolled in, like, these human resource classes in addition to industrial relations. And I was like, I have no idea what that is, but I enjoyed it. I liked the classes a lot. And I had told myself, hey, I have to stay at least a year because I knew the first semester would be really hard being that far away from home. And so I said, okay. And then. So first semester, met this cute girl, second semester, still friends with her. And then sophomore year, I get back, I was like, hmm. And Here we are 30 years later, married. We just celebrated our 30th this past summer. So I like the classes, but the girl had something to do.

Really like the girl.

Yeah.

That's so funny.

Yeah.

I ended up staying out on the East Coast. Everyone asked me why I didn't go back to California, where the biotech is booming, and start my company there. And the answer that. That I give most people is that, well, my network was here, I went to school here, but the actual answer is I met my husband and, you know, we ended up. I just said, you know, Cambridge is also. Cambridge is also good.

Yup, exactly. Yeah. And you make choices. And I started out with General Electric. They have a long relationship with Lemoyne College. And I did really well in school, and so they talked to me and hired me. And then we just moved around a ton. And one of the places we ended up was out here in Salt Lake. And so as we started having kids, we did not want to put our kids through three elementary, two junior highs. And we really liked Salt Lake when we moved out here. We moved out here twice with ge and so we, we said, okay, we'll just settle out here and then, you know, figure out careers while we're here. And we've loved it. It's been great out here.

So how did you end up in biotech then?

So my number one strength on Strength Finders is learner, and I love learning. So back to football. I follow all kinds of statistical stuff on football. There's a really cool site called StatsBomb if anybody wants to look at it. And I'm always learning to do different things. So if you look at my career, I've been in probably like 12 different industries. And I love learning, right? You go someplace where you don't know everything, you have to figure it out, there's a decent chance you'll fail, like, but go, learn, be exciting. And I just think there's so much excitement all over the world, different countries, different people, different industries, that you can always learn and grow and get better. And you can also take stuff you have learned from other places. So I was at this last company, a SaaS startup out here, which was great, loved it. And I get this phone call about, hey, this company called Invada. And I kind of move, I don't know, every four to five years just because I like, you know, learning and challenging. And it was about that time. So I said, yeah, I'll take the phone call. I knew nothing about biotech. I never been in biotech. I knew some people worked in it. That was it. But it fit this profile of, like, about every five years would go do something totally different. And so I said, yeah, I'd love to take the call. So one thing led to another and we just kept talking. And eventually Vishwa, who's our founder and CEO, offered me the job. And I was like, let's go. That's it.

Wow.

So how many years ago Was that now?

18 months. So I've been here a little over, that's almost 20 months now, and just said, let's go figure it out. And what I love doing is building too. So, like, I love the startup space because you get to build. And I don't think there's sort of a good And a bad between big companies and small companies. It's more of like what do you like, what do you want to do? And there's pros and cons, there's trade offs. Right. The people who love the startups sometimes like bag on the big companies and vice versa. Right. I'm not one of those people. I just say it's different. What I love about the startup world is you get to build and you get to try and you get to experiment and you get to move really fast and iterate. We actually try to do Agile and scrum work inside HR@invita and because I just love that environment.

So I love that you're referencing the building aspect because your role is actually the chief people architect. That is a great title. That is a great name. Did you come up with that and can you tell us a little bit about what that sort of entails?

Yeah, I did come up with it and it's for exactly what you said. I build like there are some places they don't really want HR to build. That's true. And that could be big companies or small business. Like hey, we just kind of need somebody to kind of watch over stuff, make sure things don't happen, just kind of make sure things move along. I'm not good for that. I wouldn't get hired in that job and if I did I would get fired in that job and I should because I would not be a good fit. I am a builder and so I came up with that because I'm trying to say that's my brand. That's what you get with me is we're going to iterate, we're going to use math, we're going to use data, we're going to try stuff, we're going to fail, we're going to learn and you got to be able to build and scale. And so that's why I did it because I thought that actually represents a brand. So when people see that they're going to go, oh, he sounds a little weird, I'm not going to take him. Or they're going to go, oh my gosh, that's what we're looking for. We'll totally take him.

I love that it's a bit of marketing. It's like attract what you want and repel what you don't.

Yeah, that's right, that's right, absolutely.

And so can you tell us a little bit, I think this is so fascinating is the use of this sort of agile and Scrum framework networking. What would I call agile and Scrum.

Yeah, it's how you build it's development. So it comes along lot in the software world.

Yeah, okay. That's what it is. So how. Yeah, how are you using this Agile and Scrum sort of development framework in hr?

Yeah. I'll give you the example we're doing right now. And we're right in the middle of it, and we're not even at MVP yet, which stands for minimally viable product, but we're like that close to getting there. So one of the things I'm really passionate about is people leader development. And it ties to my kind of whole brand and my epistemological construct of how I think of things, which is people create all value. So that's my brand. And then a whole bunch of stuff come from that. And one of those things is people leader development. So if you're going to say that, then you're like, great, well what are you doing about it? Well, one of the things you got to do is training, which we do. And then another thing though is how are your people leaders doing? We've all sat in that meeting and we'll just take you, Allison. And so we're all sitting around and we go, hey, what do you think of Allison? And we go, I don't know. And then Karina, you go. And after like 10 minutes, we're all like, so what do we actually think of her? We've all been in that meeting, we know exactly what that meeting is. Then you don't know. And someone just goes, she's great. Okay, what if we could do better? What if we could actually use data to answer that question? And I am not a proponent that data answers every question. I think qualitative judgment, decision making, experience matter and data matters. So if you don't have data, you're just talking. But if you only have data and you'll make all your decisions based on that, you're the first liar in the room. Because none of us make all of our decisions based on data and there's tons of examples of that. So what we're building is a people leader dashboard. And we're saying, oh, how are they doing on the things that we know we measure? So we have survey questions, how you do on recognition, we know how you're doing on onboarding, how do you on recruiting? We actually measure all that stuff at Invada. So now imagine a dashboard where up comes my name and then boom, all the data just pops up on there. How am I doing on say six, seven different metrics? So now when we're sitting around the room and we're saying, well, how's Robert as a people leader? We actually can use data to talk about it. So we have this idea. There's a data analyst on our HR team. Her name is Veronica. She's fantastic. And so she and I just kicked this around and we said, okay, let's start. And so we just started scratching it out like you normally do. And then she's in tableau. She loves to use tableau. She's good at it. So she did the first iteration. We looked at it, didn't like it. We showed it to like two people and like, okay, fine. That's why you do it, right? Because the whole idea of Agile and Scrum, fast iterations, fast iterations just constantly make changes, you know, every day, every week. And so now we're probably on Rev 10 and we're really close to having an MVP. I can already see a hundred more changes to make, but that's how we do it. So over the last month, we've just keep making these small little changes, small little changes, and eventually we're going to come out with a product that now managers can use to say, how are their people leaders doing?

That is fascinating. So when you're building this, and I know that you're still like in very close to final iterations, but when you've looked at this from an HR perspective, what are the metrics that you think biotechs have typically overlooked when they're measuring people leadership or employee growth and performance?

I don't know if it's a biotech question. I would just say first, I think this whole idea of philosophy is what's missing, whether that's biotech or other places. And nowadays people will say, oh yeah, people leaders are really important. Everybody's read Project Oxygen from Google and everything else, and there's lots of other data and books out there too. What isn't out there is this idea to say, well, how do we measure it then? And somebody go do something about it. Like, I would love to see other people try this and come up with something totally different than what we did. Because we'll learn from each other that way, the way we're going to do it will end up working for us. But someone else may have a different idea. I was like, I would not have thought of that in 10 years. That's amazing. And so more companies trying to say, how do we measure? And then you say, okay, well, great, we'll get going on that. What are the things to measure? That's Kind of like what you're asking, too. Well, the way we do employee survey analysis is we build a structured equation model, and so we say, what's our dependent variable? And then all of the other questions are the independent variables. And so things like what score did they get on the employee survey about recognition? Like, how do they do with their employees on onboarding? Because we survey every single person we onboard around the world. We ask them to give us a score at 7 day and 30 day. So we put that on there. How are they doing on the recruiting metrics? We have all that data. We put that on there. And then a couple questions also on employee experience from the survey in addition. So we don't overwhelm. We don't need 50 things, but we put about seven things that kind of tie to that classic question.

I'm just really curious about the recruiting metrics. I think that this is something we struggle to get our clients to measure, and we try to give them feedback because we measure a lot of recruiting metrics, and we know that if we can tighten up recruiting processes, we're going to have a much more successful hiring process and happier candidates. So what are your recruiting metrics? What are you measuring internally, and how do those factor into that NPS score?

Yeah, this is a great question. So I don't know if there's a way to screen share, but I did bring up a couple of our tableau dashboards, which I'm happy to share because I know we do both audio and video. So if there's a way to do that, I'm happy to share.

Yeah, it looks like there's a share tray down at the bottom.

I'll bring up our candidate one. Perfect. You guys see that?

Yes, we see it. Okay.

Okay. So we have a process for hiring, and if you make it to what's called our team interview stage, so you have a couple, maybe like a phone screen, a manager review, and then we invite you to, you know, interview with three or four people. And I'm happy to share our interview process, but everybody who comes to that stage, we interview everywhere in the world. So you can see we've got 180 responses so far. We have a lot. This is a very high participation rate. And then we use the empress rubric. And we love a high bar at invada. So NPS is itself a high bar. And then 70 at NPS is a really high bar. So our total NPS for all of this year is a 75. And so we ask people, you know, rate your experience Then we ask them about our interview schedule. Timely because we don't ghost anybody. And then would you recommend the classic question? You can see it. We plot it by quarters. I've got all the sub data that highlights and I can also go look at all the comments as well. And so this is our NPS score on these three things for candidates. So I'll stop sharing and look at you guys.

That's really beautiful. I really like that dashboard and I'm really impressed with your response rate. If you have any secrets to getting more candidates to respond, I would love to know what they are. We have to be a little careful because we work across multiple different clients and we work internally with those clients. And so but then we send our surveys through our firm. So I think there might be a bit of a disconnect there with candidates going, yeah, but we interviewed with X company like, you know, so there is a little bit. We would love to have numbers like that. Those are wonderful.

Yeah. And so we put those on our people leader dashboard. So that's an example. But then we use Lever as our applicant tracking system. And Lever has really good data. The reason I'm a fan of Lever, it's really good at data and it's not as flexible as some other systems. But I actually like that trade off because I'm so data oriented and I'd much rather have a unified data platform like Lever than the flexibility. And so they have a whole dashboard built into the app. But then you can also buy this tableau add on, which I did. And so we can actually rate. We can actually know what our processing time is. So we do pre processing, processing and post processing. So hiring is like manufacturing is how we think about it. And so I can know that by department, by hiring manager, pretty much by anything. Then I can also know if you're a good interviewer or not. Like if you've ever thought about, have you ever thought about like, oh, is so and so a good interviewer? How do you actually know the answer to that question?

Oh, we think about that all literally on a daily basis.

We built it, we have it, we.

Measure it in a couple of external ways. We do measure it through the candidate experience, but we measure it also through candidate drop off at various interview points and things like that. So we can advise our clients, but I want to know exactly what you're doing.

Yeah, so at the last job I had a data analyst on the team as well. And so we were been wrestling with this question. So wrestled. We wrestled, we thought about it, we Thought about it, go get some tea and we sit at a whiteboard and draw stuff and we came up with things and then we didn't like it and then we stopped and then we came back a few days like the whole again development cycle like you expect. One day we got it. So we built a scatter plot, an XY graph. So don't think of this in small data sets. Think of this in at least 30 interviews that a manager has done. You can obviously do this with one, but it doesn't make sense. So think 30 and above. So the Y axis is the average score that a manager has given to candidates that were not hired. The X axis is the average score that a manager gave for someone who was hired. All right, so it's a scatter plot. So now imagine it in a 4 grid though, and the closer you are giving higher scores to people who did get hired, the better interviewer you are. And there is a couple of unique cases where it doesn't exactly fit, but for 90 plus percent of all interviewers, this graph tells you the answer. That's how we did it. And so I have it all. And I can tell people, here's the risk, though. You want to hear something funny? Here's something you can't undo. All right, I tell managers this. I say, look, I will tell you your score if you understand the trade off. If I tell you your score, you can't unknow it. And so if you know your score and you don't like your score, you will start scoring candidates not based exactly on what you think, but based on where you want to get on that graph. How do you unknow something you can't? And so I said, do you want to know? So let me ask you, do you think managers want to know or don't want to know when I give them that choice before I tell them?

I would think managers would want to know, but I'm not sure it's in the best interest that they do know.

About two thirds of managers say, don't tell me. Interesting, because they don't want to be biased.

I'm curious when you have that conversation and if a manager says, don't tell me, have you ever been able to then do a comparison of before the conversation, after the conversation, to see if maybe they took it upon themselves to change up their interview style, to do some research or some training on how to be a good interviewer? Have you seen a turnaround from people knowing or not knowing, as the case may be, where they fall?

Yeah, I Have not done any specific study on that to say, hey, here are five people and how did they do over time? I haven't looked. I will tell you this though. Everybody is so curious about doing a good job. Once they know we can measure them, they start saying, oh, what about this? Hey, can you give me feedback on that? Was that write up good? Did I do well? Like just the idea that we're measuring it is itself a spur to be a good interviewer.

That's so true about measuring things. We definitely know when it's being measured. We can improve it. And you can't unknow that. You're so right. I think that's fascinating and I wonder too if eventually you can iterate this to a point where there is a feedback loop that doesn't maybe bias them. I have no idea how to make this work. But you're the big ideas person here. A feedback loop that doesn't bias them but allows them to get better and better and better at interviewing. That would be so fascinating to track.

So here's how we did it. So every few months get the interviewers together in a room and you got to set the climate that the feedback is here for us to learn the what we want in our calibration curve is we want a tall, narrow curve. Okay? We don't want huge variation. So when we say why should someone be a good software engineer and they're doing the technical interview or the work sample, my definition can't be different than yours. If it is like we're just measuring different things, we're having an odd conversation at the debrief. So what we do instead is we want that tall, narrow, and the way to do that is calibration. So we get them into a room, I'll get on the screen. I don't let them see the name of who the interviewer was or the candidate. But I just put the write up on the screen and I say, give feedback. And so we all then learn. We say, oh well, this could have been done better. I don't understand. Oh, that was really good. Oh, I see how you link those things. And so we're all learning and getting better together as we read the write ups, but we keep it anonymous so people don't feel threatened.

So how many employees are at Invada?

We have a little over 200 now.

How have you found that people are responding to, you know, having more of these things tracked? You know, we're talking about how once people know things are tracked, it makes them want to do better. But some people are really threatened by that. So do you find most people to be receptive when you're rolling these things out? I'm sure a lot of it has to do with the messaging, but I am intrigued on how the culture maybe was beforehand if it was data driven like this, or if this is a new thing you're rolling out. And if you're seeing a cultural impact.

I do think one of the benefits you get of biotech, everything is so data driven because of the science, and you got to have patient safety and you got to have make sure the toxicology reports are good. I mean, it's just so data driven that I would say I've had less of an issue here than I have at prior companies where the culture wasn't as much data driven. So I'm having to drive in those other companies, not just all these tools and these ideas and how we build and use data, but the whole idea of data is valuable because if you don't believe that, then it makes it a lot harder and you can get there, which I have done with places. But here it was easier because everybody's like, oh, my gosh. And so they're much more readily accepted. I just had a manager the other day a couple weeks ago was like, I don't know about this recruiting and da, da, da, da, da, da. I'm like, oh, well, here, I'll just get on the dashboard. Let's do it together for you. And so I just got on screen, shared, you know, oh, let's look at this, this, this, this, because I have all the dashboards already built. And he goes, oh, so we're the ones who are holding things up. I said, yes. He goes, okay.

Interesting. That makes a lot of sense if you're working with a population of people who recognize and understand the value of data and that it's not necessarily a punitive thing to have data used to help you grow. But yeah, I can imagine in other companies this would be a major struggle.

It is, and people feel threatened by it. But there's two weird things that happen, actually. On the one hand, it's. I'm threatened by it. And so you got to do a lot of culture and how do we learn and grow together? And then on the other hand, you have the people who say they love data until the data doesn't agree with what they already think is true, and then they don't like the data.

Hey there. Just a quick break. I wanted to let you know that if you're listening to this podcast, because you are exploring careers in biotech, which, it turns out quite a few of our listeners actually are. You might be interested in the Biotech Career Coach podcast. It is brought to you by our sister company, the Collaboratory Career Hub, which is our career development community. If you would like actionable tips on job seeking and career development, that is the place for you. It is a companion podcast to our Career Coach column that we write monthly in Biospace, but we go a little more in depth and sometimes we have special workshops and all of that good stuff. So if that sounds interesting, click the link in the show notes or search for the Biotech Career Coach on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts back to the show. Even within a biotech you have folks though who are non scientists and sometimes those folks are leading pretty big functions as well. Have you had any experience where the data is threatening to some departments or you've had to really coach through without naming names, of course. But have you found that you've had to coach some places more than others?

Yeah, there's always people who are more just naturally data oriented than not. And that's okay. I always use it as an opportunity and a challenge to teach and coach and learn. And we have some philosophical tenets we believe in our football team, and one of those is that feedback is a gift and the proper answer when you get feedback is thank you. That has to be married, though, with a culture where that person, my teammate, she has my best interests at heart, the coach has my best interest at heart. So I do the exact same thing at work. How do we build a culture where learning and feedback is a gift and we say thank you and we know it comes from a place of positivity and wanting all of us to get better. So once you build that, then the people who are threatened, they're a little more open. A lot of times I've also found that the people are threatened on the data because they don't understand it and they feel like it's kind of scary and like the math. And we see this in hr, actually, oh my gosh. I got into HR because I don't like math. And I always tell people, I'm like, stop saying that even if it's true. Instead, go learn. How do you be better? Nobody's expecting the HR team to be a rival to the data science team. Nobody is. And we don't need to be. But we do need to be able to do some math and data and talk in that language. And so if you can build that culture now you can have those good discussions.

Well, that's a really fascinating thing that you just brought up because in my head I was trying to think about how to go back to, you know, your early days and experience. It's really interesting that you've applied all of this data and all of this math to hr. Are you surprised at kind of where your career has gone in this department? Or were you always like, I'm doing HR but with a real data focus? Because it's very unique and it's really interesting that you have sort of like your brain is like very equal opportunity. You know, you're not just like left or right side. It seems like it really ties together for you, which I think is really fascinating. Did you know when you were in school that this was sort of how you wanted to take your career or has this just been a happy surprise?

I never thought about it in school, but I always did really well in statistics, economics, econometrics. My MBA is actually in finance. So I've always kind of just had this bent for it. And I really enjoy. I don't think the world is this way, but just for the sake of the moment, the people and the math, like, I've enjoyed both of them. I think the world is much more like this. But I think, like, I didn't imagine it in school, but I think as I just got into it, I was just like, well, why aren't we doing this? Or like, why don't we add the data to this? Or how do we think about the employee survey that way? And then got in with like, the Six Sigma crowd. So when GE launched Six Sigma, I was one of the first people to volunteer to do that and like, maybe one of the very first HR people to do it. Because I'm like, I want in. Like, teach me. This will be great. And so I just had this natural affinity. And then I've applied the Six Sigma thinking to HR as well. So, like, hiring is like manufacturing. We actually take the Six Sigma techniques and build the hiring process that matches the social science research data. We take that and we take the Six Sigma learning and we mash it together. I think maybe it's always been in there. I didn't know it though, but I do it with football. I do tons of data on football too.

That is very, very, very cool.

It really is. I don't know if you realize how unique this is. What you are doing is really not normal in hr and it's not in a bad way. But, like, this is not. We have never Had a conversation like this. And it's funny because, you know, as a scientist going into ta, like, I really enjoy digging into the data and thinking about the numbers and things like that. And when we bring it to clients and sometimes it highlights problem, what's great is we know how to solve the problem now, right? And so they're saying, you know, oh, it's so hard to hire good candidates. And it's like, well, we've analyzed the pipeline and here's your leak. We know exactly where the leak is happening. So that's great because we know how to attack it now. But that shift is just not normal. Like, it's hard, it's hard to get that across.

So I was going to say that from an operations perspective. It's interesting to me because I am not a math or finance person. It's actually one of those things that I think my fear of not being a math and science person held me back, especially my early career, because I was really intimidated. But the further I get into my career, I am so appreciative of the fact that data helps me make such good decisions. So I've become much more comfortable thinking in data sets and really relying on the math and the finance and looking at that and being able to make really sound decisions. I agree with you. There are a lot of other factors I need to take into account. But having that ability to say like, okay, this isn't my favorite thing, but I understand it enough and how it can apply to my job. And like Karina said, it's really unique to see it in an HR capacity. So I think it's fascinating what you're doing.

I'll tell you a fun story that illustrates this point on yes, use data, but there are other things. So if you ever heard of a pew matrix, Pugh, you can look it up. And it's a way to organize and make decision trade offs. It's pretty simple. And so my wife and I used it when we moved all the time. And buying a house is like, what house should you buy? You ever thought about that? You're like, I don't know. Well, I kind of like this one. Like, you're so tired at the end of the day, you're trying to talk over dinner, you're in bed, you're like, oh my gosh, what should we do, honey? Like, you don't know. And it's just like, it's overwhelming. So instead, build it into a pew matrix that says here's your CTQ is your criteria. And then here's the various houses, and then you can score it. And there's different ways to score. And then you know, like, what your data is telling you. This doesn't mean you have to do what the number one house is. Okay, so take a guess. Of all the houses that we've done, how many times we've done this? My wife and I think we did it like six times before we settled here in Salt Lake. How many times did we buy the number one house on the list? Just guess.

Zero.

Zero. And did we do the wrong thing? No, but what we also. Zero bought one on the bottom. Right. We knew we could eliminate that. And so we got down to two usually. And my wife walked in and goes, that's the one we're buying. Great, let's do it, honey. And so it's just a super way to combine the qualitative. Like my wife just said, I just feel better in this home. It was number one or two on the list. I was like, great, let's do what you want, honey. And so that's a good story. And you can do the same thing at work. Use these tools to help you organize the data. Kind of like the people leader dashboard we were talking about. Not everything about a people leader is on that dashboard. There are going to be some things you cannot measure. That's fine, but at least start with the data and then have these things that aren't on the spreadsheet to say, is she doing amazing or not? And same thing with houses.

Really interesting. How is AI impacting how you're thinking about things or what you're building? I assume you must be using AI for some of this.

We're just starting to get into it. So one of the things I think could be really helpful with AI, and there are some companies that are already doing this and it's on. My goal is probably get through the holidays. I'll start on it next year is I want to go find two, maybe three companies that are using AI to source candidates. I'm not sold yet on AI making decisions on people. I'm open to learning more, but I'm pretty hesitant. I think we can do a lot in the interview process to reduce bias and still make it efficient. And that's a whole great discussion. But what we could do with AI is instead of looking at LinkedIn, everybody's on LinkedIn. What if we could look at 50 sites, a hundred sites, and take a whole bunch of different parameters for a job? We have, let's just call it a biologist, since we have a bunch of Those, and maybe they aren't just on LinkedIn. We look at LinkedIn, we look at some publications, we look at, I don't know, social media, we look at, I don't know, but just scrape and look and say, could we identify people there to expand the pool of people? By the way, that also expands it globally. And so not just can I hire somebody in Colorado at our lab, maybe across the United States, maybe across North America, maybe across the Western hemisphere, maybe across the globe. So I haven't found anyone yet, but that's on my list for sure. Another use for AI that I think can be helpful is documentation. So if you think about stuff like offer letters and handbooks and so I've been playing around with that and we've got a couple sites that'll do all of that and keep it all updated. Like one of the real values here is ease, but also cost because having lawyers and other people, HR people, whoever, like constantly update things for every state is just a lot of work and a lot of money. Well, if AI can do it, then just keeping you compliant, that's worth a lot.

I'm going to have to ask you which tool, if you're comfortable sharing, you aren't using to do that, because I am very fascinated and interested in that.

Yeah. So Six Fifty is a group that we use and they are doing that and then for our handbooks and they can also do it for other documentation and keep it all up to date.

That is very valuable. Yeah, we're excited about some of those applications. You know, in terms of sourcing, one consideration is we now have New York leading the charge for legislating around the use for using AI in talent acquisition. So one thing to be aware of for all of our listeners is just that we personally are following the New York standard because whatever legislation is out there, other states are going to follow suit. And I think with this new legislation, basically your tool needs to be bias tested. So with some of these tools, one appeal of using this tool that we have adopted is that it does the bias testing. So we don't have to be responsible for that because there's going to be more and more of that. And I think it's really important that it is legislated, but we need to be able to follow suit.

Yeah, and this is the nature of innovation. There's ups and downs and eventually the curve is this way. But in between, innovation is a lot like learning. Learning's more like that's the graph you get there and we all get focused on the little Dots as it goes along. But if we were to just step back 20, 30 years, it looks a lot better. And so there's been these tools. There's a company out here in Salt Lake, and we know about what happened with Amazon, and I look at it as like, hey, they're trying. They're innovating. It was a problem. Let's go fix the problem, and that's fine. We obviously don't want bias in the hiring process, so let's get it out and let's do everything we can and let's learn and keep improving. But what I don't do is I don't look back, say, oh, those terrible people over there, they tried something. We'll go fix it now. Thank goodness they invented it, and now let's go make it work.

Yeah, we're definitely in that phase, aren't we?

One of the things I'm really proud of is how we're doing with employee experience. So the way I organize work, the HR work, is candidate experience. And we have quantitative and qualitative onboarding experience. Again, I can show another dashboard we build because we survey everybody at seven and 30 days, and then employee experience. And employee experience is a variety of things. And one of those is, you know, our culture and how are we feeling about it and how are we doing and what is it like to be here? So as an example, we wrote an employee promise. See how customers or companies write a customer promise. And so we wrote an employee promise. And we post on every job post on our wiki. We tell people about it and employees so that you can actually know. Well, yeah, it seems pretty good. A lot of times it's just like, how do I feel going into work? And then there's specific things like people leaders. At least 70% of how we see the job or see the. How we feel about our job is how we see our people leader. And so we train our people leaders. We measure them like we talked about. I have a whole curriculum. We build a leadership model, and so we want to make it really good. And we just got our Employee Pulse survey results back. And, you know, we improved a whole lot and did well. And, you know, overall, employees are feeling pretty good. And that's great. But here's the thing. Every single process, if not attended to, will tend toward entropy. And so that's how I think about it at Inveda. And my mantra as I talk and go to conferences and interact with my colleagues is like, you got to care about this stuff. You got to be super intentional. And so we Have a document about organizing for scale. We have a document called Culture Coherence. How are we going to solve the big problems in culture, like disagreement, like trust? And so we actually wrote a document and said it, and then we're trying to live it. And so far, employees are giving us pretty good marks. And I'm really proud of that because I honestly believe one of my passions is that you can have a really great place to work, make good money. Not that we are. We're a startup, but eventually you get the idea. You can be a successful company, have great customers who love you, make good money, help the communities you're in, be a great people leader, have employees love it. I really do believe you can do all of those things. And it's a choice. Just like on my football team, we have great character, we win a lot of trophies, we play beautiful football, and we treat opponent and the referees beautifully. We do not, do not yell at the referees. We do not scream at them. My players, not even allowed to talk to them. Every year, refs, when they come to our matches, are like, we love reffing you guys, because I don't even allow my parents to yell at the refs either. You are not allowed to yell as a parent at the referee. And, like, you can do all those things, but it takes a lot of work and you have to be super intentional. You got to write it down, you got to know what it means, and then you got to live it. And we're doing it at Invader for the most part, so I'm proud of that.

Are you a fan of Ted Lasso?

So I love Ted Lasso. What? I know. But here's the thing. There's a lot of swear words in TED Lasso. And so I try to watch episodes. There's just a lot of language. So I have not watched the episodes. But those trailers, like the NBC one where he does a press conference, and then that one, the darts. Like, I have watched the one with the darts. I love them. So that's really good. And here's. You want to know something else? So he's from Kansas City, and my friend who lives in Kansas City, she, like, knows him. Isn't that amazing?

Well, your philosophy made me think of Ted. LAUGHTER this whole thing is, like, you have to respect the other team and the referees and, like, ultimately, it's a game. You should enjoy it. I mean, I am fully with you on, like, parents yelling at refs, especially, like, if you. I mean, I know you coach a higher level, but, like, especially at kids Games and stuff, it's like, it's ridiculous.

There's no need for it. There's no need for it.

Don't stress the kids out because you're losing your mind. That's crazy.

Like, one more thing, just to give you an example. So, like, as coaches, so there's a guy I coach with a name, Matt. He's just amazing guy. And we don't even talk during the match ourselves. We say nothing. Not to the players, not to the refs, nobody. And think about it this way. What's the point of training if I'm just going to spend the whole match yelling at the players? And then if you think even longer term, if the goal of our football team is to build women of good character, so when I coach the boys, it's build men of good character. When it goes to girls, women of good character. If I don't let them play and learn and then during training time teach them, how are they ever going to learn. And if you want good character, then, like, you have to, like, train it and then let them, like, develop it. If I never let them develop because I'm yelling them at the whole time, then that's inconsistent. So same thing at work. We're going to train our people leaders. I give a lot of freedom to people leaders. I train them how to think, how to process, how to ask good questions. Most of the time when I get a phone call or Zoom or Slack or whatever it is, I actually don't answer the question that's asked to me when instead I ask them questions because I believe they already know the answer. They just need someone who's really good at asking good questions to kind of pull it out of them so that by the end they go, yeah, I think that's what I'm going to do. I'm like, awesome, Great. Every now and then I got to answer a question, but I try not to. So I try to merge how I think about work and football at the same time.

Yeah, I think that's so interesting too, because when you talk about if you were to yell at people during training, when they're learning, if you make people feel like anytime they make a mistake, they're going to get in trouble, they're never going to do anything, right? They're never going to try anything like we try in our company to say, like, well, at least just try it. Like, I mean, you probably won't break anything irrevocably and, like, it'll be okay. At some point we hire smart people who are really Good at their job. And so you don't really need the permission to do it. If it seems like a really logical step for you, do it. And I think you have to make people comfortable with taking some inherent risk so that they can grow.

If it fails, we've all messed up. If it fails, what do you do? You just fix it. Okay. Like, no big deal. You know, trust people and you learn. Yeah, you learn.

Yeah. Sometimes you learn more from the failures than you would the successes.

Definitely.

And that is. Is a really important thing as a leader to keep in mind is that sometimes letting your employees fail, not horrifically, if you can prevent a horrific failure, you know, that's not good for anyone's self esteem. But letting them make the small failures and coaching them through that is usually the kinder thing to do.

I think that's so true. Like I tell the people, leaders, just go do stuff. Try it. Like, don't wait for hr. Like I say to people, they're like, oh, Robert, what does the handbook say about this? Like, I have no idea. I don't read the handbook. What do you think we ought to do? Like, treat people. Amazing. A really good example is parental leave at work. I'm sure somewhere in the handbook. I wrote the handbook like a year ago. I have no idea what it says, but I wrote it and there's something in there. But I never start with that. When somebody says, oh, someone's gonna have a baby, then I'm like, well, what should we do? How do we make it an amazing experience? Like, I'm not worried about what the policy says. I want to make sure the mom or dad feels amazing that they can go take leave, they can be with their baby, they can come back part time, full time, whatever. They, we can work it out. And then when people come back, they're like, oh my gosh, that was so great. Thank you. I'm like, thank your manager. That's awesome. Your manager did a great job. Just make it amazing. Let them make decisions. They'll do great.

Are you guys a fully on site company or hybrid or remote? How do you, how do you manage that?

We're hybrid. I mean, like, I'm here in my basement, obviously here in Salt Lake City. We have the lab in Boulder, Colorado. And obviously if you're a scientist, like we're talking about, Karina, you got to go. We don't have your stuff at home. You gotta go to the lab. But even people, then they could work from home if they had a day where, I don't know, sick Kid just. They needed concentration, time, whatever it is, just work from home and then go to the lab when you need to go to the lab. And if your job's at the lab, you can only do your work at the lab, then go to the lab. And the rest of us, we just work from home. Then we have a big site in India, too, so about half the company in the US Half the company in India, and we have a lab over there. Most people go to the lab every day in India. And then we have a handful of people in Europe and the Philippines.

Yeah, very multinational. I love it. So this is an interesting question, and you don't have to answer it because you said you like to move. You like new challenges every few years. But where do you see yourself in the next phase of your career? What. What does that hold for you? Or not.

Yeah, I mean, I'd love if we go ipo. I mean, I've never done that in my career, so that's definitely a challenge that I'm looking forward to. Hopefully we do like we think we're gonna, but we don't know. And so I'm just gonna be grateful for whatever comes along. So I'm gonna help Vishwa and the whole team build this as far as I can build it. And I'd love to stay and have us go ipo so I can say, oh, I did that. Right. And I don't know, if we get sold, we come up with two or three amazing drugs and some big company buys us and I get fired because they don't need me anymore. Great. I'll just go on to the next thing and that'll be okay too. So I'm just going to do an amazing and hopefully we get there and have a great attitude no matter what happens.

I can't wait to hear your answer to my favorite question that we ask, which is, what is your favorite book? What book do you think everyone should read?

Oh, geez. Okay, so I have a down here, I have a little bookshelf and it's got what I call the Canon on it. So it's got like five or six books I think are really, really good books. So one that's super interesting. So I'll just. I mean, I can say more, but one is Loon Shots. So that's a biotech book. A guy, I forget what drug he invented, but it's really interesting. And I'll tell you, the key point that I learned in that book was he talks about a company, especially a smaller company, growing into a bigger company. You need to think about if you imagine a bathtub and you fill it with ice and then the ice and you just leave it at room temperature, what does the ice do? It starts melting. So you get to this point where there's water but there's also ice and you want to live right in this intersection between the two and what you have. What he calls our franchises is the term he uses, which have these more mature businesses that are a little more stable, that are profitable, that feed the innovation side of the business, which is more chaotic. And what happens is if you can figure out how to live in the middle, you're doing really well. Most can't. And because what happens is I'm on the side of the business that makes all the money and those people over there just spending all innovation willy nilly, they don't know what they're doing. And all the innovation people like, oh those super boring corporate people over there, they don't do anything, you know. And so if you can build your culture so that you can live in the middle, that's a real winner. And so that was a big thing I learned in that book.

That's fascinating.

I have to ask, can you tell us the other four? I'm just so curious. I love books, I love sharing about people like to read if they're right there. I mean I'm just very curious. What else?

No, no, it's totally good. So Loonshots is on there. Bezos book on communication. Bezos Blueprint is what it's called. So that's on there. I love Work Rules by Laszlo Bach. Love that book. The Advantage is another one which talks about the importance of the first team. So if you are familiar with that. And then Extreme Ownership written by a couple of Navy SEALs is on there that I think is helps really think about. Yeah. How do you take ownership? And it's so good for corporate culture. Like we think about SEAL culture, but it's a ton of crossover to, you know, what we do. Because it's so easy to say, well finance didn't do it their job. I guess I'll just stand here, nothing to do. Not my fault they didn't do what they're supposed to do. Like and you just can't think like that. So those are a bunch great books.

Yeah.

Where can our audience find and connect with you? And we'll be happy to link anything in our show notes so they can can click right through.

Yeah, just LinkedIn. I don't have any other social media. I've never had a social media account in my life, and I don't count LinkedIn as social media because I use it for business. So I have no other accounts. I don't want any other accounts. It's just too much. Yeah. So just go to my LinkedIn profile page and that's the best spot to get to me.

Well, amazing. This was so fun. I loved digging into the data of hr.

This was just. Just.

You were speaking my language.

I loved it.

Well, thank you for inviting me on. This has been great.

Thank you so much for joining us. This was an absolute blast. Loved it. Thank you.

Building biotechs is brought to you by Recruitomics Consulting. You can find building biotechs in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or anywhere else podcasts are found. Make sure to click subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes, and join our mailing list for a weekly dose of biotechnology news and a podcast overview. And if you need to install a recruitment engine that saves time and money for your growing company, reach out for a free strategy session. I'm always happy to share my expertise and show you techniques to simplify your hiring process and maximize returns. On behalf of the team here at Recruitomics Consulting, thanks for listening.