Episode 231: How People Analytics Empowers the Chief People Officer to Drive Value (with Dean Carter)
HR is at a tipping point: lead with data or risk being led by others.
As organisations face growing complexity - from AI disruption to shifting stakeholder expectations - the role of HR is changing fast. Today’s Chief People Officers are expected to do more than care for culture - they’re expected to influence strategy, shape business outcomes, and back it all up with data.
In this episode of The Digital HR Leaders Podcast, host David Green is joined by Dean Carter, former Chief People Officer at Patagonia, Sears, Fossil, and Guild, and now Chief Experience Officer at Modern Executive Solutions.
Dean has spent his career pushing HR beyond tradition, embedding people analytics at the core of strategy
Tune in, as they explore:
The story behind Dean’s analytics awakening, and how it reshaped his approach to HR.
Why so many HR teams get stuck in “dashboard delivery”, and how to move toward insight and impact.
How renaming his team to “Insights and Outcomes” changed executive expectations.
The measurable business and human value of Patagonia’s four-day workweek.
Why HR must reclaim workforce planning, and treat it as a strategic lever, not a finance function.
Today’s Heads of People Analytics skillsets need to step into CPO roles.
What separates data-driven HR teams that lead from those that react.
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Worklytics helps leaders understand how work actually happens with data-driven insights into collaboration, productivity, and AI adoption.
By analysing real work patterns - from meetings to tool usage - they empower teams to work smarter, not harder.
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[0:00:00] David Green: There's a shift happening in HR, one that's been building for a while. I guess you could even say it's long overdue. The more Chief People Officers I speak to, the more I see how the expectations of today's HR leaders have changed. It's no longer just about leading with empathy or managing culture. Yes, these are still very important. But today, being a successful HR leader is about understanding the business through data, influencing decisions with insight, and shaping experiences that drive the organisation's bottom line. And one person who is witnessing this at firsthand, supporting some of the world's most prominent organisations in hiring modern impact-driven HR leaders, is Dean Carter, Founder and Chief Experience Officer at Modern Executive Solutions.
Dean was one of the first HR leaders to embed people analytics at the core of the people strategy, during 25 years as a Chief People Officer at companies including Fossil, Sears, Patagonia and Guild. And now, he brings that same forward-thinking mindset to his work helping organisations appoint next-generation Chief People Officers and Heads of People Analytics. So, today, I'm going to take the opportunity to gather Dean's perspective on how the role of the HR leader has evolved, but most importantly why so many organisations still find themselves stuck at the dashboard stage when it comes to people analytics. We'll look at what separates companies that are using data to drive real outcomes from those that aren't quite there yet, and why the relationship between the Chief People Officer and the Head of People Analytics is so critical. So, let's start by hearing more about Dean's journey and what first led him to see people analytics as a central pillar of great HR leadership.
For our listeners, please could you start by sharing the journey that got you to where you are today, because I know you've had over 20 years as a Chief People Officer?
[0:02:07] Dean Carter: This all started my second Head of HR role. So, I was Head of HR for ten years at Fossil. And then, we didn't lean too much into -- if we got a dashboard, we were lucky. Then, I became the head of HR at Sears. And I remember the moment it happened because I was actually a Head of Talent there. And then, I got the role and I went up to Connecticut to visit with Eddie Lampert who was running the company, and he sits there in front of me, he says, "Okay, Dean, you're now the Head of HR", which was after going from a 10,000-person company to 270,000-person Head of HR, $42 billion, 6,000 people in HR, it was a massive change. And he slides a book over to me, he goes, "Read this", and it's called People Analytics. I was like, "Okay". And he said, "This is how I speak and this is what I want you to do, and just lean into this". And I was like, "All right, here we go. So, that makes a lot of sense.
So, there were really some challenges about working for a large company like Sears and in the challenging situation it was in. And it wasn't just Sears, it was Sears and Kmart, two struggling companies and brands. But the one thing that was -- we were trying to figure out like, what is the advantage here? And there are two things that had a big advantage. One is volume and the other is volatility. So, the great thing about what you want with data sets is a lot of volume and a lot of volatility. And so, those two things, once I leaned into it, we discovered that we actually had an advantage over a lot of companies because of the significant amount of data that we could get and volatility.
So, my first job was to hire a Head of People Analytics. I hired this guy who's like, "I don't even know what the name of that is", and you may recognise him, his name is Ian O'Keefe. And he's like, "I don't know, I've never done that before". "Well, welcome to the world. Me neither, but I think it's really important". And I connected with Prasad Setty and Google and like, "What are you doing? You're doing some cool stuff". And we leaned into it heavy, because that was the way, it was the language of the company, it was the language of Eddie. And a lot of people struggle at Sears, but we didn't struggle. We got ahead of the curve and really leaned heavy in tech and talked about some cool stuff that we did with data there. And from then on, I was a huge fan.
It was during that time that I connected to Deborah Weiss, who was at Northwestern University, and she said, "We're doing this cool thing". And I said, "I'm around Northwestern University, the Workforce Science Project, around data and people and humans". And so, that's cool, because I'm super-frustrated as I go into these conferences and every time I go to a conference, I'm talking about what we're doing with Sears at people analytics. I'm like, "You got any questions?" They're like, "Yes. How do you start a people analytics department?" I'm like, "Not the question I was looking for". So, I just thought, "I'm going to bring ten of them together, like ten of the top Heads of People Analytics, because I need food too. I was feeling like I was just not getting enough stuff. So, we brought them to Northwestern University and that was the beginning of the TALREOS event.
[0:05:37] David Green: You had quite a hotbed of talent there, that's for sure. And obviously, you subsequently went on to Patagonia, where I think your role was bigger than the head of HR, but you were there until 2022, and then at Guild for a couple of years. And now, you're at Modern, and we'll talk about that in a minute. But firstly, in one of our previous discussions, Dean, what really resonated me, you literally distilled people analytics as being about insights and outcomes. Could you share a little bit more with our listeners your thinking around this?
[0:06:12] Dean Carter: Yeah, I think words matter, by the way, in shaping the roles that people do. And people analytics does imply, like, "I'm going to do some analysis of what's going on with the human beings and behaviour". What I did discover though is, I kept getting from a lot of my people analytics leaders, reams of information and data or 16 slides of, like, charts and graphs. And I finally said, "What I need from you is a single sentence. I need all that stuff in the background, but I'm not going to get the leadership team to read all this stuff. I want a single insight and how that insight leads to certain outcomes". And then, I changed the name of the team to the Head of Insights and Outcomes, just so they're real clear about, "You're not just doing analysis, you're doing analysis that drives a specific insight that's surprising or leads to a very specific outcome".
So, we actually got a little bit more intelligence with this. We would ask the energy levels, but we asked three other questions, like a contemporary question around, like a coaching event that had happened, performance conversations, or even a contemporary event in the world, like a crisis that was happening. And then, we ask a fun question like, "What's your favourite song on Spotify?" By the way, they love that. So, you had this. And then, maybe a question that's consistent that we asked over and over again, so a regenerative question. So, we did those over and over, and what we found was right after we implemented this coaching session, which we spent a lot of money and time on it, that if people positively answered the question, "I recently had a conversation with my manager that asks really good provocative questions about my career", if they answered that positively, massive amount of energy levels went up. The line was so straight that it was like the dots that correlated to it were so strong. So, the insight was like, if you have a conversation with your person that asks provocative questions about their career, I can guarantee you the energy level and they will be more excited tomorrow to come to work than they were the day before. And it's sustainable too.
So, anyhow, I was just able say that. I didn't have to go show my graph or chart, just, "Do this and you'll get this". And over and over, I kept saying, and they would give me charts and graphs still, like insights and outcomes, and finally we got there.
[0:09:01] David Green: It's really interesting, isn't it, because I think a lot of analytics professionals, they love data, they love visualisations, they love charts; and same with HR professionals sometimes. And it's easy to, as you said, create a 16-slide, or maybe even more, deck, but you've got to tell the story at the end of the day. And as you said, when you're with a group of executive leaders, you probably don't get that long. You've probably got a few seconds to get their attention. And as you said, this is the insight, "If we do this, we'll get this", it triggers an interest. I mean, one of my favourite stories about people analytics is, Mark Berry was a CHRO at the time, I think. I think the company was CGB. It's in the book, The Power of People, this case study. He went into his executive group and he said, "We're the best company in our industry at training our people", paused, "for our competitors". And he then said, "People come here for training and then they're leaving and they're going to our competitors". And so, he captured their attention and obviously, everyone then wanted to know why was it happening and what can we do about it. No charts at that point.
So, yeah, I mean, I think it's a really good lesson for people listening to this. Distil it down to a sentence or two.
[0:10:29] Dean Carter: That was it. And even, what I love about data and analytics is when you have a problem to solve, there's some level of curiosity. We were doing a lot of retention grants to people at Sears, just because there would be challenging moments and they were working on important problems. So, we just throwing money with these retention grants. So, I was like, "What's the sweet spot? A gazillion dollars or $10, or what is the answer to that?" So, I put my cheapest app and Head of Analytics on this, I'm like, "What is the right thing?" And they came back with a very specific range. Anything less than that, they're going to leave; anything more than that is a massive waste of money. So, anyhow, this saved us tons of money because we were throwing too much away, and then we were also losing people by giving too little.
So, really, by using analytics and understanding who is leaving, who is coming, who is staying after these retention grants, we've saved a ton of money, and are much more crisp with the money that we're spending. It's just a great example of like, here's a problem, let's look at it and then how to solve for it.
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I mean, obviously, you've seen the Head of People Analytics role evolve as well. Certainly, in the work we do at Insight222, we see that the Head of People Analytics is increasingly responsible for people strategy, workforce planning, employee listening, data governance, maybe even being the Chief Data Officer for HR. This isn't all of them, of course, and some have some of those things and others, and increasingly reporting directly to the Chief People Officer as well. You said that you always wanted the Head of People Analytics reports to the Chief People Officer. So, maybe the first question is, why? How does that help you as a Chief People Officer? And then, the second follow- question is, what are the key skills that, if you're a Chief People Officer, you'd look for in a Head of People Analytics?
[0:13:32] Dean Carter: I would say if you're in finance, your Head of FP&A reports to you, your Chief Accounting Officer reports to you. The person who has the numbers and the information for your team reports to you. They're not buried someplace down in the team. My view is every single day, the work that we're doing should be quantifiable in ways, and we had this huge gift of AI. We're going to be able to quantify things that we've never been able to quantify before. And we still, to this day, and you know this, we still don't have -- GAAP principles for finance were invented in 1920. To this day, we still don't have strong principles. There are some, a little bit, but not real strong, not the same type of GAAP principles for managing human capital that we have for financial capital. That could change someday.
But until then, I believe that the people analytics should report directly, because you need to be so close to what they're doing every single day, or they get distracted, because everyone, once they see them, they're like, "I need this dashboard, I need this report". They become like the Head of Report Giving. And so, they'll just drown in report requests versus providing cool insights that are important to strategy and align with the business, and those things. So, people, you have to guard them with the work that they're doing.
The qualities, I think, for great people analytics is, I don't think it's critical to have HR experience, by the way. I think you just understand data. I think it's sometimes even helpful not to have HR experience. But to understand how to, you need a data scientist, you need to have people who can do analyst work, and you need people who can tell stories. That is the important part, more than just like charts, graphs and information, bubble graphs, that's all great, but you need someone who can consolidate that into a really good story. That's sometimes the difference between a great Head of People Analytics, and that's their job, not the team's job. They give them all the information, all the stuff, Head of People Analytics gives it to the Head of HR, and that's what I want from them. Like, "Okay, whatever your team is doing behind the curtain, great. You bring me a statement. Insight and outcome, that's all I need. I'm going to take that all day long. If you can't distil it into a statement, you're not done yet". And they need to understand scientific method. Like, just this concept of curiosity.
A great Head of People Analytics, when they see a project moving, it's like, "Wait", and they know what to do in terms of the test. Like, "Let's gather this information first", know how to get the right level of data, and know the difference between correlation and connection, or probability. There's that too. I mean, there's tons of stuff.
[0:16:30] David Green: And you mentioned, and we certainly see this at Insight222 in our research, so many people analytics teams are still stuck in dashboards and endless requests for data. Why do you think that is? And I'm sure there's a variety of reasons, but I'm interested to hear your thoughts on it. And how can ambitious Heads of People Analytics or Chief People Officers, how can they get out of that kind of hamster wheel of dashboards and data requests?
[0:17:00] Dean Carter: Well, there's always going to be a need for dashboards, there's always going to be that, so the need for a visual of like how things are moving and progressing over time. And dashboards are still important, and you need to know the basics. But really, mechanise those in the best way possible, so the key stuff, turnover, retention rates, whatever your employee experience measurement tool is. All the basics, get that, and then the other thing is democratise them as much as possible and make them easy, not difficult. Sometimes we democratise them and say, "Go do this". But it's incredibly difficult for the manager to get to the things that they need to get to. Because of AI and because of advancing tech, my view is to get as much of that dashboard-y type stuff into the hands of managers, that they want to see these things for their particular team or their particular one.
More and more, I know they love this job as being like the, what's the word? The go-between. The priest between you and God is like the HR business partner, like, "I will interpret this for you". And so, you go to the interpreter for whatever, and then they're right in the middle. I want to get rid of the middle person on this. Make it just so easy to get to the dashboards and information, that they have access to them quickly, know what to do with them, and you democratise that completely. Democratise, personalise. Then the cool stuff, like, "Solve this big problem, solve this big problem, solve this problem". That's what a people analytics team should be focused on. Not like regular pieces of information to run your business.
[0:18:53] David Green: Yeah, it's interesting. So, I mean in the research we do at Insight222, for listeners who haven't seen it, you can get that from the insight222.com website, we do our leading companies or people analytics trends research every year. And last year, we had nearly 350 companies participate, and we're able to benchmark them against each other on a scale of investment on one axis, value provided on another. And a D Team is poorly invested in and provides low value, not surprisingly enough. And that's just under 60% of companies. And then, the A Teams are the ones that are well-invested in, maybe a bit more long-tenured. They're providing high value on a consistent basis. And there's about 10% of organisations there, so it's not very many. And we're starting to see that gap widen, to be perfectly honest with you.
Some of the things that help those teams be successful is exactly some stuff you mentioned: the ability to have some influence, so that's partly through the leader, partly through their relationship with the Chief People Officer getting access to senior business leaders; prioritisation and reprioritisation; the skills that you mentioned, obviously data science, behavioural science, but also good consulting and storytelling skills, as you highlighted; ethics from an investment perspective; and then, value, actually measuring what they do, not everything, but certainly some of the work, trying to understand what the value is that they're providing; the two things that you mentioned, democratisation and personalisation; and then, the last one is building that kind of that culture within HR, wider than HR, so not just HR leaders and HR business partners, but across COEs and other HR professionals as well.
I'd love to, I mean, again, I don't know if you see that difference between some of the companies that you work with and advise, between those companies that are really pushing forward with people analytics and those that are stuck. What do you see as the biggest differences between them?
[0:20:57] Dean Carter: The biggest difference is sometimes the business itself. So, really complex businesses, who have big data science teams and are focused on it, it's easier for there to be a yes. There are some companies that don't have sophisticated even business analytics. And so, it's really hard to push on the people analytics side when you don't have a data science team or you don't have sophisticated analytics. The place to look, and sometimes they're hidden in the organisation, the place to look for really inventive teams and doing partnership, marketing usually has some really interesting data scientists, scientists that understand the impact of what's going on in marketing. That's a good place to look. And my thing is, like my people analytics, hang out with a CFO tomorrow, like hang out with them. You should meet with a CFO every day because they're going to know what are the most critical business issues to solve. And then, great people analytics persons see how to connect that, connect that, connect that. Then, the more value you add, then the next time the CFO approves headcount, they're like, "Yes on that, yes on that, yes on that!" because you're a valuable partner to them in helping them feel like they're getting what they need in front of the board and in front of the CEO. So, the more you can bring those things … I love when they're like, "Yeah, I met with the CFO twice today". I'm like, "Perfect".
The other part, this is just easy, it's a no-brainer, and if you don't own it now, you should, is workforce planning. And often, finance owns workforce planning. And I think that, I mean, it's fine, but I think HR should own workforce planning, and that is deep data, deep analytics. It is volatile, and it's a massive amount of value to add to the company. My first place to go deep to grab credibility, workforce planning, always. Own it and do it in a way that's so much better than anyone else in finance. And you have all the data, you have all the HR systems and all these things. They're pulling all the data from your system to do workforce planning. That's the first place they have to go. That's always my recommendation. Turnover, yeah; employee experience, yes; workforce planning, own it.
[0:23:28] David Green: I want to take a short break from this episode to introduce the Insight222 People Analytics Programme, designed for senior leaders to connect, grow, and lead in the evolving world of people analytics. The programme brings together top HR professionals with extensive experience from global companies, offering a unique platform to expand your influence, gain invaluable industry insight and tackle real-world business challenges. As a member, you'll gain access to over 40 in-person and virtual events a year, advisory sessions with seasoned practitioners, as well as insights, ideas and learning to stay up-to-date with best practices and new thinking. Every connection made brings new possibilities to elevate your impact and drive meaningful change. To learn more, head over to insight222.com/programme and join our group of global leaders.
I mean, obviously at Sears and at Patagonia, strong retail element obviously to those organisations. If you're inspired by marketing, you can also, as I'm sure you saw you did, you can start to understand, "Okay, what's the impact of employee experience, employee engagement on customer engagement?", and you've got those two very powerful data sets together. I don't know if you could talk to that, and then I'll come to the finance and workforce planning parts in a minute?
[0:25:09] Dean Carter: Yeah, I mean there's a lot of studies on the connection between employee experience and the customer experience. I mean, the most famous one is the one done by Sears, it was 30 years ago and was done with data. And so, maybe we question some of the methods, 30 years later, on surveys like that. But regardless, there's been so many more that have come after that. You can ChatGPT anything tomorrow and find huge connections between those two. I think some of the challenge with employee experience, I think, is getting the navel-gazing around just increasing the experience. And then, they just measure, "All employee engagement went up 16 points, belonging went up 32 points", "Yes, okay, so what?"
[0:26:03] David Green: "And so, what was the impact on business outcome?"
[0:26:07] Dean Carter: "So, what?" And I think we miss the 'so what' so much. We get caught up in our own little like, "Yeah, experience, this went up and belonging went up". And that was an important part when we implemented the four-day work week at Patagonia. There was a lot of like, "Wow, so how's this going to be in productivity? How are we going to do this? What's going to be the financial impact?" A lot of lot of hand-wringing on us, but it was meant to solve a very specific business problem, which was our climbers and skiers were leaving. So, it's an important part to have really amazing climbers and skiers design climbing and skiing product. And we believed that the people using this stuff should be the one building and designing it and selling it. And so, yeah, they were leaving because Ventura is a great place to surf, but is a really terrible place to ski or climb.
So, we came up with this and then we came up with this concept of what was measuring it beforehand, and we asked different questions that you typically ask, and we partnered with the university, asked like 96 questions, it was a lot, "What's my relationship with my spouse? What's the relationship with my children? How can I buy healthy food? What's my ability to go to the doctor and dentist? I have the ability to do the things that I love on the weekends". I have all these questions in addition to productivity, collaboration. So, I layered in the typical ones, but we added a lot of questions about life impact. We did a pre, before, and then post after the implementation of the four-day workweek. And basically, what we did is we condensed it, so there were nine-hour days. And then, we closed every other Friday, and the other Friday was a four-hour workweek. So, it was basically over two weeks, you still worked 80 hours, we just condensed it.
All of the human stuff went up off the roof. Like, "I have a better relationship with my spouse". How many companies say that better work makes a better relationship with their spouse? I'll talk about that in just a second. But then, productivity went up, innovation went up, collaboration went up. The concept, when Yvon Chouinard had this idea of like, people will do the work that you compress them to. If you expand it, it's like building freeways; you build more freeways and more cars drive it down, it's the same thing. Five days, people spread the work out over five days, and we found a way to compress it into four days, and highly productive, we made a ton of money. But we had to do the pre- and post-test, and we didn't just measure those things. And this comes down to value for human beings, this concept of total rewards. If you were able to do something that you can measure that says, "If we do this, 92% of people will say they have a better relationship with their spouse and more time with their children", what level of value does that add to an employee? Like, the value prop in terms of, "Wow"? And you're reporting that back as a result of this, 92% of you said you have a better relationship to your spouse and more time to spend with your children. We can never get rid of that benefit, ever.
[0:29:31] David Green: No. Well, and you demonstrated that not only did that have the benefit to the workforce, but it also had a benefit to the business. As you said, collaboration, innovation --
[0:29:46] Dean Carter: Productivity, probability, all those went up.
[0:29:48] David Green: All those things which are so important, but doing the right thing as well. And I think that's maybe a direction where the work around people analytics can go. But as we collect more data and as we get better technology through AI, maybe we can demonstrate, maybe better than we have today as a profession, that actually if you treat people well, it is not just because it's the right thing to do, but you do it because actually you generate better business outcomes as well.
[0:30:24] Dean Carter: Yes, and by the way, you lose the things that you think treat people well unless you start connecting to the business. It does go away, because someday someone's going to ask, "What's the value of that?" I'm curious, there's a lot of stuff coming about engagement and experience and one of the concepts of loving work, like love at work. Is anyone measuring the emoji at work?
[0:30:51] David Green: Do you know, that's a really good question. I did do an episode recently with Shon Holyfield of Amazing Workplace, and they are measuring employee happiness. And Sean came across it actually when he was running another company, a tax company, and came across this concept of employee happiness, tried it at that company and it reduced turnover, helped with hiring, and increased business outcomes. And then, he took it in and created a company that actually helps other organisations to do it. So, I think employee happiness is certainly something that people are looking at. But I've not seen the emoji stuff, no, but you think it would be a good thing to measure?
[0:31:34] Dean Carter: The concept of love, and I'm like, "How many of you use the heart emoji today?" And, like, 99% of the people raise their hand. "How many of you chose the colour, red, blue, green, whatever?" And they're like, "Yeah". "How many of you were deciding between a heart and a thumbs up?" and, like, 90% of the hands raise up. "How many like the little celebration toot or a heart or red heart?" All these, we are deciding every single day, multiple times a day, how to express an emotion of red heart, blue heart, black heart, green heart, celebration, good job, all these things. And for some reason, we haven't figured out how to measure that. It's such valuable data. You think about what things happen in a moment right now. For some reason, a lot of red hearts are showing up. What's going on? Or at a town hall, you see them start to rise up when people say something that really resonates. You'll see celebrations or thumbs ups. I am really surprised that someone hasn't figured out how to measure that. I asked my Head of People Analytics to dig into that. I want to know. I'm just curious. What do they mean? Do they correlate to anything? And I have a suspicion that they do.
[0:32:55] David Green: So, if anyone is listening to this episode and they work in an organisation that is measuring this, then do get in touch with me or Dean, and I'd love to share that story at some point, either through a podcast episode or another means. So, where do you see the Head of HR or the Chief People Officer going, maybe over the next three to five years, in terms of maybe new capabilities that will be required and the increasing importance of the role? And then, in addition to that, are you seeing now, and do you see more in the future, Heads of People Analytics moving into the Chief People Officer role?
[0:33:32] Dean Carter: First one, I think we're at a fork, and I think we have the opportunity to become one of the most significant and most important roles in the company at this time. And I think chaos is a ladder, a lot of chaos going on in the world. But as we lean into probably the largest expense, the two largest expenses of the company, labour and benefits, and the definition of capital is basically, "Owned completely by the Head of People". If we do not start leaning into data and insights, scientific method and evidence-based conversations, if we're still talking about, "Hey, belonging of this went up, and turnover went down this", and if we're still stuck on the basics and not really tying to business outcomes and getting in the conversation on that and solving big problems for the company using human capital and data information, we are going to become obsolete. Half the job will be done because closer and closer, marketing and people brand and external brand are becoming the same. Marketing could absorb that piece in terms of employee experience and client experience, all that can move that way. And the rest of the stuff, workforce planning, all the pieces to some extent, with the invention of AI, some roles are going to be automated. You could just move it into finance. If we're not paying attention, it could just go into an administrative function that the strategic parts are owned by finance and marketing.
I believe strongly that the role of people analytics and how they're connected to business outcomes and insights is what will actually get us to be the most important job in the company. And it's happening. We've been progressing and moving that way. But I feel like because of information and data and AI, what's available, we either jump into it and lead, or we stay back and wait and we evaporate. That's my concern, and I feel like I'm ringing the bell. Like, we've got to lean into this now.
[0:35:45] David Green: Are you seeing or do you think we'll see increasingly Heads of People Analytics moving into the Chief People Officer role?
[0:35:52] Dean Carter: 100%, yeah. If you're building relationships with finance and marketing, ultimately you're presenting to the board about insights and outcomes, you can be the smartest person in the room, in terms of what you need to do on TA; you can be the smartest person in the room on agility, mobility, ability, capability; you can be the smartest person in the room on how to drive connections to experiences and outcomes. That's what people are looking for, is how can you be the person who solves these things and pulls teams together to make them happen? I think the Heads of People Analytics, more are going to be heads of HR, because they speak the language of business.
[0:36:35] David Green: Yeah.
[0:36:36] Dean Carter: As long as they talk about insights and outcomes.
[0:36:39] David Green: Exactly. There's that one caveat!
[0:36:43] Dean Carter: Dean, it's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you on the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Before we separate for the day, can you let listeners know how they can get in contact with you and find out more about the work that you're doing at Modern as well?
[0:37:00] Dean Carter: The best way to get in contact is actually LinkedIn. So, I'm voracious on that, and I answer and I look at all the messages coming in. You can also contact me, if you want, at my email address, and I'll give it to you, dcarter@modernexec.com. My role at Modern, I love the Head of HR job so much and I love the profession, and I think it's important that it survives and endures and has a massive impact, so that's what I want to do. I try to do that, to be a beacon as a Head of HR. Like, "Look at this. Even in a place like Sears, we can do this. We can do this at a tiny little startup like Guild, or just choose another way". And now I get to do it, I impact thousands of heads of HR. So, trying to do it as a beacon worked a little bit, but now I can have conversations with tons of Heads of HR and like, "Think about people analytics, think about the future, be curious, insights and outcomes".
[0:38:02] David Green: Well, I definitely recommend that listeners that aren't following you on LinkedIn should, because you're right, you are voracious and you do say some really insightful stuff and some very honest stuff as well, which I think is fantastic. So, Dean, thank you so much for being on the show and I will see you in a couple of weeks at TALREOS.
[0:38:20] Dean Carter: See you in Chicago.
[0:38:23] David Green: That's it for today's episode, and what a fantastic discussion it's been. A big thank you again to Dean for joining me today and highlighting why people analytics is so important for the future success of the HR function. And of course, thank you as always for being part of the Digital HR Leaders community. Whether you're listening on your commute, in between meetings, or with a notebook in hand, we appreciate you being here and taking the time to grow with us. At Insight222, our mission is to empower HR and people analytics leaders to drive lasting business impact. So, if you enjoyed today's conversation, it would mean a lot if you subscribed, rated the show, and shared it with someone in your network. For more industry insights and learning resources, I also recommend visiting insight222.com, following us on LinkedIn, and subscribing to our weekly newsletter at myHRfuture.com. That's all for now, thank you for tuning in and we'll be back next week with another episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Until then, take care and stay well.