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On Thursday February 13 2020, HR Grapevine headed to the Reward Gateway Engagement Excellence Summit in Central London, where speakers such as Reward Gateway’s CEO, Doug Butler and Diageo’s Head of Diversity & Inclusion, Ira Read, took to the stage to discuss the finer points of HR leadership.
At the event, which featured a packed audience of over 600 HR professionals, HR Grapevine exclusively caught up with Bruce Daisley, who until recently held the position of Vice President EMEA at Twitter, before striking out on his own as an author and speaker, to discuss some of the key points of his talk.
What do you think are the key things you learned about people in your time at Twitter?
The critical thing about people is that we often confine ourselves to believing that people are infinite – and our role models, people like Elon Musk, state that they work 120 hours per week. The truth about that is that you just can’t. Sometimes those lies that we tell ourselves aren’t helpful – we think that we need our own productivity hacks e.g. ‘I’m so lazy compared to everyone else how can I be more productive, why aren’t I achieving more?’ and we try to blame ourselves.
Leaders need to learn that there’s a sweet spot. We need to work toward that. At one point in my career, we had 40% of our workforce leave, many without a job to go to. When that happens, you must take a step back and realise that you’re doing something wrong. When we looked inward, we realised that there was a culture of weekend emailing, where everyone was working through lunch and where everyone was working a couple of extra hours per day, then they were on calls in the evening. It’s no wonder that after a while, people were done. So, we needed to make changes, and when you’re honest about it, you can see the problems.
