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Global property intelligence platform Cotality, previously CoreLogic, is no stranger to transformation.
During one of the most disruptive periods for the housing industry – and throughout a transition to a modernized brand and operating model – the company’s meticulous people strategy has been vital, supporting staff throughout the change while driving engagement, trust, and performance.
Kendra Angier, Chief Human Resources Officer at Cotality, has been central to this journey, and joins the HR Grapevine podcast to discuss the importance of the firm’s human-first approach to culture and leadership.
Host: Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the HR Grapevine podcast. I'm your host, Benjamin Broomfield, head of content here at HR Grapevine. And I'm joined today by Kendra Angier, chief human resources officer at Cotality here. Kendra leads overall HR strategy, including talent management, leadership development and diversity and inclusion. And she's held HR roles at various companies including Veeam Technology, Ingram Micro, PepsiCo, Andersen Consulting, just to name a few, and brings a vast array of global leadership experience, having led world class HR teams to attract, develop, engage and reward diverse talents. Today, we're meeting to discuss Cotality human first approach to culture and leadership, and to hear a little bit more about how the approach is steering the business through transformation at the global Property Intelligence company. So Kendra, a very, very warm welcome to the podcast and thank you for joining us here today.
Guest: Fantastic. Happy to be here. Thank you.
Host: Wonderful. Well, let's start with the big question. Why is it so important for Cotality to have what we're calling this human first culture, especially in the data and technology sector? One that we know is being, uh, upheaved, shall we say, by artificial intelligence and a huge amount of digital transformation at the moment.
Guest: Yeah. For sure. You know, it's interesting, we've started on a transformation probably in the last five years. So we were a public company, CoreLogic, taken private by two PE firms, a new CEO. Um, I'm new in the role for about three and a half years now. And, um, and also a new head of operations and a chief marketing officer. So pretty interesting to see a combination of a tenured team that had been at Cotality, formerly CoreLogic, along with a new set of leaders, really, you know, kind of working together and being very deliberate in shaping what is the culture that we want to create. And a lot of that culture is really founded on people first values. I won't go through all of our values, but there's a lot of pieces that are around client centricity, making an impact, setting the pace, but there's also some pieces that are really around, you know, kind of be yourself and lift others up. So we took some pieces from the Neuroleadership Institute and brought those in. Part of that. So you've got this pretty robust framing of our core values that really underpin our mission and our vision, which is really to help transform the property ecosystem and with our customers at the center of that. I think why that's important is that first starts to show a hand towards our employees of how we are putting people first and how we show up every day really amplifies that, not just in our core values, but how we live them every day, how we communicate with transparency and with clarity and with empathy. And we have this really amazing operating rhythm from a communications standpoint with our leadership teams, with skip levels, with pulse surveys, but also global townhalls on a quarterly basis and senior leadership team meetings, where we're really indoctrinating that culture and our focus and alignment with our top one hundred plus leaders across the organization. So I want to start there first, because I think as we start to talk about any transformation, which we're in the midst of that now, especially with AI, it just amplifies the importance of creating a safe place where employees can trust their leadership, have confidence in the direction, and really thrive.
Host: Absolutely. We're going to be diving into some of the investments changes that that approach to leadership that you've made there. But one area that I suppose is a challenge is, you know, wanting to create that place for employees at the moment. But at the same time, there's so much polarization around different work models that we see available at the moment. There's heightened expectations from staff and, you know, a whole number of different places, and that can make it challenging to know, you know, what to prioritize, what approach to take. So how are some of those challenges and that, that heightened expectation creating, I guess, or impacting your team's focus? How do you know sort of where to turn and what the route to take is for your organization and your people?
Guest: Yeah, I think paradox is the word of the year when we think about polarization. And it's interesting, right? Because we and we'll get more into the AI piece, but because it's really here now and with our, you know, even we had a transformation strategy that was around digitizing some of our back office or some of our more repetitive work. So we have already been on this journey. It's just being accelerated tremendously right now. But it is that balance between our shareholders, our customers wanting more AI enabled data and workflows to support their business. And then also for our employees who are afraid of AI, but it's also our responsibility to develop our employees and help them be more AI fluent because whether it's with us or somewhere else, those are skills. Those are life skills and professional skills that our teams are going to need to have. So we balance that When we think about probably the pace at which we're instituting change, you know, kind of foundational adoption, and now we're in this acceleration phase. But I think when we think about polarization, it's interesting. We're constantly tracking what's happening in the market with what we call future of work, which is really the hybrid model. So our teams are in the office one to two days a week, and we always and we also have some teams that are one hundred percent remote. Think about our sales teams and our customer facing teams as an example. And there's a handful of others. About maybe twenty to thirty percent of our employees are one hundred percent remote, and then the rest are hybrid. And we constantly are like, do we come in? Do we not come in? But I think for us, at the end of the day, the question is not a compliance question and it's not a real estate question, although those are questions. The real question is how are we creating an environment where our teams can work collaboratively together and to innovate faster? And those are always going to be the questions that we're asking about that From that standpoint, I think the other piece for us is we think about when and why people come together, whether it's, you know, one day a week or onboarding or training or sprints for projects, I think we're kind of more of that mindset, which is really leader led is when you think about multi-generations in the workforce, some of the things for us is how do we pair a semi or an expert with an emerging professional so that we can make sure that that wisdom and that knowledge transfer is happening faster? AI will help accelerate some of the knowledge, but the experience piece is the piece for us, where we think that the mentorship and making those connections is really important. So there's some cool things. We'll come to that later. Another in another podcast. There's some cool things that we're doing that we're calling Unleashing Your next chapter, which is really looking at the ages and stages of our employees from the time that they start their careers to the time that they're starting to think about off ramping and what their next iteration of themselves is after Cotality.
Host: Fantastic. Well, you mentioned, well touched on the role that leaders are playing within the organization in sort of driving that change forward and really embodying this approach to, to human centric approach across the organization. So what does that look like at the leadership level for you, and what are some of the frameworks that are in place to, to help make sure that anyone who's a manager or especially a leader, team leader and beyond at Cotality have that ability and that confidence to, to lead in a people first and a human centric way.
Guest: Yep. So think about kind of the, I'll call it human centric leadership. It's for us, it's really around highly engaged, high performing teams. And, um, and so we talked a lot about kind of culture and building that trust. And, you know, part of that part of that now is really accelerating. Like, what does it mean to be a high performance team? And there's some things that we expect of our leaders that are core principles that we constantly, as I mentioned, are reinforcing. And we've done a lot of development. And I think eighty percent of our managers have gone through training in the last couple of years around some of our management and leadership principles and a lot of executive development for our senior directors and above with the same idea around kind of how do you perform and transform the business at the same time? So I think kind of those four key principles, if I can just kind of, you know, hone in on those would be one having clarity of purpose. So not just explaining, you know, kind of why what we're doing or what our goal is, but explaining why and why it's important and why it's important for our customers, and also why it's important for our employees in the work that they do. The other piece is this visible leadership behavior. And so really making sure that there's alignment between words and behavior super critical. And then the other piece with that visible leadership is that just as I mentioned before, what we call our moments that matter, whatever the however, those, you know, kind of look like when we pull our teams together that are leaders are really driving that. The third piece is really around manager capability. So we want to make sure that our managers have everything that they need to communicate clearly to coach their teams and coach hard love and coach hard, But also more importantly than that is to listen. And so there has been, like I said, a lot of investment around that manager capability and that, you know, that assessment of their ability to do that. And there's some fun things now with AI. We have Gemini and we have copilot, and we can drop all of the comments and the feedback from employees and managers now into, into like Excel spreadsheets, but tools where we can actually start to really see the sentiment, the clarity of the feedback and, and the focus. And so we're seeing a lot of real, real movement on this manager capability that's really been supported by AI tools to assist them and situation behavior impact type conversations. So manager capability is the third, the fourth one is really around feedback loops and that lead to action. So the credibility really comes from the follow through with what we're hearing from our employees. So we do a quarterly well, we do a biannual pulse survey and we also do skip level meetings. We do listening sessions across the organization. And the most important thing for us is that when we hear things from our employees, just like we do with our customers, that we take that insight and we create action with it and follow through with our employees on some of the things that we've done as a result of what we heard from them.
Host: Definitely. I think that's a couple of quite a few points that we hear coming up time and time again. That level of the sheer number of managers you've had within the organizations who've been able to benefit from training. I think that's something that you always see those studies of how few managers there are out there who've actually received the dedicated training. So that's a really important part of it. But definitely that credibility piece, being able not just to, to have that feel, that feedback is heard, but to see it acted on is a really important part of the process. And that that final loop that many organizations just aren't quite getting right at the moment. So really wonderful to, to hear about that. We've spoken a bit about, you know, the time that we find ourselves in, especially for, for a digital organization such as Cotality, a lot of opportunity at the moment for innovation and new ideas based on that feedback you're getting for your customers, but at the same time, you want for that to access, that has to be an environment of trust and support in place as well. So there are any examples of how your leadership team are really helping to bridge that gap between innovation and trust, to really drive successful transformation as an organization as well?
Guest: Yeah. So I think when we think about our AI transformation, when we jumped in, we jumped in last July and August with the entire organization. So previously, AI was really for engineers and data scientists to think about how we implement LMS in our data and in our products and solutions for our customers. So now we've got these amazing mostly, you know, kind of chat GPT tools. And we're starting to leverage Google Enterprise, which is super exciting with LMS. Other agents that we're going to be able to and have been starting to adopt and embrace. But we stepped back and said, how can we create an environment of experimentation so that all of our employees have an opportunity to dabble and play and share some of their best practices with each other? So I think we had between responsible AI leading with AI, some of our kind of GitHub and development, you know, kind of training for our technology teams, technology, data science, analytics, product marketing. And we've also created some communities of practice where people could just jump in and learn, like how our sales teams using this for competitive analysis, right? And how we show up in the market and how we can go to market even stronger. And there's some things I'll share that are innovative from an HR standpoint as well, that go back to the coaching and the performance. But I think creating that level of interest and enthusiasm about how we can leverage these tools to really assist and augment our work today have been super impactful. Our adoption rates, I think we had back on the training and just learning hours. I think we had like thirty thousand learning hours in the second half of 2025 and, um, eighty percent adoption of the tools that we've made available to our employees. So we're very pleased with where we are. I think this idea of just really kind of sparking I'm. Curiosity and encouraging experimentation up to this point has been, I think, super enabling and has really kind of built that trust and that excitement for what could be next. And I think even as jobs change and morph and we've talked a little bit about, you know, our jobs will change with AI, how much they change and which jobs will change. We're going to learn, you know, some of that together. But I think the art of the possibility is showing up for our employees. And that agency is really its underpinning of one of our core, you know, kind of tenants as we're going through this AI enablement.
Host: Absolutely. I've been reading today about FOBO or fear of becoming obsolete, which I think is this growing trend that we're seeing, right? Whether you're in a sector that's really ripe for that disruption and jobs changing left, right, and center, or maybe you're working in an organization where that's not necessarily so much the case, they're still going to be that sort of inherent fear of being able to address it head on, have those conversations and work through that, that journey together. Again, something really important for organizations to be doing. Again, if you have you seen sort of since taking that approach, There's been that uplift in engagement from employees with this, with this transformation and with this shift. Has it helped you to really sort of bridge that trust gap with your workforce and feeling that level of increased excitement and opportunity there?
Guest: I believe so I think we've tried to make a safe of an environment as we can. I and dispel fear. I don't think I could say that our employees aren't fearful because, you know, there's so much that you hear externally about, you know, companies doing all these layoffs or these big changes or, you know, companies don't need humans anymore. And I think being a people first, you know, kind of company, we do see the value of super humans that are amplified with AI. And so we're, you know, kind of we're on that journey, but I think for our employees, at least, they can trust that we are in it with them. And we're, you know, kind of walking every step of the way with them. Hopefully that makes sense.
Host: Yeah, definitely. As you say, it's not straightforward. And there are just some, some challenges, especially what you see sort of, you know, externally and deadlines that a lot of times just aren't really that helpful. Um, and maybe you don't really get to the heart of the issue can, can be difficult to manage that, but for your organization and the process that you've been on over the last couple of years, has there been any challenges that you've had to work through in terms of building that trust, or any lessons that you'd share with other people who are sort of also going on that transformation journey, especially from that CHRO or HR perspective?
Guest: Yeah, I would say that it really needs to be kind of a bottom up and a top down approach. So bottom up is make tools available and encourage employees to use them and share and explore and not be afraid, especially if you have responsible AI setups for most of your tools are, you know, kind of within your four walls, you know, and your data where employees can feel confident that they can trust at least that the data that they're using will be safe, I think is super important and then encourage that sharing. But I also say from a leadership standpoint, our leaders need to model it and our leaders need to demonstrate their curiosity, their openness to really thinking about how work can get done in a better way, meaning frictionless, that creates a better experience for our customers. And also from our perspective, also really helps accelerate our product development and product adoption, which benefits our customers as well. So I do think that it really starts at the top and constantly, continually kind of reinforcing that. And this idea of creating communities has been great for us because we've asked our executive leaders to champion various communities, whether it's our sales community. We have our product management community, obviously data science and analytics, our technology and our engineering teams. And those really are being led from the top. And I'm super proud at Cotality, because we have awesome tools. And I think that's what makes it fun too, is when you know that you've got access to some of the best tools, you know, available today. And I think that's what's interesting is that we're trying to be tool agnostic because tools are changing. So it's not about learning the tool. It's about learning the process. Right? How do you do? Prompting. How do you get more effective at prompting. What's the benefit of creating, you know, prompting versus creating a gem versus using an agent or a notebook? LM and, you know, kind of understanding the inputs and the outputs. And so I think that's the biggest thing is like, we're literally all learning together. And I think that that goes a long way in building and building that trust. I think one of the things for us is, and this might be more for our HR audience that's listening, is I kind of took it on early as my responsibility to demonstrate to the organization what early adoption of AI looks like and really demonstrate that curiosity. And so, and we started to think about not only which AI, you know, how can we use AI to really amplify and benefit our leaders, but how can we also do it in a way that's like in the flow of work? And so performance is a perfect example of that. We do, we have a quarterly performance cycle. We do a year end and goal setting at the beginning of the year. We have a mid year that's more of a more formal touch points and then just kind of a recalibration of goals in Q2 and Q3. Yeah, Q2 and Q4, beginning of those quarters. But with that said, we created gems for our leaders. We actually put all of our leaders through training, opt in, all voluntary. And we had like eighty percent participation of all of our managers. And we did the same for employees with the development gem. And so we gave to our leaders like, hey, if you put in, you know, kind of goals, results and also focus on putting in feedback from other people and SBA on the behavior. So think about the what and the how. You know, use these to help build your performance review, but also use the gem. We built questions in it to help with if somebody is accelerating, how should that conversation be versus maybe somebody that's more developmental that might have some resistance? How can you kind of prepare for that conversation? And the same tools we created for employees, which I love because it creates that transparency and it creates that capacity on both ends to have just really more robust and pointed conversations between employees and managers. And that has been wildly successful, and that's scrappy. We didn't pay for a performance chat tool or added in to anything that we have. This is just kind of a literally guide by the side and a way to really kind of help amplify, amplify a process with better outcomes, but, you know, make it available for employees and, and managers.
Host: And you mentioned, obviously, that's something that, that you helped lead and embody and sort of took that first sort of step within the organization to do as a leader. And it leads on to the final question, which is really around the role of the CHRO. And it's going to look different in every organization. I think you're sort of seeing now one side says, you know, CHROS have to be really focused on, you know, people and can't be focused on the technology. People matter most on the other side, you know, everyone has to focus on, you know, just the transformation. We're seeing CTO now get way more involved in this digital transformation and AI adoption within the organization. Again, that temptation for sort of being polarized says you have to be one or the other, even though most people are sort of doing that nice blend of the two. So I'd be interested to hear from your own experience, how do you see the role of the CHRO currently shifting and how are you preparing for it? What are some of the changes that you're making to put your best foot forward and deliver the role as you think it can be as most valuable to the organization and its people?
Guest: Yeah, it's interesting. Right? I mean, technology, all of us need to really all of us, meaning HR CHROS really need to be adept at technology and that we used to call it the digital experience. I think it's a lot more than that when we think about digital workforce. But I think for CHROS, we literally sit at the intersection of talent, technology and enterprise strategy. And so it's no longer just about managing HR teams or creating HR processes, but it's really helping to architect this kind of intelligent system that connects AI and human judgment in a way that helps really accelerate the performance and the value of, of the company. And so I think for us, it's really kind of thinking around. I heard somebody call this for now the chief work officer. And if you think about how work gets done, it will get done through technology and it will get done through people. And so understanding the harmony of both of those and, you know, kind of the skills and the outcomes that both bring is going to be really important for CHROS.
Host: Wonderful, well Kendra, thank you so much for taking the time to share your insights with us across the episode, and really useful to get that first hand look into the transformation process at your own organization and how you've led that, especially with that human first approach and investing so much in giving leaders and managers the tools that they need to succeed as well. A really important part of that process. So a huge thank you again for taking the time. It's been wonderful speaking with you.
Guest: Well, fantastic. Thank you very much.
