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AI is reshaping leadership, strategy, and the very role of HR. In each episode, the host Barb Bidan explores how AI drives innovation and leadership in HR with actionable insights for the future of work.
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The Human Element - David Alsop
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David Alsop: [00:00:00] how do you make HR matter? How do you make it relevant? And as a CEO or business leader, how do you expect it to be relevant? Humans are the most costly, most influential, most critical part of a business, and yet we put a function in the side because we all think we're experts on it.
But you've got a function there that can help be the focus on the strategy of making humans matter.
INTRO: Welcome to The Human Element, presented by Wisq. I'm your host, Barb Biden, and in each episode, I sit down with CHROs and senior HR leaders to explore how AI, innovation, and human insight are reshaping the future of HR. We'll explore how technology is reshaping leadership, strategy, and the role of HR by sharing candid stories, practical ideas, and strategic perspectives to help you shape the future.
The Human Element is brought to you by Wisq, [00:01:00] the leader in agentic HR and creator of Harper, the world's first AI HR generalist. Learn how Harper can resolve up to 80% of routine HR tasks autonomously. Learn more about Wisq at wisq.com.
Barb Bidan: Today my guest is David Alsop chief human resources officer at Ultradent Products, a company that makes the uncomfortable fact of a dentist visit a little more bearable, and has been doing so since 1978. So earlier in his career, David spent 13 years at Kraft Heinz starting as a sales rep, actually selling Kraft products into Walmart stores before finding his way into HR. What he took from his foundational experience is something that most HR leaders don't have. He knows the business and what it looks like from the inside. At Ultradent, David has spent nine years building one of the most celebrated people cultures in the country, landing the company at number five on Fortune's best place to work list.
So [00:02:00] on the side of all of that, David has founded Disrupt HR Salt Lake City, joined the Forbes HR Council, taught at BYU, and has also just published his first book, Making HR Matter. That book is why I wanted to get David on the show to talk to us today because the question his entire career has been answering is, how do you make HR genuinely matter to the business?
David, welcome to The Human Element.
David Alsop: Thanks, Barb. It's great to be with you.
Barb Bidan: I am so glad to have you on. We, I don't know if you know this, we share a similar background in that I also didn't get my start in HR. But ~y-~ before you were an HR leader, you were a sales rep selling Kraft products into Walmart stores. A big route of 25 stores, five states, et cetera. So you came at HR from this commercial side.
How does that shape how you think about the profession?
David Alsop: I think it's really simple in that aspect is I start with the business. That was my DNA when I started out in business, understanding how the product got to the customer, that is what it's all [00:03:00] about in business. And that shaped my understanding when I got into HR and I started dealing with, "Hey, let's build some policies, let's build some benefits."
And it started taking me down a route where everyone I was around in my profession seemed to be focusing on things that weren't driving the business. And so it pulled me towards making sure everything I do is driving the business forward through people, and that's ~a,~ a mindset that sometimes we don't get focused on in HR.
And so it was everything to do with how I wasn't indoctrinated in a profession. I came at it from the outside in, and I've been able to blend that balance into my career.
Barb Bidan: Awesome. And so you spent a, a long time with ~s-~ one employer and had the option to relocate, I think to Chicago when Oscar Mayer moved its headquarters. And so you made a meaningful bet~ on,~ on your own terms, right? In choosing to make a move to Ultradent. What did that decision tell you about what you ultimately wanted [00:04:00] overall from your career?
David Alsop: Yeah, when I finally~ ~ woke up to what I fell into, I had to make a decision not to take the easy route, but to take an unknown route into the future to find a new career path. And what it taught me is I had an internal craving after everything I'd learned at Kraft Heinz, Kraft Company. I learned so many good things, but I learned what big company HR is and the struggles of it, and I always had this craving to test what I learned in my different business partnership roles to see if that could really help , a whole company adapt to the strategies that I was learning myself.
And so for me, what that departure meant for me is I had to form a n-new identity as the head of HR versus the cog in the wheel, and that was an exhilarating journey. It still is, but sometimes we don't realize that ~d-~ when we're being pushed out or we make a decision to leave something that we're [00:05:00] in a flow for, we find a new flow that can take us even further in our lives, our careers.
And that's what it did for me, is it challenged me to think, "Okay, what do I do if I own it? What do I do if it's mine to lead the strategy for?" And that has been such a learning journey that , took me further than I could ever gone in a bigger company that I came from.
Barb Bidan: And seems like you have not looked back, right? And built a great career at Ultradent over the last nearly a decade, right? So I do want to talk about the book. I said that upfront. Your book is called Making HR Matter. Tell me where the title came from. What does it mean to you, and does AI change anything about what makes HR matter?
David Alsop: Yeah, starting with the book. My co-author, Ted Forbes, and I we came together just with this thought that he came from a background in the business and got into HR, and I did the same thing. And we both had a similar thought that, why is this so hard [00:06:00] for HR people to get to a relevant place in their profession and for their companies?
And what we realized is we had learned so much in our journeys through the failures, the successes, the experiences, that there really wasn't a book out there, a guide out there that was gonna help people see through a lens being the fly on the wall of another's career of succeeding in it and bringing relevance.
There wasn't anything out there other than academic approaches that weren't experiential and niche approaches that were just parts of HR that were pointing out the opportunities and the parts. And so we viewed it as, how do we help people see the journey to relevance to make it matter? And how do we help CEOs see it in a way that they are craving that from their HR professionals?
And that's what we did with the book, is we showed a journey that helps people see what makes it hard, what the myths are that hold us back, what the [00:07:00] mindsets we need to have that can guide us forward, and what the essentials are to have HR matter for any organization, because we're all different. But if we do it the right way, we can find our way towards relevance.
I think ~A-AI~ is a unique part of this journey, and what we talk about in everything that we do in making HR matter is, how do you partner to identify what the strategies of the business are, what the needs of the future are, what the opportunities are for people and business to unite and converge towards a maximum outcome?
And I think just an ideal way to think about AI, is too many people think AI is gonna come in and take over But what we need to start thinking about is AI needs us and we need it. And it's an and conversation about if I can use AI to maximize my potential, it's gonna benefit from me to maximize its potential.
And that's what we're finding as we use [00:08:00] AI. It provides great opportunities to streamline things, to maximize things, to create new tools. We just, in our business we've been working on a lot of different strategies that we've had for years, but we always have these experiences where maybe the tool could be a little bit better to connect with our manufacturing population.
Maybe it could be better to connect with a broader population outside of the United States. And we've been able to create tools with AI that can be perfect for everybody. And it's just this interaction where AI can create the tools for us that we had to pay thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars before for an organization.
Now we can create our own tools, and it's a lower cost, but we build it in the dream way that fits our company. And so if we can partner with it, if we can grow with it, if we can embrace it, we can make it better and overcome the fears that we have of it to make it be something great for all of us versus, the robots are taking over and there's no ethics in [00:09:00] it.
We are the ethics that will combine with it to make it ideal. And the tools that it's creating for us right now in our HR are really unbelievable, that we couldn't fathom that we could have done these things 10 years ago, five years ago, or even two years ago. And it's just evolving so fast.
Barb Bidan: Yeah, there's no greatness in it without our expert input, right? So it is something that I think in the right hands makes all of us better, faster, more effective, more efficient as long as we've got the right and intelligent inputs heading in. So I'm gonna take us back to something that maybe is a little bit provocative relative to the book. The title I think subtly implies that maybe HR doesn't matter enough in certain places. Do you agree with that? And if so, where that's happening, why do you think that is?
David Alsop: Yeah. It's unfortunate to say it, but it's not that there isn't relevant HR happening out there. [00:10:00] It's just if you think about how business grows, it starts with a founder that has an idea, and it usually starts with this gritty group of people in a garage or a small operation of five to 10 people that they're not thinking about HR, and as they grow, they get bigger and they think, "Hey I'm a people person. I know how to do people, and I know how to do this." And so HR is really a hard thing to bring into an organization for the first time because most founders, most business people think, "I know how to lead. I know how to do the people side of things."
And so the first time they think about bringing HR into a business is setting it up for the way it's always been. They need to fire someone legally and not get in trouble for it. They need to have some benefits or a 401. They need to create some policies because they have 200 to 500 people, and they need to figure out how to keep people on the same page.
They need to throw some parties, and then they [00:11:00] lose so many people because they don't have a strategy to keep people. They need to recruit people, and they get recruiters. But that's really where HR starts out and sometimes stays. And when HR people come in with their education that sometimes trains them on those basics to do them very well, they stay there too and keep the organization stagnant with HR that's just pulling in the basics.
And so what has to happen is a CEO has to recognize there needs to be a strategy to keep people succeeding together, and it has to be monitored. It has to have the right tools. It have to have someone that gets everything flowing in the right direction to converge the business outcomes through people strategies.
And, the basics of what start out from a startup company, that really becomes the floor of what HR can be to matter. It's something that really is a reality that ~b-~ it will always be a [00:12:00] challenge for HR to get to relevance. And what we're saying is if you can see the potential of what it could be, and our book helps you see that, you can start planting the seeds of what's next for the CEO that doesn't understand what it could be.
You can start implementing or sharing strategies that start waking them up. I'll share one story about what I was challenged with when I ~start,~ first got to HR at Ultradent, is we were doing those things great. We were firing people legally. We were putting policies in place. We were recruiting, throwing parties, and had great benefits.
But what I noticed first off when I got there that I could plant a seed for is everyone talked about the founder and how amazing he is. They had a great culture. But when I would ask them about their manager, too often what I was hearing is, "That founder's great, but my boss is just okay." And what I was able to start helping first off to modernize HR and bring relevance, I [00:13:00] couldn't do it overnight.
I had to start with little things to build it over time with my team, was we have to expand the leadership of that founder and his legacy into every leader in the organization to create partnerships that managers and employees love one another. They don't look past the manager to the founder. They look to the manager for their experience to grow, succeed, and impact the organization.
And so that's just an example of you have to be able to plant the seeds over time to grow out of that startup phase of HR to be able to bring the relevant strategies of the future and find the right talent for that future. But it is a very real thing that business will always start with the irrelevant HR, as we call it, that is needed.
We have to do it. But if you don't get past the floor of that, you will never build the house of what can be an amazing HR function supporting an amazing organization.
Barb Bidan: I wholeheartedly agree. And in places, right? Not when you came into this situation, but in [00:14:00] places this exists because there is a skills gap of some manner, right? Let's talk about that a little bit more in as concrete a way as we can, right? Not in the abstraction. What do you think it is that some HR leaders don't know how to do in that circumstance, right?
Where it's like, okay, I've been taught textbook-wise to do all these foundational operational basics. What's missing that allows them to kinda identify that next step is needed and take it, right? In terms of growing leadership and the other sort of more advanced things that you're talking about
David Alsop: I think sometimes our challenge is, one, we can be indoctrinated in our profession. So we have great education for the basics of HR. We can get certified in it. We can get these great degrees in it. But we come in and just say, "This is the way it's supposed to be." One of the skills that I had to learn constantly was what my profession was [00:15:00] telling me isn't always what my leaders want me to do to support them.
And I had to get really good at listening to leaders, listening to organizational dynamics, listening to employees on what the culture needs, what it's ready for, and I had to be able to foresee and understand what can bring people closer to the ideals of the business for success, and how can I converge their outcomes, their performance, their productivity towards the aims of the organization while being satisfied doing that.
And satisfaction and profit for the company are two things that ~c-~ sometimes conflict with each other, where HR people, if they get caught up in the indoctrination and the benchmarks of our profession, they'll just come at it without a return on investment mentality and start throwing out that company B, C, and D across the street are putting ping pong tables up, or they're throwing more cash at the equation by [00:16:00] raising wages without validating that's what the market needs.
And the strategic HR people are the ones that are seeing, "Wait a second. Let's dig into this and understand what our organization needs, what's happening here, what do people love about this place? How do we analyze that? How do we bring data to the equation of that, so we can make the right decision for this organization?
And how do we make it better for everybody to succeed together here versus always comparing to what degree we got, what it says in our books?" The thing I've learned over and over again about HR is it is not an academic function. It's a listening function . It's a human function, and humans are complex.
Businesses are unique, and if we know how to listen, partner, build strategies, and bring the right skills to ~ad-adeptly~ grow those strategies, then we're gonna start to bring relevance. But ~what--~ If I could say one thing in ending that, I had to learn to really listen to the business, the [00:17:00] leaders, the CEOs, to understand what the needs are right now and be adept at understanding how do I build skills to drive forward with strategies that support what they're needing and get away from, "It's all about what I see."
Because there are times where I see what they need that the CEO doesn't see. That's when I have to start building a relationship to influence him towards seeing what I'm seeing and understanding when he comes to the alignment of where I'm at. But if I just try to push it on him or her, it doesn't work out.
It's about aligning the people strategy towards the business strategy and the leaders that need what we are bringing to them.
Barb Bidan: Yeah. I've referred to something similar as beware the fallacy of the best practice, right? Like a best practice
is only a best practice when it is contextually the best practice for the environment you are in, with the leaders you are in the entire context that you are in. It is definitely not a lift and shift from a textbook in any circumstance, right?
And that's ~a,~ a fallacy that [00:18:00] I think it's like you come out of like your academic learning in
HR not knowing that, I think. And so it's like remembering that you actually get to take best practice and make it better, make it suitable, make it contextual, right? That's, I think, some of the stuff that you are talking about.
Like we're still using the things we know but we are applying them contextually to the organization that we're in, which sounds like exactly what you did when you got to Ultradent
David Alsop: Yeah. Too often we focus on best practice or benchmark, and what I've learned and what I call it is the herd is doing the best practice. The herd is following the trend of that. And the bottom line is if you follow what the herd is doing, you're gonna go off a cliff of momentum that they're following when you might need to stop right where you're at and understand your culture is different from their culture, and you gotta adapt what best practice is for your company to understand if you even need a best practice at the time you're at.
Barb Bidan: Completely. Yeah, is it [00:19:00] even the right thing for us right now, right? What do
you truly need? You need what the business is telling you it needs based on, where they're at, where they're headed, what they need to achieve. So I wanna pull us over to the topic of AI a little bit more deeply.
So you've got about 1,800 employees globally at Ultradent, I think. What does AI readiness look like for you within your people function? How are you thinking about this within your own team?
David Alsop: Yeah, I think just in general as a company, the way we're talking about AI is we want to be tucked in modernizing and testing and doing modern things in the AI world, tucked in right behind the lawsuit generation of AI. And what we mean by that is there's companies that have bigger pockets than us that are gonna test the waters, test the laws, test the regulatory environment, and challenge that.
We don't have the pockets to be able to be in that environment doing anything free willy with AI. And so we're starting there is we need to be [00:20:00] understanding where we listen and monitor and see and pay attention to what the most modern companies are doing, and then let's just tuck in right behind them where the lawsuits prove out what we should be doing versus what they're doing.
And so that's our first premise that we follow. The second thing that we do is we ensure everybody in our administrative functions that has an administrative type role or administrative duties has access to the AI capabilities, and we invite people to test it. We invite people to play with it. We invite people to think about how this tool can help you be better in your job.
And as we do that, we start to see people taking their jobs to the next level, taking their jobs to new places, becoming more productive and finding more productivity in what all of us are doing. And so how it applies to our HR function is we view ourselves as the guinea pigs of different tool creation and AI in our function that we can share with [00:21:00] others, and we invite all the other functions to do the same for what their skill sets are meant to develop and try.
And so we've developed a committee. The committee helps guide us around the regulatory environments of AI, and that's what our committee helps guide us towards. All right. They provide tools, they provide best practices, so we can know what's out there. But we all meet together as a committee for the company to understand where do we stop, where best practices are going into the lawsuit generation of the future.
And but, just I'll just give one example. We were just playing around with how could we make this tool that we have on paper that we give to people, and we put in pictures, and we train people on into an interactive tool that can help a manager and employee interact better.
And it's just our model that we'd use to help people think about where are they at when it comes to performance and satisfaction because we want people to have maximum performance and maximum satisfaction. But that's a partnership a manager and employee have [00:22:00] to work through to make sure they're at that right apex point between those two.
We decided to go into Claude and just say, "Hey, can you ~cr-create~ an HTML tool that can help a manager and an employee have an interaction that's very simple and very appropriate to this picture?" We just put the picture into AI and said, "We wanna create a tool out of this." And what it created was unbelievable.
~It-- we've,~ we have Workday, we're a Workday customer, and we ~wa-~ we've been trying for years, how can we get Workday to create a tool like this? They're too big. They have to create so much consistency for their tool for many companies, and we just created something that can just be a simple link we put in that a manager can download, have a great conversation with their employee, and improve that employee's experience and their performance with a really simple conversation.
But before AI, before Claude was able to do that we were just putting a picture up there and trying to print it out and give people a piece of paper to do, which might [00:23:00] be fine. But now we have an HTML tool that provides a very simple way to have a conversation and expand it very quickly to many people in the organization.
And It's facilitating both the tool and the accessibility and the ability to broaden our influence in what we're doing in everything we do.
Barb Bidan: Yeah, there is no substitute to letting people put their hands on the tools and be experimenting in safe ways. Even with that example, it's seems like the, it's like the output there maybe even s- I don't know if it was you or your team, but it even surprised your team, right? In terms of the caliber of what they were able to produce.
It's like a step change situation. But I did also like how you balanced that with not everyone or every company can be out there chasing the lawsuits, right? On
all of our behalfs, right? But being a fast follow in that scenario, like you're not left behind, right?
There's such a sense right now in HR communities that I'm a part of around am I behind? And the fact is if you are [00:24:00] started and you are moving down the path, then my argument is you are not behind at this time. So such
great advice, David. I wanna ask a, a piece of broader advice for HR leaders relative to the book in particular, right?
So if I'm an HR leader, I finish the book, and then came to you as the ~au- ~one of the book's authors and says, "What do I..." Say, "What do I do on Monday morning to start closing this gap? I've never mattered in this way before. I wanna do it, David. What do I do on Monday morning that looks different?"
David Alsop: Whether you're a business partner supporting a vice president of a smaller organization or you're a CHRO supporting the ~s- ~the CEO of an organization or a recruiter supporting a hiring manager. It goes back to what I did when I didn't really know what HR was. I didn't have a degree in it, and I got assigned to be a business partner.
And the one thing that I realized to do [00:25:00] coming from sales is, what are our business goals, and how am I supporting those business goals? And it brought amazing conversations when I would go as an HR person to a vice president or a CEO and say, "Can you educate me about the business right now and what your vision is to grow this business and what needs to happen and what gaps exist when it comes to us delivering that as a people together towards that vision?"
And the rich conversation that comes out of that where it just starts the leader talking about their vision, and they start realizing there is a gap between what our people are at, where our people are at, and where I wanna go. You become that partner talking about there's the gap. Let's identify how we close that gap.
Let's develop strategies to close that gap." ~That,~ that's all I knew to do when I was a business partner because I wasn't indoctrinated in the profession, and it brought these [00:26:00] amazing opportunities for me to fill gaps in the people strategy that was missing for their business strategy. And so that's the first thing I would do is start just asking them about their strategy, what they're focused on, what their business is, and you will find there's a gap between their ideal and the people that they lead, and there will always be a gap.
We have ideals, and our cultures are always somewhere down here. HR is the gap strategist for all of our closure towards our ideals. The other thing that people can do that I have always done is find out who the enemy of HR is. Is it finance? Is it marketing? Whoever it is, and go to the head of that function and say, "Hey, can you mentor me?
I wanna understand why you hate HR. What's the problem with it?" And that's what I do with all my CFOs that I go into any organization for, my finance leaders is it seems like HR can be the deterrent to what you're trying to do to build financially stable business. Can you [00:27:00] mentor me on how our finance is going, what we can do, how I can help it?"
And in turn, that creates these connections to close the gaps of HR's distrust in an organization. So those are just two quick things that I would recommend people consider on Monday.
Barb Bidan: Such great advice, and I would be remiss if I didn't point out, A, how smart it is, but it is actually easy. You don't, you're not bringing something. You don't have to bring a perfect best practice out, right? Or launch something. That's the opposite of what's needed here. You need to go out with curiosity, asking questions, understanding the business, understanding the strategy, and all you need to know how to do is ask the right questions.
I could keep talking all day. I am excited to have a look at the, the book, so looking forward to that. I'm gonna take us home with a few lightning round questions, just quick hits to leave folks with. What is the HR skill that you think will matter most in five years but that barely exists today in the profession?
David Alsop: I don't know that this is gonna sound very innovative, We will always [00:28:00] need to have a skill to be the ones that have brain science understanding. There is a gap in business when it comes to understanding how the scientific methods work, understanding how the chemicals of these brains work, and I truly believe over the lifetime of the future of any business or human endeavor, understanding how the brain science works is gonna be key to motivating, to creating mental health, to creating stability in business strategy for people.
And so if you can just help people have purpose, if they can have collaboration and connection, and they can feel that they're contributing to that higher purpose, you'll be amazed how they will have mental health because of what you're triggering in the chemicals of their brain when you get that right.
And so brain science to me is the biggest skill we need to adapt to, learn, and understand on top of everything else.
Barb Bidan: I love it. The next one I'll hit you with is what is an HR practice that [00:29:00] you think AI should replace as fast as possible?
David Alsop: Employee relations. I don't think it will, but employee relations is sometimes the most annoying part of our job where we have to fire people and we have to let them go. I'm being facetious. There has to be a human in that endeavor to be able to help someone have understanding when they're being given feedback, understanding when they're being let go from an organization.
But it sure would be nice if AI could do that in a human way and take it off our plates so we can focus on preventing the employee relations problems. ~I,~ I just think the compliance is the base that we h- all have to deal with. Governments put laws in place, too many of them, and if AI can help us navigate compliance to get it off our plates more and stay compliant so we can focus on the solutions towards the business and understanding the risks towards doing the right things.
There's too many policies, there's too many regulations, and AI, I [00:30:00] think, can help us overcome that by mastering it and telling us where the risks exist so that we can take the right decisions and know how much risk is making the right decision going forward. So compliance, I think would-- I'd put first
Barb Bidan: That's my, that would be my set it and forget it nominee for sure. So let's do one more. The HR leaders who will matter most in the AI era are the ones who blank
David Alsop: The ones who embrace, maximize, and bring human strategy to the AI strategy. I've been ~a-asked~ by a lot of IT professionals to jump on their podcasts about AI, and a lot of them offline are telling me, "We are struggling because we have so much to bring with AI, but we don't understand the people side of it, and the people side is becoming the biggest barrier to AI's growth, expansion, and success."
And so HR leaders stand at the apex or the opportunity line [00:31:00] of the future of AI. If we can help bridge AI's potential and the human potential by breaking down the biases against it in organizations, helping maximize the compliance and morality of it as it comes to us, and bridging and really bringing that gap together.
And I call it in the book convergence between one opposition and the other. We can be the convergence between the opposition of the human resistance to it or the human overuse of it, and we can bridge the gap of the machines or the AI's , lack of morality or going too far beyond where we're at, and just finding that ideal growth curve together to maximize where the future could be.
Barb Bidan: That is such a smart comment. I am going to see if I have done justice to... I always take notes as we're talking. I have a few takeaways. I feel like I have one very large takeaway that I think is thematic, [00:32:00] but I think that'll pop out from the few things that I wrote down. So the first thing that I caught was the idea of never losing sight of the fact that we are here because we need to help make the business successful. And understanding that as an HR professional has to be at the core of what we do. What is the business strategy? What does the business need to achieve, et cetera. So I think thematically that came up through and through, and I think would in the book as well. I loved the phrase, so this is my next one, "Don't get too indoctrinated in the theory of the profession."
So I ~re-reworded~ that a little bit, but I like that indoctrination comment. It is more about what the leaders need, what the culture can handle, where the business is today, et cetera. Don't get too hung up on the things that we learned in textbooks. And I also caught the AI in the AI era being that fast follow, for lack of a better phrase.
You don't need to be the lawsuit chaser, and you can be very aware of what's going on and just tuck in [00:33:00] behind those folks who are gonna test all the rules for us, and that is by no means a bad strategy, and it's not a lagging strategy in any way, shape, or form. In fact, it actually may make you faster than the people who are stuck with the lawsuits, right?
So that
is... And then I got ~another~ another takeaway, and when I asked what to start on Monday is go ask about the business's strategy. It is so easy, right? It i- we're all sitting here thinking about, like, how the... I can show up smart with XYZ program and a bunch of stuff, and that isn't actually what they need.
They need us to go understand their business, ask some questions, and I think that came through very clearly in all that you shared. So I'm sure our listeners will get that and a lot more from the talk today. But I love to leave guests with the last word. So if you were to offer something up to the leader who's just listened to us talk on their drive home, what is it that you want them to go on and continue thinking about for the rest of their drive?
David Alsop: It's the title of the book. ~How do you make HR matterder--~ how do you make HR matter? How do you [00:34:00] make it relevant? And as a CEO or business leader, how do you expect it to be relevant? How do you expect HR to matter? Humans are the most costly, most influential, most critical part of a business, and yet we put a function in the side because we all think we're experts on it.
But you've got a function there that can help be the focus on the strategy of making humans matter. And so if they can make it matter they're gonna do a lot of impact on the organization. And if CEOs can allow them to make it matter because they are the gap sometimes because they don't expect it, and they just keep HR in a corner, unleash the power of human by having strategic people influencing that with you and helping you to be the best human influencer you can be as a leader.
Barb Bidan: Great advice. I'm so glad our paths crossed and that you came on the show today. Thank you, David, for joining me.
David Alsop: Thanks, Barb. It's great to be with you.