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 Hiii y’all, I’m OOO today after spending the weekend in a new city and attending a music festival. Ya girl needs a break every now and then because I fear I am too old for festivals. At least my feet and lower back think so! BUT you know I’d never miss a chance to bring some light and joy into your inbox on a Monday so here I am!!!! Below is an edition to bookmark about landing your message across the mediums at work and a bunch of things to also keep your eye out for: 🍽️ Chicago peeps where you atttt? I’m gonna be in the Windy City in July for a dinner that I'm hosting with my friends at Rippling. Want to snag a spot in the room for a delicious dinner and a gift that I’m very very very excited by? Request a spot and I hope to see you there. 🎧 A fresh pod ep in your ears!! Sagar Khatri joins me this week to talk about when global talent limits where you can hire and how we both navigated hiring global talent for the first time. I deffff learned some important lessons! 🤖 THIS FRIDAY… we build live, again!! Cassidy and I are back by popular demand for part 2 of the AI live build. We’re tackling a bit more advanced things you can do in this session. You can catch up on part one here!!! Mark your calendar for June 12th from 3:00 - 4:30 PM ET and I’ll see you there!!! 📺 HR Therapy we’re digging into the THREE biggest challenges HR leaders are talking about! Spoiler alert: ranking at the top is fraud, AI in hiring and selecting tech. I’m joined by an incredible panel to dig into why these are ranking as our top challenges and WTF to do about them! Grab your spot and let’s jam. Now onto today… Enjoy my homage to Buffy. Sponsored by Rippling HR people are out here drowning in administrative work...meanwhile, it's a perfect use case for AI! Download the playbook and give them a try, so you can get back to the convos and decisions we all know NO AI can ever replicate! 😉 HR'S ROLE Right data, wrong room? ^^ I certainly will change your mind!!!! Last week I got a tad intense about HR's value and the three types of metrics we should actually be tracking to show our value. If you missed it, you can read it here! And at the very end I left you on a cliffhanger like some kind of HR Shonda Rhimes with my very own form of a to be continued… 👋 Welcome to part two 👋 You can do all the work like tracking the right metrics. You can connect the dots across your HR systems. You can set the baseline, measure after, calculate that a 2-point shift in turnover saved the business $400k (remember that math from last week??). You can build the most beautiful, business-impact-connected metric in the entire world… …and still watch it die a quiet, lonely death in someone's inbox or fall flat in a meeting. WHY??? Because sometimes we obsess over the what and completely ignore the where. The medium absolutely matters! The same exact metric lands three completely different ways depending on whether it's in an email, said out loud in a meeting, or dropped into a message to leadership. A lot of folks present every single metric the same way no matter where it's going!!! So today we're talking about the MEDIUM. Email vs. meeting vs. leadership message and how to present your data so it actually connects instead of getting skimmed, buried, or politely ignored. First, a quick reminder!! Before you decide how to present a metric, make sure you can answer two questions:
The medium you pick should serve to answer those two questions. Okay, now the three most common mediums we find ourselves presenting data. #1: the email / async update: This could be your monthly people update, your quarter recap, or even your FYI to stakeholders who aren’t deeply ingrained in your work. Here's the thing you HAVE TO remember about email: you are not present to explain it. You don’t get the chance to read faces or catch confused looks and jump in to clarify anything. The worst part? Potentially someone is going to skim this email on their phone between two meetings while half-listening to whatever conversation is going on. We’re all guilty of it, including me! So the #1 rule of presenting data in email: Lead with the answer. Bury nothing. Or as they say in journalism, don’t bury the lede. The conclusion goes FIRST. Not the data set size, methodology you used, build-up, not the "as a reminder in Q1 we launched,” your headline goes at the top in plain language, and the supporting detail comes after for the people who want it. An example: ❌ "Over the last six months we ran a manager development program across two cohorts, and after collecting upward feedback and comparing it to where we started, we've analyzed the results and…" ✅ "Manager effectiveness scores went up 10 points after our development program. Here's the breakdown…" Do you see the difference? The second one tells a busy person with short attention (your CEO???) the entire point in one line. If they read NOTHING else, they got what they need to know. The detail underneath is the context for those who want or need it! A few more email rules I'd die on a hill for:
📚 Email is where data goes to be referenced later. So make it easily findable and skimmable. #2: the meeting / live presentation: A meeting is a completely different game!!! You have the one thing email never gives you: you're in the room!! There you can read faces, pause, and handle any pushback in real time. But the biggest thing?? ✨ You can tell a STORY and let it build ✨ So please, for the love of all things, do not turn the meeting into “this could have been an email” by simply reading your email out loud. We’ve all sat through far too many of those meetings that could’ve been emails. In a meeting, your superpower is the narrative. So here’s a storytelling arc to use: Here's where we were → here's what we did → here's where we are now → here's what it means → here's what I need from you. The structure: Baseline, action, result, impact, ask. An example: "Back in January, only 60% of our managers were rated effective by their teams. We knew that was a flight risk because most people quit managers, not companies. So we rolled out the development program. As of last month, we're at 70% effectiveness. That 10-point jump matters because manager quality is one of our biggest levers on retention, and retention is currently the most expensive problem we have. Which brings me to what I want to talk about next…" A meeting is also where you get to do the thing email can't: handle the room. So walk in expecting the hard questions and have the answer ready:
Pro-tip: I actually write down all the questions I think I could get and how I would answer them. In a live meeting you can actually reference that doc. Two things that quietly kill a live data presentation:
👀 Getting into the room is half the battle, the other is landing the message with the attention you have. #3: the leadership message / exec or board level: #3 could be the highest-stakes, lowest-word-count medium there is. This is the Slack message to your CEO. The slide presented in the board deck. The time you get in an exec meeting before someone moves on to revenue. I’ll never forget my first board meeting. I won’t lie, I was scared sh*tless. I asked my CEO what to expect and he said they may have some questions. That’s it. So in typical Hebba behavior, I over-prepared and practiced my slides over and over again. We ended up spending 10 minutes on my slide and they had good questions, nothing too wild. Truthfully I was surprised about how big picture some of their questions were. The truth about leadership at that level is oftentimes they don’t want the metric, they want to know the implications. They are not asking "what's our turnover.” They are asking, in their heads: Is this going to cost us money, lose us people, or create risk? And do I need to intervene and do anything about it? So the entire art of presenting data to leadership is translating everything into their language of:
❌ "Voluntary turnover is at 18% and trending down.” ✅ "We cut turnover 2 points this year. That's roughly $400k saved because we didn’t have to spend time or resources re-hiring. Some tips for communicating metrics to the leadership level:
Listen, I’m a yapper. I sometimes want to go IN DEPTH on metrics and explain all the things non-HR people don’t get. But in these meetings I have to refrain. It’s a practice, it takes reminding myself and never, ever forgetting WHO IS MY AUDIENCE. ⏱️ There is a time and place for everything. The goal is to always know your audience and your messaging so that you can have the best success at getting your message across and your plans approved. The throughline: Same metric. Three mediums.
The data doesn't change. The delivery changes based on who's receiving it and what they need to do with it. We spend SO much energy getting the number right and then almost none deciding how to deliver it. Data without a story is just numbers in a spreadsheet!! ✅ One thing you can do this week: Take a metric you're sitting on right now. Now write it three ways:
Same data. Three deliveries. Feel how different they are. Then next time you go to share a number, ask yourself the only question that matters: what room am I in? I have to cut myself off now because I’ve been yapping for far too long in this newsletter. Next week I’m talking about how everyone wants HR to fix things but… should we? TTYL! Sponsored by Go1 Nearly half of your employees needed support multiple times last month, but only 7% went to your learning platform. 😬 The math isn't mathing!! If your people are struggling in real time and your L&D strategy is sending them to a course catalog, it might be time to find a system that works. Go1's Weight of Development report breaks down exactly why workforce expectations have outpaced how learning is being delivered, and what needs to change next. 🤓 (HUMAN) RESOURCES
*This one is brought to you by one of my amazing brand partners WORK-LIFE BALANCE
SONG OF THE WEEK 🎧 Standing, Anthony Head Anthony Head (Giles in Buffy) passed away last week and this was his solo song in the musical episode. Not me ugly crying listening to this! The Buffy fandom has lost 3 actors in the past two years so the fandom is really going thru it right now. May your Monday be as peaceful as possible. It's not the day to mess with HR. Reminder: not every problem is yours to solve <3 | |||||||||||
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