HRM sat down with Isa Notermans, Fleet Space Technologies’ Chief People Officer, to learn about how heading up global DEI at Spotify and leading an APAC HR team at Google set her up for success.
1. Gain experience in fast-growth companies
When determining my career path in HR, I took the time to assess my professional values. I loved people, I loved science, and I needed something that would fuel my energy for change and disruption. Working in the technology start-up space seemed like the natural fit. My first official HR role was at realestate.com.au back when it was a tiny start-up. This was my first taste of working in a fast-paced environment, and I loved it. From there, I moved to Google where I spent a decade managing different talent programs and, eventually, became APAC Diversity, Culture and Inclusion HR Business Partner. At Google, I learned to say ‘yes’ to (almost) everything. Retrospectively, I can see that likely led to people continuing to give me opportunities. My impostor syndrome hadn’t kicked in enough at that point to tell me ‘I can’t do this,’ so I just gave everything a go. That’s not to say I was immune from impostor syndrome – Google was quite intimidating at times – but it was a company that was brimming with learning opportunities, so I just chose to focus on those. From there, I felt ready to step into HR leadership and over the next 10 years I worked as Head of HR/DEI for various global organisations, including Pandora, Spotify, LinkTree and Airtasker.2. Focus on impact over outputs
When people hear you’ve worked at companies like Google and Spotify, they’re always keen to learn the secret to their success, particularly in relation to driving high-performance cultures. A disclaimer I always share is that no one is getting it 100 per cent right. At Google, we were iterating our performance frameworks every year. You’ve got people who were individual contributors, people in high-visibility projects, back-end support projects, etc. So it was hard to apply one methodology to an entire workforce. One thing I always suggest considering as a first step is to determine your ethos around performance. Is it managed by a manager or is it self-driven? Do people have to own it themselves or do we guide and lead people through a performance journey? Now, as the Chief People Officer at Fleet Space Technologies – which builds and operates space-enabled technology – I’ve been able to cherry-pick elements of what I’ve learned from other companies and apply it to our own workforce.“While you want to be flexible in your thinking, you also need to be strong in your core beliefs.”For example, the way we see performance at Fleet is by focusing on impact. We’ve created a framework called the Impact Alignment Process and intentionally removed the word ‘performance’ because that means different things to different people. But impact, for us, is very clear. It’s about how you are driving Fleet forward and not just doing BAU work, because we need to be doing more than that as a start-up; we need to be building momentum. Some organisations have outputs as their main performance measure. We have outcomes – how have you improved something? We have skills-based mastery – how are you building your skills to become an expert in something? Then we have behaviours – how do you work in alignment with our key behaviours of patience, achievement and collaboration? When I’m assessing the impact someone is having, I look at how individuals are contributing to these three areas, and if they are doing so in a collaborative way. We want to avoid creating a highly individualistic culture – which can sometimes occur in highly intelligent organisations like ours. We work hard to create a culture of sharp minds instead of sharp elbows.
3. Champion initiatives that make a difference
A key part of HR leadership, from my perspective, is championing healthy work behaviours. Mental health and wellbeing have been front and centre of my world for a long time. I experienced burnout at Google. I pushed myself too hard, and, as someone who identifies as a Type A personality, I really struggled to slow myself down. I also struggled a lot with postpartum depression after having my daughter when I was living and working in New York. This experience showed me that there were many people who were silently suffering when they came back from parental leave. Many people are expecting you to be right back where you were before you had a baby. That’s why, at Spotify, we built a great mental health program which encompassed a variety of different life experiences, such as those experiencing substance abuse, neurodivergent employees or people with learning difficulties, people with acute mental health issues and those who might be experiencing divorce or the death of a parent. We didn’t want to put guardrails around how someone might need to take time to care for themselves or others in their life. How are we helping people show up authentically if we’re saying that in order to take time off, you have to be officially sick? This is a hangover from the industrial revolution when we felt we could only get off the production line if we were physically sick. We need to challenge this thinking, which is over 250 years old. When I was the Chief HR Officer at Airtasker, we wanted to think about how we could give back to our people. We built the four-day work week, and called the fifth days ‘recharge days’. And at Fleet, we offer 10 wellness days each year, on top of sick leave. While these initiatives may not be realistic for all businesses, HR leaders can champion flexibility in pursuit of employee wellness as a way to respond to the complexity of our work environments. The type and volume of work we’re expecting from people now has shifted pretty dramatically, so it’s just smart business sense to invest in creating the right conditions for people to respond to this.
4. Leverage a broad range of perspectives
For those looking to step into HR leadership, I always suggest shadowing other business leaders. Join their team meetings so you can pick up the nuances of how they talk about the business. I still join other teams’ meetings so I can learn about how they’re talking about their specific people issues. The other thing I did, after I had developed my core HR competencies, was diversify my influences. I made a point of not consuming only HR-related content. I looked to other business leaders to be my role models. Not only is this helpful in giving you a full-spectrum view of the business landscape, it also diversifies the types of opinions you’re hearing. Now, I intentionally seek out the opinions of people I don’t agree with. This helps me develop a more balanced view and gain a perspective on the ideas and concepts that other people are challenging. When you’re Chief People Officer, people are going to come to you with strong opinions all the time, and while you want to be flexible in your thinking, you also need to be strong in your core beliefs. It’s important to learn how to hold these two perspectives without having to be right or wrong.5. Co-design roles with employees
My final piece of advice – for HR practitioners at any career stage – is to build 80 per cent of a role and then let the other 20 per cent be defined by the person in the role. We’re always trying to perfectly match people to a position description, but that doesn’t allow the person to exist in the role the way they need to. It’s similar to how Google used to allocate 20 per cent of its engineering employees’ time to work on new initiatives – that’s how we ended up with Gmail – but that was very much dedicated to R&D projects. This is about skills expansion and development. That 20 per cent is a buffer to flex into other spaces that excite and energise you. This allows for people’s agility to shine through and helps them prepare for what’s coming next for your business rather than feeling tightly bound to a position description that was written two years ago. This is particularly true for start-ups where jobs change every six to 12 months, but as the world of work continues to evolve at warp speed, it could be an important shift for more traditional businesses to consider too. Isa Notermans is Chief People Officer at Fleet Space Technologies. A shorter version of this article first appeared in the October/November 2024 edition of HRM Magazine.Want to learn more about effective leadership and management? Sign up for AHRI’s short course to understand your leadership style and learn how to create key performance indicators.
Hear more from Isa in this episode of AHRI’s podcast, Let’s Take This Offline.