💡People Leader Spotlight: Lars Schmidt
Founder of Amplify, Author and Podcaster
In This Edition
🔍 The impact of an open-source model for HR
📝 The potential of communications and people leader partnerships
📖 The power of community to foster learning and growth
About Lars
Lars Schmidt is the Founder of Amplify, a firm that helps companies and HR leaders navigate the new world of work through HR executive search and the Amplify Academy HR practitioner and leadership development program. Lars has spent over 20 years in the industry, building a range of leading global companies. He’s a writer for Fast Company, author of the bestselling Redefining HR book, co-author of Employer Branding for Dummies, and Host of the Redefining HR podcast.
What sparked your professional path to the work you're leading now?
Looking back, it’s been an accidental career path. I grew up in South Florida and went to Florida State where I studied Marketing and International Business. I had one goal — moving to Los Angeles! I thought I’d work in advertising there.
When I went to a career fair on campus, there was one company recruiting that had a role in LA. At the time, I didn’t even know what the field was — it was technical recruiting — but I thought if it got me to LA, that was the job for me! I liked the team, and that’s how I started in the People space many years ago.
What is one project you are particularly proud to have accomplished over the years?
In 2015, I co-founded HR Open Source to see if we could take the model of open-sourced software and apply it to HR. We grew that to thousands of members and hundreds of companies. That was my big catalyst into open-source. In the very early days of Covid, I put together an open-source resource to help companies and practitioners navigate the situation that was rapidly changing by the second.
In early February 2020, I started having conversations with several global Chief People Officer groups. In particular, for the companies that had operations in Asia and Italy, they were addressing these challenges first. Soon thereafter, it became clear that the pandemic was going to impact everyone and we all needed to help each other.
Around that time, Coinbase open-sourced their pandemic guide for how companies could prepare for the pandemic. I knew we needed to amplify that resource. I wrote a Fast Company article that spotlighted it and added more HR resources for supporting employees, specifically around safety and communications. The situation was evolving so quickly that within three days that resource was already out of date!
At the time, I created a Google doc on Coronavirus HR Comms where I linked to a range of resources to help serve as a global benchmark that allowed practitioners to understand what their peers were doing for their employees. Then, I leaned on my network to ask them to open source their guides to also include them in the master list. I knew that the more resources we could share the better — we were all experiencing this massive event at the same time and there was literally no playbook for it. I firmly believe that the more we can lean on each other, the greater we can help employers and employees.
The doc went viral — it was shared tens of thousands of times around the world. During US business hours, I couldn’t even make edits to it because there were so many people logged into the doc. I had to set my alarm for 3 am US Time when I could actually access it to make edits. This is the doc today.
More than two years later, I still get positive feedback from people who leveraged those resources to make informed decisions about how they could support their businesses. It was one of the more rewarding projects I’ve done — it had impact and scale at a time when our industry really needed that guidance. It was a real privilege to tap into my open-source experience and my network to create a resource that could support others at the start of the pandemic.
What inspired you to launch your current venture — Amplify Academy?
My personal mission is to accelerate innovation in HR. Last year, I wrote my second book — Redefining HR: Transforming People Teams to Drive Business Performance. It was designed to be a modern framework for today’s HR to compare and contrast it with legacy HR.
Initially, I set out for the book to serve as an on-ramp for HR practitioners who wanted to practice more impactful, business-driven and culture-first HR practices. When the book was released, I listened to the feedback that I received from readers. The question that kept coming up the most was — where can I go to continue my learning and development for modern HR?
I didn’t have a good answer to that question. A lot of the long-established entities in our field are not doing a great job preparing practitioners for the work of today or tomorrow. I realized that if this platform supporting the architects of the new world of work didn’t exist, I needed to build it!
Amplify Academy started as a community with a 4-week cohort and peer-learning program. It’s now grown into an AI learning lab with courses, resources and templates that practitioners need to build modern people teams and functions. There’s also a global Slack community of peers sharing ideas, struggles and practices. For the leadership development, I’ve run six cohorts helping 184 students around the world. It’s been amazing to watch this community grow!
While I’ve always been an advocate for modern HR practices, I’ve supported this goal through books, conference speaking engagements and a podcast, but those have been passive actions. To now run an active platform that’s mentoring, developing and coaching people leaders is incredibly meaningful. I get to see the growth, connections and collaborations that are happening from the Academy, and it's been one of the most rewarding projects I’ve launched in my career.
What are the ways that people leaders collaborate with internal communications?
Over the past two years, the role of a Chief People Officer has evolved to also be Chief Pandemic Officer, Chief Retention Officer, Chief Crisis Officer. Because we’ve had so many significant flashpoints in the world — Covid, social justice movements, racial equity, extreme political climate, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and so many other events taking place — the role of a Chief People Officer as a communicator has never been more important.
Every organization has a different approach to how they think of it. In some organizations, they view their CEO as that person. In others, it’s the head of HR, especially for internal communication. At smaller companies, often they have an internal communications manager who sits within HR — they are the ones often crafting the responses.
Right now, a lot of heads of CPOs are struggling with when, what and where do you communicate. There are so many of these flashpoints that are happening globally and it’s a real challenge to determine when they should something, what they can say — is it going to represent them as an individual or the organization — and is going to make a difference or will it just be a token statement with no real effort behind them?
There’s an expectation from employees that organizations should take a public stance on any event that is important to them, whether it’s aligned with the mission, vision and values of the organization. There’s no wrong or right answer here. I understand why employees could be frustrated and how People executives are put in a difficult spot. This is the reality of the climate we are in right now.
That’s why the role of the Chief People Officer as a Chief Communicator has never been more important — understanding how to craft a message, what medium to use, what points they want to make and how to listen. There’s an art to this role that wasn’t historically part of a Chief Human Resources Officer skillset, but the demands of the business and the world of work today require a heightened skill set than we had in the past.
You do an incredible job teaching others. How do you keep learning about the field?
For me to be successful in the work that I do, I have to be in constant discovery mode for new resources, ideas and perspectives and try to bring those to the HR community. I have an interesting perch in the industry because I haven’t been in an in-house corporate role for eight years, but I’m deeply connected to HR Leadership through my podcast, social channels, Executive Search and the Academy.
In order for me to truly serve this community, I need to be really informed and check my views with the realities of someone doing that job. I’m very mindful that Analysts may have great ideas in theory, but if they haven’t sat in that seat and aren’t calibrating their recommendations with the on-the-ground realities of the work, it’s actually harmful.
We’re living in this golden age of information with so much great content out there that I try to separate the signal from the noise. One of the premises of the Academy’s Learning Lab is that I will be that filter of information you need to know to be a modern people operator — separating signal from noise. In order for me to do that effectively, I need to be reading a range of diverse sources and making time to read, listen to podcasts, and watch videos.
Fast forward, what does the future of communications at work look like?
There are many companies already operating in the future! For HR, communications skills will become more of a focal point — not just for CPOs, but across the field. We have to find creative ways to communicate with employees, whether it’s rolling out a program or recruiting a candidate. What HR says to people matters, especially now when there’s so much content and resources. Our ability to rise above the noise and capture people’s attention will be critical.
There will be more training with visual communications, it’s not just text and words anymore, but packaging ideas to ask — how can we influence with stories? This translates to the work that we do — you can have the best policy, but if you roll it out in a clunky way, people won’t pay attention.
There are also some interesting tools in HR space like Pin that allow you to personalize and automate employee messaging. It also allows employees to select how and when they want communication. The future of communications in HR is being more comfortable with different modalities of messaging to see what resonates with our audiences the way we need to connect.
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