Being in HR may feel like a thankless job at times. But, according to one executive, HR leaders have the ability to harness an “HR superpower”—which can drive positive business results and position HR to be seen as more strategic by both leaders and employees.

The key to this superpower, according to Darcy Mackay, chief people officer at workforce management software provider Rippling? Understanding the industry the organization is in, the business itself and the talent strengths and challenges in each business unit. Doing so, she says, can reshape both impacts and perceptions of HR across the organization.

It’s a perspective Mackay developed during her more than two decades at commercial real estate services and investments firm CBRE, where she led global divisions and held roles including chief people officer and chief operating officer. Mackay recently shared with Human Resource Executive what HR leaders need to know to embrace this “superpower” and drive people and business success.

Human Resource Executive: What influenced your view on the “superpower” HR leaders have?

Mackay: One of the unique advantages that HR professionals have is they really see all vantage points of a company and its talent. There are very few functions within a company, including on the business side, where you really have a 360 view of what’s going on in the company. HR leaders have this incredible vantage point to be able to draw from that I think is sometimes undervalued.

I am not a career HR person. I’ve spent the vast majority of my career running businesses. And I think the great secret is that we’re all in HR. Even individual contributors are influencing referrals and helping to onboard new members of the team, even though they don’t necessarily report to them.

As a business leader for many years, running very large global teams, I had a very clear-eyed view of how much revenue or clients I was leaving on the table if a role was unfilled, or if a role that I had on the team was filled with someone who wasn’t performing at peak. I had a very clear understanding of what the relationship was between talent and my P&L and talent and the ability to satisfy customers. That’s really what led me to having a deeper understanding of HR and, importantly, where some of the connective tissue within HR is broken.

HRE: What are some of the skill sets HR leaders need to hone to take advantage of having that 360 view?

Mackay: I would say two things. One is business acumen, and the other is human-centered design. It’s very hard to engineer an HR function if you don’t really understand what you’re trying to drive in the business. If you don’t understand the core of what the business needs and where it’s headed, it’s very hard to make sure that your HR organization is ready to go drive those results.

I find that HR organizations can be very input-driven, as opposed to focused on outcomes and really delivering business results. A good example of where I see this a lot is in the learning and development field, where the most caring, generous HR people love to run programs that make people feel really great. But we’re not necessarily really clear on why we’re running programs—and what we expect the outcome to be: Is it better retention? Is it the ability to move certain cohorts of people into different skills or jobs? I think being focused on the business acumen side is really important.

And then on human-centered design, I think that like all functions, HR leaders can have a tendency to be very focused on their own HR-speak—as opposed to, “Let’s put the employee at the center of all things that we’re doing. Let’s design our technology and our systems and our experiences to be seamless and productive for the employee”—how they experience your brand in the marketplace to how they get onboarded to how they progress in their career.

HRE: What conversations are happening at Rippling around AI and its impact on the workforce?

Mackay: AI is certainly a big buzzword these days, among just about every company out there. We have started with Ripping Recruiting in our AI capabilities. All of our interviewing is done using our ATS module, which is fantastic. You don’t have to search in your email: Where did I put that person’s resume? Where did I put their presentation? What did Susie think of that candidate? It’s all in our ATS.

The ATS sends out automated reminders that you’re having your interview—“Here’s the prep that you need to do”—and then as soon as the interview is completed, it reminds you to enter feedback into the tool. One of our baseline AI capabilities summarizes all of the interviews and feedback into a single, digestible summary. That’s a way we’ve been using AI for the last year pretty effectively.

There’s also a lot of work going on behind the scenes to launch some pretty exciting stuff. Give us a few months; stay tuned.

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HRE: HR leaders everywhere are focused on retention. Where are you concentrating when it comes to keeping top talent?

Mackay: Rippling hires the top 1% of the top 1%. Especially on the engineering and product side, we’re really looking for some pretty extraordinary people, who tend to be very motivated by being able to stretch their wings and do things in their career that are very hard to do at other companies, especially larger companies. There’s a lot of runway here that that engineering talent has to create product. We tend to be a pretty attractive playground for folks who want to act like founders—have the ability to create but to do it at a larger scale than they were able to on their own. So, recruiting and retaining those folks in a high-performance culture is definitely one of our areas of focus.

Rippling is a really interesting place because it really lives its leadership principles. And so, people can come and stretch their wings and push what we call the limits of possible—to do things that in other places people would say is crazy. We find a way to get it done.

That’s pretty exciting, and I found that that level of talent wants to work with that same level of talent. There’s something inherently motivating when you work with people who are superb at what they do. That’s the performance culture that we’re very focused on maintaining. That can get diluted a bit as companies grow, and we’re trying really hard to make sure that doesn’t happen here as we grow.

HRE: You spent 20 years at CBRE; what was it like getting acclimated to a different organizational culture as you joined Rippling?

Mackay: I describe it a bit like being in a washing machine. The environment that I came from was very fast-paced and very high-performance-driven. But there is something about Rippling that is very uncommon, so getting used to an environment where things move at the speed that they do was one of the biggest eye-openers.

The way decisions get made is very asynchronous. And while I was used to working asynchronously, the vast majority of communication and decision-making happens asynchronously. I would say that was probably one of my biggest adjustments. The second was, I was really surprised at how transparent everything here is: The good, the bad, the ugly—it’s all out there.

And [CEO] Parker [Conrad] really leads the way on this. There really isn’t anything happening behind hidden doors or decisions being made in back rooms. When people make mistakes, it’s very front and center. In fact, one of our leadership principles is “decide quickly.” It’s the ability to make decisions quickly and to learn from those decisions. Your instincts are right a lot. But where you’re off, it’s like, “OK, I was off, here’s why.” And you move on. There’s not a lot of preciousness around that. That was surprising to me culturally when I first joined.

HRE: What aspects of your personal identity have most shaped who you are as an HR leader?

Mackay: First and foremost, I’m a mom. I think there’s a great amount of humility that is learned when we become parents, and especially as kids get older, you realize you have to lead with influence. As they grow, you want your kids to develop their own identities and think for themselves and make their own mistakes and what have you, but you want to be a role model. I think there are a lot of parallels between parenting and leading people in a workplace.

I firmly believe that the healthier our brains are, the better we are at work. While we all work hard, it’s really important to balance that out with things that inspire us personally.

That means I have a number of interests that I hold around microfinance and helping underprivileged communities. I’ve for many years served on various not-for-profit boards. In fact, I used to work in the not-for-profit community for many years before I went back to grad school and eventually went back into the private sector.

I’m also a huge fan of just doing fun things that keep me sane. I spend a lot of time trying to exercise. I love my Peloton, I do a lot of yoga. In the last year and a half, I have learned how to be a competitive equestrian. I picked that up when my daughter became too busy with high school for her horse, and I said, “Well, someone’s got to ride this horse.” I really had no idea how difficult it was to figure out how to get this incredibly beautiful, large animal to actually do what you want it to do, even walking in a straight line. That’s been super fun for me. And if I have some spare time, I might play around on my piano.

These are things that exercise different circuits in your brain. One of the things I emphasize to people, especially those earlier in their careers, is how important it is to take time off. You’re using different parts of your brain, and you need that whole brain to be working when you come back to work. Because you will see problems differently, you will see solutions that you can’t see otherwise. To the extent that we can figure out how to activate different parts of our brains, I really do feel like we become better employees and better teammates as a result of that. So, I do my best to lead by example for my teams.

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