Throughout the course of her career, Donna Scarola, chief people officer at real estate investing platform Parcl, has successfully
"People don't prepare you for the complexity of what I like to call the human skills that are required to lead teams," she says. "So first there's the job skills, like can you do the job? Are you competent at getting the work done? But then it's, can you scale the work? Can you inspire and influence others in a way that can bring a team together and actually get things done?"
As a result, 69% of
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According to research from Gallup, 50% of employees leave their companies because of their boss in order to improve their overall life at some point in their career. Today's employees are expecting their managers to be
"[Managing] is a totally different skill set than doing it yourself as an employee," she says. "And most importantly you have to do it in a way that's positive and inspires people and doesn't feel like management. You're just there to support, help guide, give feedback and truly just unlock their potential as opposed to instructing or advising."
Scarola recently spoke with EBN and discussed her own journey up the ladder, what she learned and how it has defined the kind of leader she is today.
Walk me through the positions you've held throughout the years. How did they grow in seniority?
After graduate school I became a product manager at Workday for two years, then made a lateral move to become a product manager at performance management platform Reflektive for a year and a half. Then I got poached by Johnson & Johnson, where I joined in a senior manager role and eventually became global head of HR at Ethicon. As a product manager technically you're managing designers and engineers because they're on your team, but they're mostly your peers. I jumped from an individual contributor to a senior manager role, which was a big jump. I then became a director at J&J for almost three years and now I'm chief people officer at Parcl.
As a new leader, how do you foster good relationships with employees without sacrificing the fact that you are their manager now?
Both at Johnson & Johnson and even here at Parcl I've almost always been managing people older than me, which is a really fascinating dynamic. There's always an insecurity there in general of managing people when you are earlier in your career and you're going to have that feeling of, "I earned this, but have I earned their respect? Do I have followership?" The best bosses are ones that are very human. They admit what they're good at and what they're not good at, and that's something that I've baked into our culture at Parcl. The first day that they sit down at Parcl I show them my growth plan, and that means I'll tell them, "I'm not so good at these things and I'm going to want you to give me feedback."
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If you admit what you're working on, it signals to people that we're not perfect, we have a growth mindset. But that doesn't mean we're not going to hold ourselves accountable to being professional, right? It's not like saying that we're all flawed and anything flies, because the same way I'm going to ask my team to hold me accountable when they see me slipping, they'll have talent assessments where they can see where they have opportunity for growth. There's been so much research lately on how building trust really comes down to listening, and I think the antiquated approach to management is that you're constantly telling and giving very explicit directions. That's been flipped on its head in the last 10 years, which reminds leaders that they're there to pose questions and to really listen and support. You do have to prove yourself, but you do it through creating connections and being genuine.
What was your experience like with your managers when you were promoted or when you moved to a new company at a more senior level? How did you advocate for yourself and make sure you got the pay and benefits you deserved?
Very early in my career in tech, I remember I was sitting next to this straight, white man and he made $40,000 more than me and he didn't even have a Master's degree, and I did. We were in the same position and we had the same years of experience. I realized that I did such a bad job negotiating out of grad school. We have to create transparency through data, and we're seeing that now with laws in New York and California. But what did I do then? I had a lot of really difficult conversations with managers, explaining my market value and that if they couldn't get even remotely close to that in the next six months, I would have to look elsewhere.
You have led teams both during and after the pandemic. How did COVID change the way leaders operated?
I always say that the pandemic did a massively beautiful thing to management, because what it proved is that just because you don't see work — which is such an industrial complex mindset — doesn't mean it's not getting done. What I think it did is make a lot of leaders realize, why are we measuring work by how much we see, like productivity, when the reality is that intellectual and creative work like innovation doesn't always look like traditional productivity. So they have to find new ways to measure those things. It made managers realize that they have to be more like a coach. It humbled a lot of leaders, and for those who were willing, it changed the way managers viewed work.
Were there ever key moments in your career with a manager where you chose to adopt one of their strategies? Or the opposite?
I had a manager early in my career who really believed in a sink-or-swim mentality with zero support. They would assign a really complex problem and tell me to go figure it out for a few months and come back. I did not thrive in that environment, and I realized that as a manager, I'm never going to be absent. I'm never going to ask someone to do something I can't help them with or that I'm not willing to help them with. Because that's not how people learn.
Reinforce the great things that people don't even realize about themselves, because it's very easy to be avoidant if you're frustrated with someone or they're not meeting expectations. So for me, I'm constantly giving feedback and asking for feedback on my own work because I learned that it doesn't need to become this big thing if we're just communicative all the time. I always start every one-on-one with anyone that's on my team by asking how they are feeling? How's their energy lately? What's keeping them up at night? The pandemic definitely reinforced that because if people aren't feeling well mentally or physically, we can't expect them to be showing up at work and doing well, and good leaders always make you feel that way — seen and heard.
