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Pat Wadors, CHRO at Intuitive (the company behind the da Vinci surgical robot), the architect of LinkedIn's Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging framework known as DIBs, and the author of the 2024 Wiley book Unlock Your Leadership Story, joins Jessica Neal and Peter Clarke on Truth Works.
From losing her mother during her freshman year of college and getting diagnosed with dyslexia in a career center conversation at LSU, to declaring at nineteen that she was going to run HR, Pat traces the unlikely path that took her from a fine art major in Louisiana to one of the most respected CHROs in Silicon Valley.
She walks through the moment Jeff Weiner called her in the middle of a staff meeting at Plantronics to come fix LinkedIn at three thousand employees, the whiteboard exercise in her first five weeks that forced the executive team to admit they were not actually being "open and constructive," and the 3am realisation that became DIBs.
She talks openly about why John Donahoe pursued her for ServiceNow with a now legendary line about marriage, and the comment from a head of product that has stuck with her for years, telling her she was the dentist while the rest of the executive team were just dental hygienists.
She then opens up about her Personal Scorecard, and the moment her son devastated her by pointing out that if she actually stuck to her own scorecard, she would only see her grandchildren seventy two times by the time they turned eighteen.
In this episode, Jessica, Peter and Pat discuss:
- The art show story that taught Pat at eighteen that she only sold to people she actually liked
- The three year clock she runs in her head to avoid getting pigeon-holed in any role
- What joining LinkedIn at three thousand employees was actually like
- The whiteboard exercise that became the foundation of LinkedIn's culture
- Why she gave DIBs to the world rather than keep it inside LinkedIn
- The dinner with John Donahoe that turned into a marriage proposal for a job
- Why she thinks of HR as a product with agile development methodology
- What a CHRO actually needs to learn about the business to earn a real seat at the table
- Why she had a hysterectomy with the da Vinci robot and was ready to cook dinner that night
- The Personal Scorecard framework and how her son broke her heart with it
- Goldilocks, the Three Pigs, the Tortoise and the Hare, and Mulan as leadership lessons
- The one question she keeps on her desktop that empowers her every day
Pat's book, Unlock Your Leadership Story: How to Build Understanding and Motivate Teams Using Fables and Folktales, is available now on Amazon, patwadors.com and as an audiobook.
