Episode 4: Conversations That Matter - Phil Donnelly, Travelport

Welcome back to our Conversations that Matter podcast series. Throughout this series, you'll hear the opinions and experiences of individuals who deeply believe in the power of conversation. Each episode will be unique, some stories are personal, some and professional, but all are incredibly insightful, 

Our first guest of 2024 is Phil Donnelly, Chief People Officer at Travelport, an innovative technology platform that supports exceptional travel retail experiences. 

As you'll hear throughout the conversation, Phil has had an incredibly diverse career in the world of HR, spanning over 30 years. From starting his career in the military where he learned teamwork and high performance, Phil has spent the last four years with Travelport's leadership team transforming and delivering incredible value to their customers, their stakeholders, and of course, their people.

Anna Rasmussen sat down with Phil to discuss the changing landscape of the employee experience and how the role of the manager has shifted to one of performance coach and career concierge.

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Follow us on LinkedIn, where you can connect with our Founder & CEO Anna, and our Chief Revenue Officer, Jordan. Have you got a question for us that you'd like answered? Email hello@openblend.com today.

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Transcript

Anna Rasmussen

Thank you very much for joining us today in our Conversations that Matter podcast. Today we are joined by Phil Donnelly. Phil Donnelly is the chief people officer at Travelport and has a career spanning over 30 years of inspiring and innovating in the people space. I'm always so energized by Phil's perspective, and I'm thrilled he's joining us today on our Conversations that Matter podcast to discuss the role of the career concierge. So, thank you so much for joining us, Phil. 

Phil Donnelly 0:39 

Anna, thank you very much for inviting me and for having me today. 

Anna Rasmussen 0:43 

Very much looking forward to our conversation. So maybe we can kick off with a bit more of an introduction to your background Phil. So if you can say a little bit, tell us a little bit about yourself and actually I'd love you to spend a bit of time focusing on what you think is the most important aspect about your role?

Phil Donnelly 1:02 

Very good. So I've been in the world of HR for about 35 years, really long time. Started my career in the military which was a brilliant place to learn about people and organization and teamwork and high performance and it really was the foundation for my career. For the rest of my career really. I was a short-service commissioned officer in the Royal Air Force, served for six years, and then decided to pursue my career really in the public sector. Left and joined financial services and spent the next ten years or so working for various life pensions, investment management, private client firms, and increasingly working for firms that had significant change agendas. Old Mutual in particular was a South African life insurance company that was highly acquisitive and I really learned a huge amount during my time at Old Mutual about the importance of the people function to supporting organizational change, post-merger integration, creating new companies, restrategising, delivering value through those company combinations, worked with some fantastic consultants, studied for my master's degree, became really passionate about change, and the role that the people function can play. And so after about a decade in financial services, I moved across into professional services and spent really the next 15 years or so of my career in top-tier professional service firms. Big Four, accounting with EY, large law with White & Case, consulting with Willis Towers Watson, and lived all over the world, moved to Dubai, moved to New York, moved to Toronto. But what really defined that period of my career was just helping those firms meet some form of ambitious change challenge through people, organizational change, culture, transformation, liberating the talent within an organization, and delivering high performance, all absolutely critical to the change agenda of all of those firms. And then my last move to Travelport was really interesting. My first foray into a tech company was late in my career really, but this was a private equity-backed take-private transaction of a global travel tech company. Really liked the owners and what they wanted to do with this company and really have spent the last four years with the leadership team transforming Travelport and really delivering extra value to our customers and to our people and to our stakeholders. 

We had the Pandemic to contend with in the middle that we used really as an accelerant for our change agenda. We decided we were not going to be deflected by the challenges that the Pandemic presented, but we were going to see the opportunities that it created, particularly to accelerate what was already an ambitious growth agenda. 

Phil Donnelly 4:55

So for me, what's really important in the role of a people leader in these organizations with significant change challenges. Um, is that it's all about the people. To achieve change, you really need to win over the folks within your organization. You need to do two things in my opinion. Liberate talent and unlock people's potential. If you can do that, you can accomplish anything, no matter how ambitious your agenda. If you can really unlock the potential in the people that you employ and use their talent, people have unlimited talent. It's the organizations that they work with and for that, in my opinion, constrain that. And I guess there's a few things that we try and do, I try and do in these situations. One, I want to make sure that people feel really really engaged. I want them to feel involved, I want them to feel informed. I want them to feel excited and kind of energized and innovated by what we're doing as an organization. Even if it's tough and difficult, and challenging people find that very, very exciting. So really transparent, open, authentic communication, particularly by the leadership, but throughout the organization, kind of helps drive that level of engagement. And secondly, alignment. I want folks to be doing stuff that's really contributing to where we need to go as an organization. We're a kind of scrappy organization. We don't have huge amounts of resources to get things done. So, we have to use the resources that we've got really wisely, including our human resources, and that means making sure that folks are really doing the right things to contribute to where we're going. And specifically, for Travelport, we had a need to really reenergize the organization and create a really compelling, winning culture that was focused on high performance and that really had the organization raise its game, raise the bar of performance, do more with less, really compete with our major competitors and win in our marketplace. And I look back over four years and feel like we've really done that in spades. It feels like a different company to the one I joined back in, in 2019. And I look at the role and contribution the people team have made towards achieving that outcome and feel really, really proud of all that we've accomplished. So that's my thoughts on the kind of role of the people leader, the people function, and a little bit about my career to date. 

Anna Rasmussen 8:06

Can I ask you a question about stakeholders in that? Your energy for the role that people play in any growth agenda or any transition or change is really inspiring and just hearing, listening to how you articulate that. Obviously, you work at in the c-suite, you sit on the board, I think you have done throughout your career, worked at a very senior level. How much time do you have to spend, not convincing, but getting the buy in of other C-suite colleagues, along with your passion and your opinion on how important the folks or people are in any sort of growth and change agenda? Is it an easy thing to do or is it quite challenging? 

Phil Donnelly 8:58 

It's an interesting question. I hear this all the time from other HRDs around, you know how do you get a seat at the top table? How do you have a voice? And for me, I don't try hard to achieve that goal. What I try to do is to build strong relationships first and foremost. I spend time with my colleagues all the time. I listen actively to what they're trying to accomplish, and I try and find ways in which I can help them to accomplish what they need to accomplish. I see the role of a people leader as an internal consultant, just like management consultants do. They go out and they conduct diagnostics, they listen to clients, they develop a point of view, they deliver a product or a service and that has a value to it. And that's why firms like Bain, McKinsey, others are seen as valuable and helpful. And I see my role in exactly the same way. I want to really help contribute towards making Travelport a better place to be. And for me, once you start delivering that, people will naturally see you as a peer, you don’t have to try. It's not something you're trying to achieve. That's not the goal. The goal is to be relevant, to contribute, to add value, to make a difference. And have strong relationships. These are my mates. I want to go and achieve the things at Travelport that I want to achieve together and that's really important. And make your conversations with them just that conversational for me. Too often HR people go in there to try and justify, explain lane apologetically, to be on the back foot, 1s to try and be somebody they're not, to play a role, and I just kind of guard against that. Just be yourself, be natural, be authentic, enter into conversations, find out what's important, go deliver that stuff, make a difference and you will find your level within the organization. Recently, the chairman of Travelport, John Swainson, was over in London. He and I met up for dinner. That's really important. Having the chance to have conversations with the chair of your board, talking about the C suite and the future of the company, getting input, just relaxing with one another. Just really important. This last week I had dinner with CEO Greg Webb, who was over again from Texas for exactly the same reason. Just spending time building relationships, getting to know one another, building trust. 

Anna Rasmussen 12:13

Yeah, I think that's fantastic. Well, everything you said there was fantastic. The bit that stood out for me is finding out what's important. It's a real partnership. Each of you plays your part in the overall picture, finding out what's important and then collaborating and partnering on delivering your part of that picture. You make it all sound very easy as well, Phil, which is great. Okay, so I know that you have sort of looking back into business, I know that you have a very strong opinion around the employee being perceived, treated as a consumer. Can you talk to us more about that? 

Phil Donnelly 12:59 

Yeah, if I look back over my long career, I think that earlier in my career, I think the employment relationship would have been very much a one-way relationship between the employer and the employee. I think the employer had criteria for their roles. They could go out into the marketplace, recruit people on their terms, pay people accordingly and it felt very much like the power in the relationship resided with the employer principally. I think over the course of the last decade or so, I think that power in the relationship has begun to shift from the employer to the employee. And I think we saw that most acutely during that period post-pandemic of the great resignation, where employees were reflecting on their employee experience during the pandemic. They were reflecting on what they wanted from their careers and from their professional lives and their personal lives, and they decided that change was what they wanted, and it was very much a candidate's market they could choose. They were demanding things from employers around flexible working and agile, and the employee experience that employers had not been providing, and I think that that is part of a trend. I think it was exaggerated post pandemic by the conditions that the pandemic created. But I think that those trends of that have been changing as really a microcosm of what's been changing in our society. If you just think about our experience as consumers over the last ten years, with the advances in technology, the speed of communication, the amount of available data, we now have choices that we can make as consumers that we never had before, and it's making our expectations greater and greater. For example, if you and I were meeting in person and we decided to go out for a coffee and we just dropped down to any coffee shop, any high street coffee shop, we will both go and have coffee. But the likelihood is that we will both have completely different drinks. Your preference may be for, I don't know, cinnamon latte, no foam, all kinds of tailored preferences that you have for delivering coffee the way you want to drink it. And so, will I. And I think that careers and employment are getting like buying coffee. It's getting to the point where people, employees, are looking for the things that they want and that they have the power in the relationship. And of course, that will ebb and flow as economies kind of,  boom and bust and wax and wane. But generally speaking, my view is that the employee is now the consumer of the employee experience. They have lots of data on which to make their decisions about employment. This is not just for new hires. This is for existing employees as well. They expect the experience to be personalized, some would argue kind of hyper-personalized, really tailored to their experience. And if you want engaged employees, if you want a stable workforce with low regretted attrition and unwanted turnover, then you're going to have to deliver that to your employees. If you just deliver a single plain vanilla experience that everyone experiences in the same way, then I think that you will not be delivering what it is that the consumer is looking for. So that's my thesis around the role of the employee as a consumer of the employee experience. 

Anna Rasmussen 17:56 

I think that makes complete sense. Can I ask your opinion on how that fluctuates or changes throughout through looking at generations? So, is that more in your kind of gen z, your millennials, or do you think it crosses all generations in the workplace? 

Phil Donnelly 18:17 

Yeah, I'm one of these people leaders that doesn't believe in stereotyping generations. I just think it's dumb. I think are gen z's any more likely than previous generations to kind of want this? They've been raised in a different era where this information was readily available and where this was a consumer experience was expected. So, yeah, it's conditioned that they have this already. But for me, this is agnostic of generation. I think all employees, you think about yourself, you have career aspirations that took you in the direction of opening your business. I do. And my colleagues around me do. We all have things we want to accomplish, things we want to experience. Maybe it's a little more heightened for those who were brought up with this available data and this degree of choice, but I think it's something which we need to do for everyone. 

Anna Rasmussen 19:28

Yeah, I'm completely with you, actually, that I believe this is generation agnostic also, when it comes to the uniqueness and the personalization of an employee experience or a consumer experience, in this case, do you think different, whether it be generations or types of individuals are just more vocal about it or more likely to vote with their feet, or do you think there's any theme on how, the differences in how people approach this? 

Phil Donnelly 20:05 

I don't. During the great resignation, it wasn't just Gen Z's that chose to leave. It happened throughout the kind of strata of employment, and so I just think that we have to deal, this is is quite important to me. We have to stop thinking about employees as cohorts. We actually have to start thinking of employees as people. That's why I choose to be called a Chief people officer. I'm not a chief human resources officer. I'm a chief people officer. I focus on people. I focus on putting people first. I focus on having a very person-centered approach towards people leadership and people management, and I try to avoid referring to people as X or Y. This is why diversity, equity and inclusion matters to me. Because if you have a very person-centered organisation, you can be really inclusive in how you operate. You can focus on ensuring that an individual has an equity of opportunity within your organisation, and for me, that's how you achieve a high performing organization. We recently had Sir Clive Woodward teach a program within our firm called the DNA of a Champion and he talked a lot about his experience of leading the England rugby team to success in the Rugby World Cup and he says what he tried to build was a team of individual champions, and really focused on making sure that each player played to the maximum of their potential and collectively, as long as they then had a structure and a strategy and a way of playing together. If they optimize the individual contribution of each team member, they were going to play to their full potential and success, and that's how I feel about Travelport. I want every employee to play to their full potential so that we can truly optimize our human capital assets, the people of our organization to truly deliver on performance. And I think this philosophy of mine comes back to my time in professional services, where the product of those firms are the people, individually and collectively, the intellect of a professional service firm. But even in a technology firm, it's the people who build the technology, who sell the technology, service the technology, support the organization. And without them, the technology will just fail and falter. So that's why I kind of take this very person-centered approach. 

Anna Rasmussen 23:14 

Yeah, literally, sorry, hanging off every word that you were saying there. So going back to what you mentioned there about Sir Clive coming in, and I bet that talk was very inspiring. He obviously was leading that team and you're sitting at a c-suite level, and you have this sort of very forward thinking, people-centered, insight, and knowledge and experience of what works and what doesn't work. But there's no denying you sit at the top of the business, and this mindset needs to filter down, because these employees, these consumers, are spending the majority of their time with a manager. So, I'd love to sort of shift the conversation across to the manager, if that's okay. 

So, we understand your opinion around a shared opinion, actually, around the employees, the consumer, and this hyper-personalized employee experience, and we understand how important it is to sort of unlock the potential of people, to liberate the people, make sure that they're all aligned, so much of that sits on the shoulders of the individual's people manager so as the employee to consumer has evolved over the last ten years, how's that been mirrored? Or what's the changing role of the manager throughout that time frame? 

Phil Donnelly 24:43 

You're absolutely right. For me, the most important role within an organization, particularly one that's undergoing the type of transformation that our company is, is the role of the people manager. They are the people who manage the individual contributors on a day-to-day basis. They interpret the strategy set by the leadership, and they understand what needs to be accomplished within their area of responsibility, they drive that alignment, they drive that engagement of the colleagues within their teams. There's that old adage that people don't leave organizations, they leave managers and teams that they belong to. And historically, for me, the role of the people manager has been fairly one dimensional. It's been about setting goals and then evaluating people's performance in achieving those goals, and if you think about the performance management process, historically, we even called it performance evaluation. It was about how did you perform, It's like an end of school report. It's a report card on how you performed and typically linked to reward. So, some form of reward outcome, whether that's base pay or bonus, linked to how your manager judged your performance to be. 

Again, I think as part of these changes in the world of work over the last 10/15 years, I think the role of a people manager has changed fundamentally. I think that there is still the responsibility to agree goals, but it isn't a unilateral process, it's now very much a bilateral process. It's about dialogue and discussion, agreement between those two parties, about what goals make sense and why. The role of the people manager becomes one of a performance coach. We talked before about Sir Clive, if we have individual people managers coaching their team and helping their team member to liberate their talent, fulfill their potential, drive alignment, drive engagement, and they're raising the performance of their individual team, then we've got a team of individual champions and we've got an overall enterprise of teams, of champion teams. And that can only raise the bar in terms of the performance of the organisation. So when we talk about high performance and a winning culture, it's not just rhetoric. We really have to compete against larger, better resource companies, and that means we have to get the most from our organizational assets, which include our people.  So the role of the performance, the people manager, as a performance coach, is really important. And for me, that requires placing the employee at the heart of the conversation, understanding what it is that motivates that individual, talking about what drives them, what engages them, what they're looking for, what their strengths are, what their areas for development are. And you helping them build on their strengths and develop in their areas of weakness or development. 

We also talk a lot today about wellbeing and the importance of wellbeing in the workplace. And that can't be separated, in my opinion, from an individual's performance because you're talking about the whole person. And if someone is suffering with mental health issues or physical health issues or financial, emotional, spiritual issues, then they need a place for that to be managed. And so placing wellbeing at the heart of the dialogue is not just the kind of moral responsibility, but a very commercial one. You want the person to perform at their best, which means bringing the whole self to work, in a manner which allows them to perform at their peak so you can't separate out these things. And then that started me thinking that performance management is about managing to the near term, but what about the mid to long term? What about where an individual employee sees their career going? And shouldn't that be part of the dialogue that takes place between a people manager and their work colleague? That not only are you managing for the now and the near future, but you're helping the individual manage where they want their career to go. They own their career. That's clear to me. They're the driver of their own career bus. But they will need some help to navigate, to know what options are available, what different routes they can take, what resources are available. And so it started me thinking about what the role is that the manager was playing in this regard. And I came up with this metaphor for considering the people manager as a career concierge. You just put yourself in that position where you go on holiday, you're staying at a smart hotel, you want to develop an itinerary with your family, you want to do certain things, go to the front desk. You talk to a concierge, you say, we'd like to do these things. And the concierge goes and helps you find the things that you want to do during your holiday. Well, imagine if you had someone at work who could help you find the things that you want to do and experiences you want to gather and direction in which you want to go. Imagine if you had someone playing that role at work. So, for me, the people managers become performance coach and career concierge. And that's my current thesis in training them and educating them and supporting them and rewarding them for playing those roles is absolutely what organizations should be doing. 

Anna Rasmussen 31:43 

Yeah, excellent. That's my next question. So, if we understand that we need the people manager to  be this performance coach to take the role of the career concierge, that's a skill set and it's an advancement on their skill set. And as they're evolving in their career, the organisation has a huge responsibility to support them in that change as well. So, could we talk a little bit about that? Because sometimes, when I look at sort of the changing role of the manager, I look at the manager in a role and every manager, like every employee is different. Every manager is different. They come to the table with their own skill sets and horror stories of how they've been managed and different mindsets on how the role should be played out. So, I think there's an aspect of this which is sort of theory, so helping them in theory, and then there's sort of a shift of the mindset as well. And I think in my experience, some managers are much quicker at getting their head around a new style of management than others might be. So, could you talk a little bit about your opinion or maybe how Travelport are doing this, supporting managers with the mindset shift? So how are you supporting these managers to actually evolve into the role of the performance coach in the career concierge? 

Phil Donnelly 33:08 

Yeah, I think for me this is about creating a culture of coaching and kind of career management. This isn't about any one specific intervention that will create that outcome. There's no silver bullet to achieving this goal. You've got to build a system, a culture around this, and that includes things like making sure that when you're selecting people for the people manager role, you're selecting people with the potential to perform in that role. That you're clear about your expectations of the role that you have a program of support, education, knowledge, resources that people can access, that people in people manager roles can be coached by either their manager or by one another, by peers, that's a fantastic resource to an organisation, that whole peer coaching, peer mentoring kind of program, that it links to their rewards, so they have a priority around playing and fulfilling this role. It's important. It's not just something that's added onto their day job, this is their day job. Alongside their kind of technical role within the organisation, there needs to be role modeling throughout the organisation so people look up and see what good looks like and see the leader's kind of walking the walk and really supporting this culture. We celebrate success, we communicate around this and over time, and this does take some time, this is a new institutional capability that you're building and that takes time. So don't be impatient. Make sure that you are incrementally building this muscle around this, and we're not finished at Travelport. We still are a work in progress. We continue to invest. We look at new programs and support mechanisms, tools that we provide. We have this opportunities marketplace that we use, which is an Oracle product that really provides a place that people can go to search for opportunities within Travelport. Whether they're short-term project based opportunities that we call gigs or whether they're longer-term role changes that people might apply for. We have growth toolkits; we have traditional mentoring and coaching. We have reciprocal or reverse programs. So, there's lots of kind of things that we do to build that kind of capability of our people managers and the platform that we use for performance management, the OpenBlend platform, really allows that, facilitates that. It's all about conversations, it's about career conversations, it's around performance conversations. It places wellbeing at the heart of the discussion. It has a place for drivers, it has a place for priorities. It allows you to align those priorities to strategic objectives. So, all the things that matter to me in creating this system, this culture, this ecosystem of high performance and a winning culture kind of exist within the tools that we deploy as well. Try and be really sophisticated in your view of this. There is no one single thing which will deliver this. You have to build this up in layers. It's a very textural problem to solve for. 

Anna Rasmussen 37:22 

Yeah I love that the patience aspects of it as well. It's like anything through a change period or anything that evolves it's going to be times where it accelerates and times where it slows down and you've just got to be patient with that, and I love that mindset of there's no silver bullet. It's a culture and it's really intricate and there's lots of different things and actually just the way you talk about that it's never going to stop being a continual investment in that population in the workforce, is it? And the managers, just continually supporting them as the workforce evolves and giving that all of these different initiatives. I think that is fantastic. You make it sound so easy when you're talking about it as well. You've got such clarity in the way that you communicate this it's no wonder you're having so much success in there. 

Anna Rasmussen 39:15

Okay, so we're kind of rounding up then in this podcast although I could talk to you for a lot longer. So just finally if there's kind of one, there's loads of snippets of advice throughout the whole podcast, but one kind of parting nugget of wisdom that you can share around the content of today. So, the employees as consumer, the changing role of the manager, how organisations need to support their managers with the mindset shift, any kind of concluding nugget that you can share with us? 

Phil Donnelly 38:51 

My only kind of piece of counsel is to encourage my colleagues out there thinking about the same things that I'm thinking about, to constantly push the boundaries. I'm in my fourth decade of doing what I do, and I could be at that stage in my career where I'm just looking through rear-view mirror at what I've done and trying to replicate that wherever I am, and it would be successful, but I try not to do that. I try to look really forwardly and ambitiously, I try and look at kind of related areas and fields and disciplines to think about like that analogy of the employee's consumer and that whole retail experience and think about us as a kind of retailer of the employee experience and so just thinking kind of progressively expansively, ambitiously and pushing the boundaries. You asked me that question earlier on about how do you kind of gain credibility as a people leader within an organization? Well, this is one of the ways in which you can do that. If you're someone who can create a vision, if you're an innovator, if you're kind of ambitious, forward thinking if you use things like science, neuroscience, and bring in other kind of disciplines to create kind of a narrative around what it is that you're doing, and you've been kind enough to flatter me with a few things today about my kind of the how I can articulate what I think of my philosophy and my strategy. That's important too, that you can give expression to and have the verbal fluency, to be able to kind of communicate convincingly, but above all else, just have passion. I mean, you know that there's so much that we can accomplish in the world of work just through the energy we create for ourselves and for others. And I've always thought that to be a really important part of my role as a leader and as a people leader is to be a real source of energy for the organisation, and when we were going through the worst of the pandemic, the impact that had on the travel industry, it was really quite concerning for people, and at those times, you kind of need steady hands on the tiller, you need people with confidence for the future and who people can look to and be strong. And once you're through a crisis and you're looking to the future, perhaps with more optimism, then again, people are looking for people to be a source of energy and enthusiasm to help that ambitious agenda to be realized. So those would be just a few kind of final parting thoughts, but I'm grateful for the opportunity today, Anna, to speak with you, and I hope that some of this stuff has been interesting and useful to people. 

Anna Rasmussen 42:24 

I've loved it. It's been absolutely brilliant. I think just as a final, I think the reason that you're able to articulate everything so well is because your beliefs, they're so clear, they're so authentic, and I think you're talking there about steading the ship is your consistency, you have an opinion, you have a belief, you're confident about that, and you deliver that with consistency. And that, I think, is where the kind of the confidence and the stability comes from. And, yeah, thank you so much for your time today. We truly are an evangelist of the future of HR, Phil, and yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you, so thank you very much. 

Phil Donnelly 43:03 

Lovely. Thanks very much, Anna. Bye for now.