HR as a Growth Lever: Building People Ops That Actually Drive Profit With Panagiota Hatzis

Panagiota Hatzis is the VP of Human Resources at HexClad Cookware, a hybrid cookware company. With over 15 years of experience in HR, she has led people and teams through hyper-growth, global expansion, and major cultural transformation. Panagiota is also an Executive Coach at MentorPass and Leaderology. Before HexClad Cookware, she was the Vice President of Human Resources at Common Thread Collective, where she helped scale the company from 20 to 80 employees across 10 states.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[4:08] Why human resources should be a business partner rather than a back-office function
[7:07] How Panagiota Hatzis aligns HR with EBITDA
[10:33] The importance of building relationship equity with leadership teams
[15:54] Distinguishing between effort and business impact
[21:34] Is burnout inevitable or a result of poor leadership?
[27:24] Tips for encouraging guilt-free employee time off
[31:57] How to balance care and challenge in kindness
[38:10] Treating HR like an internal marketing department to improve company-wide communication
[48:22] Panagiota talks about closing the gap between leadership’s intent and the employee experience
[54:34] Common HR challenges companies face when scaling from $10 to $100 million in revenue
[1:03:11] How organizational culture shifts as companies grow, and how to manage the change
[1:05:01] Panagiota shares her experience as a first-generation Greek American

In this episode…

Scaling a company from $10 million to $100 million requires more than just great products or marketing; it demands an intentional and strategic approach to building and leading teams. Yet many leaders overlook people operations as a vital growth lever, treating HR as an administrative function rather than a revenue and culture driver. How can businesses rethink their people strategy to avoid burnout, misalignment, and stalled growth?

People operations and organizational psychology expert Panagiota Hatzis emphasizes repositioning HR as a strategic business partner aligned with EBITDA goals. This requires maintaining relational equity — trust and mutual respect — between leaders and teams and optimizing processes to minimize burnout. Building culture intentionally through frequent communication, transparency, and accountability is crucial for maintaining alignment as you scale to the next stage of revenue.

In this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris interviews Panagiota Hatzis, VP of Human Resources at HexClad Cookware, about using people operations as a strategic growth engine. She explains how to encourage guilt-free time off for employees, the difference between effort and authentic business results, and how to close the gap between leadership intent and the employee experience.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments

"I consider human resources to kind of be the spine, and then each department is a rib."
"You actually have more say over your calendar than I think people give credit to."
"Burnout isn't like restricted to just work; you can be burnt out at home, volunteering, anything."
"Successful organizations don't just happen on accident; it's effortful, it's not effortless."
"The most compassionate thing you can do for someone if they're miserable is to part ways."

Action Steps

Align people operations with business objectives: Treat HR as a strategic growth lever tied to EBITDA, not just administrative support. This creates stronger leadership alignment and directly impacts revenue and retention.
Build relational equity with leadership teams: Consistently invest time in personal, trust-based relationships across departments. Leaders are more receptive to feedback and organizational change when they feel genuinely supported.
Maximize current tech stacks before upgrading: Leverage existing software creatively for HR processes like onboarding, reviews, and communication. This prevents unnecessary overhead costs and streamlines the employee experience without tech overload.
Create a formal business case for every new hire: Require leaders to define the impact, KPIs, and ROI before expanding teams. This ensures headcount growth is intentional and sustainable during scaling phases.
Integrate regular conversations about time off and recovery: Normalize planning extended weekends and vacations as part of check-ins and team culture. Prioritizing recovery helps prevent burnout and promotes long-term employee performance and satisfaction.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders, sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show.

William Harris 0:15

Hey everyone. I'm William Harris. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast, where I feature the best minds in e-commerce to help you scale from 10 million to 100 million and beyond as you up arrow your business and your personal life, today's guest is redefining what it means to lead people, not just with policies or perks, but with purpose, precision and a direct line to business outcomes. Panagiota Hatzis is the head of people at HexClad, one of the fastest growing kitchenware brands in the world, and she's anything but your typical HR executive. With over 15 years of experience with iconic brands, she's led people teams through hyper growth, global expansion and major cultural transformation. But what sets her apart isn't just her resume, it's her philosophy. She doesn't believe in HR as a support function. She believes in People Ops as a strategic growth lever. She's built a reputation for aligning culture with EBITDA, for bridging the gap between effort and impact, and for making performance conversations not just tolerable, but transformational. Today, we're diving into what it really takes to scale a team from 10 million to 100 million, how to communicate from the C suite down with clarity and force, and why kindness and leadership is equal parts care and challenge. If you're building a team leading company, or just want to understand how people strategy drives real business outcomes, this episode is in your playbook. Panagiota, welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast.

Panagiota Hatzis 1:31

Hi. Thank you so much for having me. It's such an honor to be on this show. I'm such a big fan and will You're an incredible human being. I'm really excited today.

William Harris 1:40

Likewise, I appreciate that. Well, it was fun. I was thinking about, like, how did this happen? And we were talking about this a little bit before the show, and I saw you give some really good information in Aaron orendorf's podcast, or not in his newsletter. And I was like, Ooh, we haven't talked about people ops at all on this podcast. I gotta have you on the show. And I was like, Okay, how do I how do I make this happen? He is

Panagiota Hatzis 2:05

one of the most wildly connected human beings on the face of this planet, and one of the most gifted writers and storytellers ever. So how lucky for us that we both share him as a contact. And yeah, I got to work with him while I was at a small little agency, Common Thread Collective, back in the day, while he was the VP of Marketing and I was the VP of we called Human Resources at the time differentiation, and he's now helping to roll out everything on the operator's newsletter. And I had mentioned a couple of things around burnout and q4 and what that means for D to C and E commerce specifically. And that led me to you. I love

William Harris 2:41

it well, and even if I give real credit here where it's due, he's not the one who made the introduction, not that I asked him, but Sarah was on the show, and I said, Hey, who else do you think would be good? And she said, paniota. And I'm like, yes, I've actually wanted her for a while. Can you make the intro? So I gotta give a shout out to Sarah. Thank you for making this intro so we can bring this podcast out to everybody

Panagiota Hatzis 3:00

and other really incredible human being and an incredibly talented marketer like, my goodness, that woman is out doing her own thing now, consulting, and she's a bit of a nomad with her husband. She just is an expat now, like going across Spain and Europe and all of the different places doing the darn thing. It's really cool.

William Harris 3:19

You are so good, I love that you still keep such good tabs on where everybody's at and everything. I mean, it's clear that you this is what you do and what you love. I'm gonna give a quick shout out to our sponsor that we're gonna dig into the good stuff here, because there's a lot of fun things we're gonna be talking about. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired, with the largest one selling for nearly 800,000,001 that ipoed. You can learn more on our website@Elumynt.com, which is spelled Elumynt.com Okay, on other good stuff, I want to start by talking about redefining H R as a business critical partner, not a back office solution. You, I feel like have worked really hard to dispel the stigma of HR. What do people get wrong about what HR really is? Yeah,

Panagiota Hatzis 4:08

I think there's like a the stigma that's attached to it is that the joke that I often make is like, I'm not Toby from the office. Like, that's not me. That's not my approach to business at all. I'm not like your typical paper pusher type of an HR executive. I do consider us to be like the spine of an organization. There's not many parts of an organization that touch every single part, but literally, we interview all of the people, help onboard all of the people, and then you know, as you grow thoughtfully, you're with, you're connecting with the senior leadership of each of the departments. So I consider human resources to kind of be the spine, and then each department is a rib. So there's nothing that's not connected to us in a lot of different ways. But the stigma is that, you know, all we do is hand out pink slips or you. You know, if you're completely detached from the business objectives, it's like, Hey, I'm gonna launch open enrollment right before Black Friday my schedule. But maybe that's not the best idea for E commerce. And so if human resources is functioning, absent from like, strategic business goals, or understanding what when the business is like in peak season? Then, yeah, of course, they're going to be like, You don't understand me. You have no idea of what we're doing. Like, get out of my way. Versus, no, I understand that we're in peak season. I understand that this is q4 I understand like, you're going to be working extended hours. What can I do to help support that? Because I understand it. How can I help make your lives a little bit easier in the midst of everything that we're going through? Or how am I planning my objectives to be an off season from when everybody else's peak season? It's just fundamentally being connected to the ebb and flow of the business, as opposed to what I need to do. I think HR in general can often feel like we're pulling back on the CEOs initiatives and like their vision, because most CEOs are more similar than dissimilar. Is what I've come to understand in my experience, right? There's a lot of really amazing characteristics of what it takes to be a visionary, and they're so focused on the up and out HR and operations, especially me, considering myself People Operations, is like a down and in approach in a lot of different ways. And so it can feel like I'm holding you back with like a, you know, a word that a lot of CEOs don't like, is process, being able to bring a bit of that into it, but framing it in such a way as to say, this isn't pulling you back. This is actually the exact way to, like, move us forward. This is the innovation that's going to get us to where you want to go. So working very closely with them, so that they feel that there's alignment in what the overall business strategy is, the business objective is, and how HR is helping that, not hindering that, and how

William Harris 7:03

are you doing it like, how are you aligning HR around EBITDA, for instance,

Panagiota Hatzis 7:07

EBITDA is ultimately what you are valuated against, right? And if I don't have an understanding of how overhead is having a significant impact on the bottom line and or driving top line revenue, then I am absent of what the ultimate business objectives are. So many organizations and so many VPs of growth, or heads of growth are attached to KPIs around EBITDA and top line or net revenue. And so if I'm not helping them grow their departments thoughtfully and figuring out what career development means to help retain our top talent. Things of that nature, then it, it's absence of any sort of business strategy. But I also think there's, there's a wherewithal of being able to capitalize on existing systems. You don't always have to get the newest, best software, especially when there's so much AI innovation that's going live now, right? Like all of my daily daily and like, finding ways to incorporate that more and more and more. And I think people are seeing chief like, AI officers popping up left and right and like, that's something really interesting that I think organizations can look into. It's something that I'm starting to look into over here. But yeah, you don't always have to, like, change the software just because the company has grown. I think if you can maximize what you have, especially from an HR standpoint, then until it doesn't work anymore, then it doesn't work anymore. I've spoken about this before, but like using your project management software in unorthodox ways is really powerful. So you can turn that into an intranet, you can turn that into an app tracking system. You can turn that into, you know, like internal communications, performance review management, it's all just about looking at what you currently are investing in at a minimal price and then maximizing the output. I like

William Harris 9:02

that a lot. We do actually do that a lot. Even, you know, ourselves, there's tools that we use that it's like, it's not the best way to use that tool, but you're already paying for that tool, and you have 90% adoption anyway. So like, how can we maximize that before we're ready to make that break into another tool? You know,

Panagiota Hatzis 9:16

I was having a conversation with like customer service just the other day, and customer service can sometimes be flooded with a really impressive tech stack, and human resource can sometimes be flooded with a really impressive tech stack, right? And it's like, best in class in this and best in class in that. And if you have some systems that maybe aren't best in class across the board, but they synthesize, and then they make the support agent work easier, or they make the employee experience easier, because they only have to go to one place, like you have to think through the cost benefit of that, which also has an impact on how much you're spending month over month. And so really trying to be strategic around the tools that you're using and whether. Not you want to brag about having 12 best in class tools that no one uses, or having one tool that you know meets the standard of what you need and people are actually engaged and using it very regularly. Like, what sort of experience are you creating? Both for my internal customer, which is my staff, as much as you know you consider through customer service, the external customer. That's

William Harris 10:23

brilliant. Um, you had kind of hinted at this idea of relational equity with the leadership team. Why is that? Why is that necessary for execution? Yeah,

Panagiota Hatzis 10:33

I just think that if people don't know that they're you are for them, then they don't want to hear from you at all. And so, you know, having the wherewithal to create relational equity with people is sitting down, and it is a little bit of the water cooler talk. What did you do over the weekend? But then also, just trying to get a better understanding. I have standing meetings with my senior leadership team. I meet with them once a month, and we go over, like, what is your actual leadership legacy? Like, what do you want to do? I've done this at other organizations that I do it currently, and then I'm able to, like, anchor our conversations back to remember when you said that your primary objective is to be a servant leader. Is what you're doing right now representative of that. Or remember when you said that your primary objective is, you know, you want to do X, Y and Z within the realm of performance marketing? Does this decision align with that? It's a little bit different than like KPIs, organizational KPIs, because it's something that's very personal to them. But I'm able to call them up, not call them out, because there's something different in that approach, right? And say, Is this really who you want to be? And if I didn't have that frame of reference, if I were to give difficult feedback, then they would just be like, again, your HR, you're completely disconnected from anything that I'm trying to build. You don't know who I am. I don't want to listen to you versus Oh, you actually have a frame of reference. You actually do give a crap like, Okay, I'll let you in. I'll pay attention. I'll incorporate and I'll come alongside you on some of the things that you know we're talking about are important for who we want to be, not only on a personal side, but then obviously on an organizational side, because if your senior leadership team is showing up in a certain way, that's going to have trickle effect to how everybody else is showing up, right?

William Harris 12:26

100% it reminds me of a quote from Josh McDowell that I really like, and I quoted Hoff. And so others may have heard me say this before, but Rules without relationship leads to rebellion. And I just love this quote because I've seen it myself, and I think one of the easier ways to see it is with kids. And so I have kids, right? And so you can see where it's like, when there's not a relationship that's being built up for some reason or another. And this could be like, This is not like a long ongoing thing. It's like, every week there's like, this maintenance of this relationship. Then it can feel like you're just giving me a task to do. You're not seeing like, where I'm coming at from this. And so I like that. I like this idea of building up that relational equity. Where do you draw the line with this? You know, Enron was what famous for, like, taking everybody out on, like, dirt bike rides and stuff like that. Like, where is that you'll be ongoing just like, the boring, let's just say, like, Hey, here's a meeting that we scheduled over zoom versus, let's go dirt biking together. Like, where do you find that to be able to build that? Yeah.

Panagiota Hatzis 13:22

I mean, there is just something magical about the in person experience, right? And so finding a way to really capitalize on that, I think, is important. And so just flying people out for the sake of flying people out and saying, Oh, we have a hybrid team, and there are people spread across the country, and we fly them out once a month or once a quarter, whatever. If nothing is formally organized, and it does take a lot of work to do that, like the equity piece doesn't the relational equity piece doesn't happen on accident, right? Like it's just, like, successful organizations don't just happen on accident. There's it's effortful, it's not effortless. And so finding ways to make sure that you're maximizing the time when you are together. We currently at hex slide. We do have an LA office, and that's where the majority of the organization is based out of. And then we also have some people that are 100% remote, but they do fly out to LA very regularly, and we've had conversations like so you get to make sure you're having, like, lunches when you're out here. It doesn't have to be a dirt bike riding experience, but just going out to lunch and talking about stuff that is work related, not work related, outside of the office or now we're in like, this amazing, amazing office. We're in the Spotify building in downtown LA nice. We have, like, exclusive rights to our rooftop, so like gaining being able to go up on the rooftop and just talk a little bit, but just making it a point to talk to people. And it doesn't always have to be a scheduled meeting, and it can be over breaking bread. We're really big. On meals here at hex pad, right, and the experiences that are built over shared meals. So that's something that's probably at the forefront for us. But yeah, I mean, and then it can also just be sure, maybe doing the dirt bike experience, but just finding times to connect in general, I think flying people out and doing that face to face is first and foremost, like bare minimum and something breaking

William Harris 15:26

bread. I love it because there's so much serotonin that's released right, literally by breaking bread. And I think that there is science behind the idea of sharing meals together and how that can help impact that you you talked about how impact doesn't effort. Well, how? What is effort? Doesn't equal impact. Equal. EBITDA, yes, that's yes, yeah. Even better. How do you help high effort teams figure out where they're spinning their wheels?

Panagiota Hatzis 15:54

Oh, yeah. So the premise behind that is we as humans, feel an effort. I feel like I've worked so hard, like I feel like I put so much into this, and we've all been there. I'm guilty of it myself. Right where you get to the end of the week and you're like, golly, I'm exhausted. What the heck did I do? Right? And so being able to track back, like is the thing that you're doing, is the thing that you're spinning your wheels on, actually making an impact to whatever your EBITDA is, or whatever your KPIs are, like whatever it is that you're tracking against. And so I think that just being objective around what's on your calendar and what your output actually is, there's a lot of power in that. The more you get crystal clear on what your priorities are, the more freedom you have to say no to something, and it doesn't have to be a shutdown No, like Fuck, no. I'm not gonna do that. But it does get to say, Hey, I'm actually working on this as a priority right now. Can we talk about that later, or can we revisit it down the line? I think there's power in freedom and being able to say no as much as there is, and being able to say yes every time you say yes, you're saying no to something else, right? Love that.

William Harris 17:07

That's another one of my favorite quotes. Yeah, there's, uh, I've been reading a lot of the daily stoic in the morning. And one of the things that I really appreciate, okay, great. It seems like you would too. Like, like, the way that you speak, um, one of the things I appreciate about like, what you just said, and what Taylor had said here is that you do have a lot more control. You're saying yes to things without realizing that you're saying yes to them, right? Because you're not verbally saying yes or whatever this is, but you are saying yes in the way that you're acknowledging the action. And so you're not just beholden to this. For instance, in the example that I like to give, too, is like, you can say no, I don't want to work today. Now there are consequences to that, but you can say that. And so you are choosing, whether you realize or not you're choosing. You're saying, I like having a job more than I like not working today. And so you are making that choice. And so to a point it's like, yeah, if you're looking at your calendar, it's not reflecting what you wanted to do. Realizing you're still you made the choices for those things to be on there, even if you felt like you didn't make a choice for that.

Panagiota Hatzis 18:01

There is agency involved in all of it, and I was doing some consulting work for a while, and it was all in, like, executive leaderships, and so much of it was beginning with the analysis of their calendars and being able to say, like, you actually don't have to do X, Y or Z, and you don't have to be booked in back to back meetings to feel super important, right? And so that goes back to what are the things that are actually going to make an impact, and am I actually allocating times towards that, as opposed to whatever else it might not be? And I'm in a bit of a crunch here we are in a hyper like hex pad has grown exponentially since I started a year and a half ago. And so, yeah, I regularly look at my calendar and I'm like, Does this make sense? Still? Does this need to get changed? And you adjust accordingly, and then, if it doesn't work, you can adjust back too, right? Like, I think oftentimes when we make decisions, we feel as though they are, like, dogmatic and like, there's no going back once you try something. Yeah. And also, many things can be true at the same time, like you can want to do other things and focus on one. It doesn't mean that you when you say yes to something, you completely disregard the rest of the stuff. Like we're dynamic people, and so free will is attached, I think, to a lot of this agency is attached to a lot of this

William Harris 19:27

well, and like you said, Not only could you say no later on, like you could say it and you can revert. I think that we feel like we can't revert, because we feel like we've made a decision. But what we forget is that sometimes making that decision is the most diagnostic way to see if that's the right thing or not, is to just do it. And you'll find out very quickly if you didn't, but if you try to, you know, go back and forth and back and forth and weigh the options before you actually make a choice. More often than not, the the opportunity will have passed you by. Just making a decision would have been the most diagnostic. Way to decide, find out if it was the right decision or

Panagiota Hatzis 20:02

not. Oh, my goodness. And Indecision is also a decision, right? Like, it's also super telling. And so, you know, like, as as organizations, as your listeners are considering career pathing, and what that mean, even if it's not something like, super formal and you don't have career paths developed, but you're like, God, I have this amazing performer, and I really want to promote them. Maybe you don't know ahead of time that they're actually just a really clutch individual contributor, and they totally get managing people, because not everybody that's good at the job is good at management, right? You don't know what you don't know. And maybe you promote them, and then maybe it doesn't end up working out. But like, gosh, you had to find out one way or another. You know, like you're not going to make every decision right every time, but if you learn from each decision and build upon it, I think that that's where the best organizations are created

William Harris 20:52

Shopify. I really like that. They came out with that concept of two paths. And so we're trying to do that ourselves as well, because there are some people who are like, I want to continue to advance. I don't want to manage people. I don't want to direct people. I really get at this, and this is what I enjoy, and having that option to be able to show that there are two different ways that you can go about this, I think, is, is key for, let's just say, Agency for the individual as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Doing what you don't like can cause for too long, could cause burnout. That said, you have said before to me that I appreciate it, which is that burnout isn't always a bad thing. Can you unpack that in the idea of, like, when is burnout inevitable versus when is it a sign of bad leadership?

Panagiota Hatzis 21:34

Oh, yeah, okay, so, so good. Um, I think that, especially in our industry, burnout is inevitable for any sort of person that has any sort of desire for a promotion or, like, personal growth. It goes back to like, you don't know what you don't know, and that includes your limits, and you have to, like, test them right. Q4 for so many of like, paid media buyers and paid social buyers, golly, they are on their computers, like 14 hours a day, like pressing all of the Levers, doing all of the things, scaling all of the stuff, you know, sending all of the crap. And it's like, absolutely necessary. And maybe at the end of a q4 their first q4 their second q4 they wear that as a badge of honor, and they're like, oh yeah. Like, this is the thing that I really want to do. It's performance, growth, marketing. I love e commerce. Or they're like, heck no, this isn't right thing, and I'm gonna step out of it. I fully got burnt out. But sometimes you just have to screw around and find out. And so that's when I think it's actually healthy like and science has proven that like burnout, when it's exercised as a form of like stress. Stress isn't actually a bad thing. It's a prolonged stress that goes unaddressed that is a bad thing. So when you're stretching your capacity, of course, you're going to feel stressed, right, mentally, physically, all of that. But if you never do that, then you're just going to stay stagnant. And I just think that there's so much talent in our industry. There's just a lot of people that really want more for themselves and more for the organization. And again, you don't know what you don't know. So I think that that's the healthy side of it. The unhealthy side of it is if your manager or direct supervisor is recognizing that you've been in that state for a really long time. So if you constantly feel like you're in q4 and you're in q1 or q2 like that's a problem, that's something that really needs to get addressed, that's unhealthy.

William Harris 23:44

You, we've talked about this before, so I know this about you. We were going to talk about it maybe later, but you like to lift weights, and this reminds me so much of that same concept. You have no clue what your one rep max is unless you've actually gotten under the tension of weight. That's too much that you actually couldn't get it up there. And so to your point, it's like there's a safe way to do it. And way to do it and an unsafe way to do it. The unsafe way is you just do it by yourself. The safe way is you have a spotter, because inevitably you're trying to push yourself to that. And so having somebody in your corner, having a good people ops person in your corner, having a partner who can be Hey, I recognize or a manager. I recognize that you are going into this a little bit too long here. You're struggling for too long. I gotta let you struggle for a little bit, see if you can get that weight up, if you can't, and then I'm ready to help step in. And

Panagiota Hatzis 24:27

I mean, like, weight lifting is such a perfect analogy, I think, for management and leadership in general, right? Because if you're an Olympic lifter and you're going into, like, the clean and jerk, let's just say you're cleaning, right? And you're going for your first one rep max, and you're getting under the bar, but your elbows are too slow, like you're not flipping the bar fast enough. You don't you don't know that about yourself, but your coach is on the sideline saying, Hey, make sure that you're flipping faster. Make sure that you're, you know, pulling up and out instead of throwing the bar out in front of you, keep it closer to your body as you're. Are about to go down, right? You don't feel that you need someone to give you the cues, but your manager can't do the job for you. They're not going to be lifting the bar or the weight or getting stronger for you, like you have to do the job. You have to pay attention to the feedback that they're giving you if you want to set a new PR. And so I love that you brought that up in this point, because I think it's, it's true. And I mean, my goodness, you can get burnt out at weight lifting as well. That's another thing. Burnout isn't like, restricted to just work like, you can be burnt out like at home, burnt out in volunteering, burnt out in whatever the heck it is, like, it's such a dirty word as well. And don't get me wrong, I've experienced burnt out before, and it is not great, yeah. Like, who hasn't Right? Like, that's another thing too. Is that it's like, it's common, like, yeah, yeah, pay attention. Pay attention to yourself, and pay attention to the cues, and if it's prolonged. Like, I do think that you should take some course of action, but if you're feeling it for the very first time, or if you know that you consistently get burnt out, and it's just a part of your cycle, maybe don't resist it as much. Just understand that you're going into peak season. This was a part of my post. Like it burnout in q4 isn't specific to any organization. It's a part of the industry that we've all signed up to work in, yeah, yeah, the Do you know what I mean? Like, and so you just have to come to terms with what you've signed up for in some

William Harris 26:27

way you're a CPA that's gonna your burnout season is, you know, April 15. Like, yes,

Panagiota Hatzis 26:32

exactly, yeah, you know. And so to say that you are going to be absent of that and work shorter hours when that's not the demands of the job, it just doesn't make sense. I don't want to come across as not having empathy for burnout, because I do. I just also think there's a bit of a reality check that we can all appreciate in being able to say how much of this is something that I'm also creating because I have this drive because I really want to get promoted, because I really want to prove to myself, X, Y or Z, and how much of it is circumstantial from any other reason. 100%

William Harris 27:11

agree on the flip side, then time off doesn't happen by accident. What are things that you have put in, like systems or norms that you've built to help people do that, to recover for burnout without feeling guilty.

Panagiota Hatzis 27:24

Oh, that's so beautiful. Yeah, one, I just think having regular discussions about it is fundamental, like 101, and whatever organization I've been a part of, I've helped to create, like, a regular check in agenda, and literally for your weekly syncs, or your bi weekly syncs, or your monthly syncs, however, often you sink in with your direct reports, it's a line item to discuss, when are you taking time off? And like this is also when I'm taking time off. So you have to model the behavior as well as the direct supervisor or as leadership, and then encourage them in my own team, I try to encourage one extended weekend a month. I'm like, take a Friday, take a Monday, whatever it might be. How do we reverse engineer from that time so that it's not a surprise, right? And I'm left like, Oh, you're gonna suddenly take this day off. Like, no, we get to plan for it, and then you actually get to check out stuff like that doesn't happen on accident. So when people take vacations and they're like, Oh, I didn't get to disconnect, my first question is always, what sort of planning did you put into taking time off? Um, get support for yourself so that you can disconnect. And there's, like, different nuances to different levels, if you're you know, the only HR person in an entire organization. Maybe you're going to have to stay connected a little bit until you get some support, and then you have urgency to hire support. But yeah, if there's like three of you and you're not disconnecting, maybe that's a part of the organization's culture, and that needs to be addressed. But my first question always goes to back. Goes back to like, what are you doing to help make things better for yourself as well?

William Harris 29:09

We, one of our girls on our team, is out today, and we talked about that even in team our stand up today, which is like, do not tag her in anything, because we know that she has a tendency where it's like, if she gets tagged, she's still gonna jump in. It's like, we do not want her jumping in. Do not tag her even by accident. Like, just hold it all off. We'll, you know, bring her up to speed later. Um, I like where you're going with this idea, though, of how that time off doesn't happen by accident, and you have to plan for that. And then, in theory, let's just say sometimes maybe you don't know how to plan for it. Maybe you haven't learned that skill yet. I would say, like to the people who are listening, then just raise your hand and say, I need time off. I don't know how to plan for this. Can you help me? Right? There are people who would love to show you and help you, but sometimes we don't want to assume that you don't know. If I just come in and I just say, let me explain to you how to take time off. You can. Like, why are you talking to me like I'm five four, so I think it's okay to raise your hand and say, I need time off. I need to unplug. I don't know how to do this. Can you help me?

Panagiota Hatzis 30:09

Or I want to take time off. I don't know how to do this. And I'm actually kind of afraid my inbox is full right now, and I'm afraid of cleaning it out and then coming back and feeling overwhelmed by it, right? So like practical tactics for that, or then you're out of office message you extend to one extra day, so people are told that you're out all the way through Tuesday, instead of you being back on Monday. And then you use that entire Monday to just go into your inbox. Like there's ways to plan around that, or tricks that you can use, but you just have to, like, talk about it and it is uncomfortable. And I mean, sometimes having the difficult conversations about what you don't know can feel embarrassing. That's your icebreaker everybody. You go to your direct supervisor and say, Hey, I'm kind of embarrassed to say this. I don't know how to do time off well, and I it's actually giving me anxiety to even think about it, but I feel like I'm on the brink of burnout, and I really just need some time away help me figure this out. What's

William Harris 31:09

interesting is, when you do that, when you have those conversations, you will likely find somebody chuckling alongside you. And the idea is, like, No, I get it. I have struggled with it. I still kind of struggle with a little bit. Let me walk you through what I'm doing and how I doing and how I can do this, but I think you'll find that there's a lot more sympathy on the other side of questions that you think might be dumb questions

Panagiota Hatzis 31:29

there. Yeah, there truly, really are no dumb questions, and asking questions is the number one way to build trust in organizations. That's been proved in, I want to say organizational psychology. I heard it somewhere. It's on Google, so it must be true.

William Harris 31:46

On Wikipedia, it was on Reddit. So you've said that, you've said that kindness is equal parts care in challenge. How do you strike that balance? Yeah,

Panagiota Hatzis 31:57

I so I have people pleasing tendencies, and early in my career, I was 100% like an all care person, right? Like empathetic, Empath to the nth degree, and I would just absorb whatever pain they were feeling, and then I would just say, no, like, you're doing really good, and I would dismiss anything that was bad. I would make excuses, and I would offer context. And you know, then you get more mature in your career, and I did a lot of like, first time management stuff in retail, so you have to learn pretty quickly that you can't always make excuses for people. And that's when I first learned, like, I can't do your job for you, like I need you to actually show up and do your job. And then once I got more mature in my human resources career, it dawned on me that I don't ever want to get to a separation meeting and have it be a surprise. And Jeff Weiner from he used to be the LinkedIn CEO, he talks about how his wife was actually really instrumental in his transformation. He went from being like, not a great person to work with and just kind of entirely condescending. And she had said, like, Well, have you ever tried being kind? And he was like, Oh, I didn't know that that was a thing to do in business. And he talks about differentiating between, like, sympathy and empathy. I think it's like, you know, sympathy, you walk upon somebody and they're getting crushed by a boulder, and you look at them and they're like, oh, wow, that really sucks that, but you must be hurting. And then empathy is like, getting under the boulder with them, and you're both getting crushed. And then he goes on and he talks specifically about Compassionate Leadership. And he's like, compassionate compassion is you see somebody getting crushed by a boulder, and you're like, How can I help you get out from under it? And sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do for someone, if they're not being successful in their job, is to part ways. And so being able to offer the challenge piece then and say, like a when we have that conversation of separation, did I give you every chance that I possibly could have to succeed? Because this is your livelihood, and if I didn't shame on me like I should have had the more difficult conversation I should have engaged in, it more even if it made me uncomfortable, like I needed to figure that out, because here we are two, it should not be a surprise. And three, kindness saying, like, well, it's their livelihood, and I don't want to do this because of X, Y and Z, you're right. And also, if they suck at their job, they're carrying that home. And it's like the way that you show up with your wife, or maybe you snap at your kids unexpectedly because you had a crap day at work. Like the most compassionate thing you can do is sometimes part ways with someone who's miserable in their job so that they can find something that they actually really love, you know. And so coming to peace and viewing it through that lens of care is kindness is equal parts care and challenge, you know. Catch people something. Catch. People doing something right, and then tell them what you caught. What are they doing really well, let them know, but then also not being afraid to lean into the difficult conversations, because a promotion shouldn't come as a surprise either, too. Do you know what I mean? Like, why haven't you told this person that they're doing really great? Like, that's not cool. Yeah,

William Harris 35:18

we've done that. I mean, like, they, they knew they were doing great, but the promotion came too much as a surprise, and it was equally as stressful for that person as if they had been fired. Like it was, like, it was a really interesting learning experience for me as a leader, yeah, um, I like a word that you use, and I don't know if you meant to use it on purpose, but I it was so perfect that you had, like, absorbed that for them, right? Um, and it reminds me of this idea where I heard somebody and I again, this was on, you know, not Google, this was on Tiktok, so it's even more of a high authority, but the idea of, we metabolize other people's bad attitudes sometimes, right? Or it's like, well, it's like, okay, well, I'll metabolize your anger for you, so that way you don't have to that idea of absorbing it, and I do feel like to your point when we do that for other people, when we're saying, I'm going to help you out with this, I'm going to do part of your job for you, or whatever this is, or I'm not going to give you this negative feedback that might be hurtful, but it's necessary for growth. When we do that, we're we're robbing them. We're robbing them of a necessary, like you said, a necessary learning moment, or we're robbing them from being in a position that is right for them. And I think when you think about it from that phrase, you're just like, well, I don't want to be a thief. That's a crappy person to be. Now you have more, more of a desire to do the right thing for them.

Panagiota Hatzis 36:34

It like the the most simplified, like metaphor that I can offer for this is be the friend that tells you you have spinach in

William Harris 36:44

your teeth. Yeah, that's a good friend.

Panagiota Hatzis 36:46

Yeah, yeah. That's uncomfortable, but just don't let them take all don't let them take their wedding pictures with crap in their mouth. Like, tell them, you know,

William Harris 36:56

Yep, yeah. This is an embarrassing moment. I had lunch yesterday with a couple of business people, and when I got there, I'm at the age now where, unfortunately, I have ear hair. And so I had plucked an ear and it was bleeding. This is so gross, I didn't realize I gonna share this thing, but it was bleeding, but it wouldn't stop bleeding. And so I went to the bathroom, and had to get, like, you know, a little toilet paper to stick on the ear here, to like, kind of like, but I'm, I'm at this, missed this meeting with toilet paper on me. Nobody said anything. Nobody said, like, Hey, what's going on? Or anything to your point. You just like, that wasn't those weren't good friends. Somebody should have at least mentioned it. You know, you got some toilet paper. Like, yeah, I know why I got it. Don't worry, it's covered. Yeah, tell your friends you have spinach in your teeth. That's right. That's right. I feel like a lot of leaders can struggle with internal communication. How do you prioritize and make, let's just say, something complex, like a payroll shift or an incentive program? How do you make sure that this gets communicated in a way that it's not just like one more thing I have to read, but it's you know, you can bring some excitement to it that actually gets watched and read and understood, versus like hounding to follow. Have you seen this? Did you are aware of this yet? Or how do you prioritize and make that conversation?

Panagiota Hatzis 38:10

Yeah, you and I talked about this. I think it's one of my other approaches to human resources. So one is, I view us as customer service to the internal customer, which is my staff, but I also think that human resources is the marketing department to the internal customer, which is the staff, right? And so it it's not enough for me to say that there's going to be open enrollment and like this is what you have to do, but using a Simon Sinek approach, which I know we're both fans of, right? You start with, why? Like, how is this going to benefit them? And we talked about how, you know, having to be the internal marketer, like, you have all of these people in your funnel, they're literally your staff, like they're there, right? So how do you get them all the way through the funnel to, like, do the thing that you need them to do? It's through effective marketing, it's through effective storytelling. And so finding ways to be engaging, like knowing that the intention span is really short, and really most people don't give a crap about what I'm going to say, because it's from human resources. And so that goes back to the relational equity piece, and all of a sudden they're like, Oh, well, if she's saying something, maybe it's because it's important, and maybe it actually impacts my paycheck or my health care benefits, and my entire family is on it. So suddenly it comes less. It becomes less of this thing where, again, HR, who's completely disconnected, doesn't know what's going on with me, and now, like, all of a sudden the health care benefits got better because HR is there and it matters more. And my daughter's going to get braces this year, like all of those things. So finding ways to be succinct, I think bullets, making it very like result, impact, results impact, stressing deadlines, creating whenever we're launching something or a new software, we plan, I reverse engineer everything. I call it being planful. And so we start with the end in mind, and then we work backwards, but we will go from the launch date, and then we will plan multiple meetings with senior leadership and then the rest of the organization. So senior leadership is first looped in, then the rest of the organization is looped in with subject matter experts, and then you get everybody enrolled that way, but less is more when it comes to what you're actually writing, and then you just present that a lot. Yeah,

William Harris 40:28

like, you have to present it more than once. I know we do EOS at Elumynt, and one of the things they talk about is, like, when you have, for instance, you come up with your vision values, if you haven't said it nine times, then it's as if you haven't said it once, like you have to at least get to, like, a certain threshold before it really could be adopted. Yes, I Okay. Transparency is a big buzz word. Also, what is, what does real transparency look like, from the C suite down to, you know, the rest of the team, like, is, like, moving away from paychecks, but like, C suite communicating things?

Panagiota Hatzis 41:03

Yeah, that's a really great question, and I don't know that it's actually a answer that can be used across every organization and every industry. I think that you know what gets communicated at a private equity bank versus a, you know, startup that it like drops shipment startup or something like that. The patient's probably going to vary quite a bit. I don't know that I have a good answer for this. Will, to be honest with you,

William Harris 41:39

I feel like there's been tests, and that's okay. I feel like there's been tests, you know, of SAS companies, especially, like you said, like, really sexy startups that are like, we're going to be 100% transparent. I don't remember who it was, but it's like, we're going to publish all of our like, P and L, basically, online so everybody can look at it, every employee. And it's like, one of the things that I've seen is that, in some ways, it becomes a distraction from actually getting something accomplished. And so that's why it's like, I don't know where that line is sometimes. So I

Panagiota Hatzis 42:07

can say, in my experience, one, this is another truism, because I worked so closely with Taylor holiday, and he did have a significant impact on my career, is that in the absence of a narrative, one is created. And so that's something that has stuck with me, especially in human resources, is, what am I doing to be pro at and that's something that I I regularly try to do. I can anticipate what the reaction is going to be. So what am I doing to address everything up front? So I think that that's part of it. But um, as a result of that, or as a result of whatever transparency you want to do at whatever stage of an organization that you have, just because you understand the information that you're speaking to, like, maybe some organizations are not going to release what their EBITDA targets are, right? Like they're just it's not something that's public to the rest of the organization, and that's okay. Also, if EBITDA is something that you're publicly talking about and you're regularly referring to it in meetings, does your staff actually know what that means? And so I think that that's a level of transparency, right? Like if your growth performance marketing team is regularly sharing information and they're saying ROAs and CAC and this many impressions, but your team that's receiving this information and this data has no idea what an mmm is, then the information is useless, and you can't just say, Well, like I shared it. You should know what we're doing. You also have an obligation to teach them how to use that information and like what it means to them specifically. So what I can offer, that I do think is blanket across the board, is whatever level of transparency you're offering from the C suite down, make sure that you're also teaching people what that information means and means to them specifically. I

William Harris 43:58

like that you brought this into the marketing mind for me, like you really just spoke to my language, right? Because we do this, there are there are times where we're optimizing around EBITDA for brands instead of optimizing around ROAs or CAC or some of these other things. Those are all good metrics. They have their place, but we're like, but ultimately, I want to optimize towards the bottom line. Some brands, though, that we work with, you'll be working with their marketing team, and the marketing team has no clue what the EBIT does. They don't have access to PDL either. And so they're given a directive. They're trying to help us optimize. They give us a directive. None of us have that insight. And so then perhaps the CFO is disappointed. When we look at we're like, Well, wait a minute, your ROAs is higher, your revenue is higher. Why are you disappointed this episode? Well, our EBITDA is down. Despite that. It's like, well, I don't have access to that. I have no way of influencing that if I don't understand that. So to your point, maybe the transparency that needs to happen is, if you're looking at this as a metric that needs to be moved or adopted in some way, the team has to have some insight into what those are 100

Panagiota Hatzis 44:59

100% and I, you know, that is such a great example, too, of illustrating why there needs to be cross collaboration and how growth, performance marketing does have a significant impact. You are what is driving the entire top line revenue for the entire organization, right? And so many organizations make, I don't know, 50 plus percent of their revenue in q4 and so if, if growth is functioning separate from like the finance department, and there's not alignment on what the targets are, we have to, as marketers, spend money to make money, right? You have to spend money on platform. That's just a part of it. But maybe your CFO is actually also savvy, and they're able to say, like, what if we cut spend by this amount? But we were able to pull on this lever. Let's test that in q2 see what it what the impact is. How do we scale back spend and still see things take off right? Like you have to kind of play around. But if you don't have the wherewithal to have those conversations, or if you feel that what you're doing is so separate from finance or accounting, what have you, like it's actually not. And I encourage there to be more conversations with those people. My best friend is Shireen Auber, who I'm sure listeners of your podcast are aware of she's just a queen and a beast, and she's amazing. And wherever she goes, We were recently talking about this, she always becomes best friends with like the CFO, or whoever is in charge of finance. And one of the people that I'm closest to consistently is also in the finance department, because, again, so much of what I do in human resources can feel like a cost center, because it is, and it can feel like it's being absent of overall business strategy. But when I'm able to sit down with my VP of Finance and say, All right, strategically, here's the people forecast through the end of the year. What do we think actually makes sense? What is the business case per position? How is this actually going to have a return on overhead? Like, what are we doing to plan thoughtfully across all of those things, as opposed to just saying, like, Well, yeah, our people are stressed out and they're tired, and I just think if we hire some more, like, Help, it'll be fine. That's not the case. Don't, right? Don't use that as business logic, because it's not

William Harris 47:26

Tamsin Webster. I had her on here, and she talks a lot about, like, change organization and how to be effective within that. And that's one of the things that she talked about, is you're never going to convince somebody to solve a problem in a way that's different than what they intrinsically think. Problems are solved in general, right? And so it's like, this is where the alignment from a hiring standpoint, makes a good point. But if you have somebody who believes that the only way to solve the problem is by hiring, but your organization says your core values are more on, how do we drive efficiency? Like you're you're going to be at an opposite end of a lot of the changes that you're trying to implement, it's like, hey, I want to adopt AI. Well, I think we actually just need to hire. Well, you you're trying to change them on something that they think is more of a core, fundamental truth. That's not going to work. Yeah. And I think this is where, like, you and I were talking about before, the difference between, like, there's a gap between intent and impact. Like, Yeah, where is that? Like, how do you define that gap, and how do you work through that? Oh, gosh.

Panagiota Hatzis 48:22

I think that intent and impact is most clearly demonstrated in communication, because you and I can have a conversation all day long, right? And I can tell you will, the sky is blue, the sky is blue, the sky is blue. And then if you leave our conversation and you're like, I just had this epic conversation with Hannah Yoda, and she talks about how the sky is orange. The there was a meme that was circulating on social years and years ago, and it said, I am responsible for what I say, not what you understand. And I call full bullcrap. Sure, like as leaders, we are actually responsible for what people understand. To a certain extent, if you say it three times and the person still doesn't get it, okay, but making sure that your intent of the mess, or your intent of the message actually matches the impact, I think, is is critical. And then it's also being able to take ownership when that those things aren't aligned. That didn't answer your question. Specifically, I was just going off of intent and impact, but well, and I

William Harris 49:18

like that, well, no, no, that's that's a really good way to approach it, because I think that the impact can't be there if you haven't clearly communicated it. So that's a big piece of it. And what you said reminds me of one of my favorite songs by India Ari, which I talked to with my team, which is, talk to her like you were talking to your grandma. It's like what she says right in this song. And so we talk about that with you know, when you're talking to a customer, if they don't understand how what we're doing is driving towards EBITDA or whatever this might be, um, explain it if they still don't get it. Explain it a different way, maybe visual, maybe whatever, right? But it's like, we even talk about, like, the different ways in which people learn, right? So it's like, find it. For way. Because, to your point, it's like, if they don't get it, they will, they will not invest where they need to invest, and they will end up not growing. So it is critically important that they understand it. And to your point, it's like you You are responsible for whether they understand or not. I

Panagiota Hatzis 50:17

love this example that you just said, you know, you don't say the same thing and just expect a different outcome, like, That's insanity, right? But my I started out in retail, and I would often have people traveling from around the world, uh, come to South Coast Plaza, which is like a travel destination in Southern California. Like princes and princesses from all across the world would come, and I wouldn't speak their language, and I would sometimes, like, see younger individuals engage with them, and it's like, just because you're talking louder and slower, but saying the exact same thing doesn't mean that they're gonna understand what you're saying, right? Like, you have to change the approach. Like, do you pick up the bag and point to it and say, Do you want this bag? Or do you like, I don't know, your approach does have to change. And kind of going back to the intent and impact and the leadership is taking responsibility when they're not. I literally just had a, you know, difficult conversation with one of my department leads last night, and my intention impact wasn't aligned, and I was able to say, like, oh, that's how you receive that. I am so sorry that wasn't the intent, and I take responsibility for it. You don't. Then put the blame on them and say, like, Well, you didn't understand what I said. You're the idiot. Like, I had to take full ownership, because the onus is on me to say, Ah, okay, I get what I get. How you could have interpreted it that way. It wasn't my intent. Let me try saying it a different way now, and that builds the relational equity, like, right when you take away the hubris and you are able to, like, showcase humility in your own humanity and saying I'm just a human too, even though I'm in human resources, right? Like I'm just doing the best that I can. I'm gonna screw up too along the way and say I'm sorry. God, there's so much power in saying I'm sorry.

William Harris 52:13

Yeah, it reminds me of the key and peel skit. Maybe you've seen this where they're texting back and forth, and he's like, basically something along the lines, like they were going to go hang out, and he's like, do you even want to go? He's like, because he was feeling frustrated, like the other guy, he's like, do you even want to go? And then the guy reads the text, he's like, do you even want to go? And he goes, That's so nice of him to be considerate. Yeah, I guess. Whatever. And he was like, Whatever, whatever. He's like, Let's go right now. Right Like, we're gonna go fight. And he's like, Let's go right now. He's like, Yeah, sure, why not? Let's go right now. Kind of thing. It's like, the way that they're receiving these were completely opposite. And so it's so easy, we think that we understand each other, but more often not, we don't. How do you mitigate those types of miscommunications in the way that we work now, which some of just, is text based. And to make sure that you're saying, Did you actually receive the message that I was sending? Yeah,

Panagiota Hatzis 53:07

my goodness. So what you're highlighting on is it's not just what you say, it's how you say it, and you are right, right? So much of that is lost in written communication, Slack communication, text, whatever. If you find the current or as much as we are, like technology dependent, we have become phone adverse, and that kind of, like blows my mind in so many different ways. And so if you're going back and forth in email or in Slack or in text message, and you're finding that something is only escalating. Sure it's okay to pick up the phone and actually say, like, Hey, I think that there's a disconnect my impact or like, my intent clearly isn't aligning with my impact. I'm so sorry. I want to clear the air. What I was trying to say is this, how do you feel about that? Or what do you think I'm trying to get out of this? Right? Pick up the phone. That is my solution to all of the crap that happens in written communication. That's

William Harris 54:12

huge. I want to talk about some practical things, then, for brands that are scaling from 10 million to 100 million, this is a big part of what I focus on, what what people challenges are most overlooked by companies that are making that scale from you going from 10 million to 100 million, what are the people challenges they're likely going to struggle

Panagiota Hatzis 54:34

with? None. It's the easiest thing. And worry about it.

William Harris 54:40

Yeah, exactly. I

Panagiota Hatzis 54:41

think that. I think that having been a part of organizations that have scaled from like zero to one up to like 25 and HexClad is, you know, in the multi 100 million dollar scale now, yeah. There's different approaches to it, and I think part of what has made hex cloud as successful as it has is we've been able to function, really, on a lean team, and we've been able to hire incredibly thoughtfully, and I even saw this in my consulting work, but certainly like mistakes made earlier on in my career, where you figure out what ever your target is for the end of the year, and maybe EBITDA isn't attached to it, because you're not that savvy on some of that stuff yet, and you're just thinking of top line revenue or bottom line revenue, and you're like, Okay, so I'm just going to go after this. How many bodies do I need to do this job? And like, you back fill it from a head count point of view, especially if you have revenue attached to like, if you're selling people as a service for whatever it is that you're providing, right? And you're like, Well, I know that my buyer can provide this much revenue. I know my growth strategist can provide this much revenue. So if I have 10 of them, they can bring in this much right? That I just don't know that that's always the right approach, and I do believe, and have witnessed that leading to like a form of implosion, and so just being really careful around, what does it mean to scale efficiently and effectively? I think, is first and foremost, the thing, incorporating the use of AI wherever you can to help execute against those things, I think, is paramount in this day and age. And then it goes back to that process, Word and process as a way of allowing for you to excel and scale and innovate, not something that gets in the way of what you're trying to achieve, but a thing that's allowing you to actually flourish. I'm not saying that everything needs to be documented and be an SOP, and not everything needs to live in your PMS necessarily. However, if you want to scale in such a way that you have a couple of different pods or teams doing similar work, if all of them are functioning in a very different way, and one of them has multiple people out sick, and you have to depend on people from another pod to support them, and they don't speak the same language, that is problematic. That is completely counter to you, scaling effectively. And that's when the process comes into play. That's when the SOP comes into play. That's when writing creative briefs consistently for your strategist comes into play, right? Or submitting those briefs to production like all of or the naming conventions for post production, like all of that stuff, like they exist for a reason. And so you just have to kind of think through the lens of what would allow for my people to do their job as streamlined as possible, so that I can build more of them, or so that you're building in redundancy without having to hire 12 people, the more that people are like focused On streamlined systems, process, naming conventions, whatever it is, the more secure I believe you're building your organization to be. Yeah.

William Harris 58:06

No, that makes a lot of sense. I like the way that you called out the idea of, like, one might be helpful, 10 is going to implode. So how, how do you know if the next hire is relieving stress? Like, how do you make a business case for that? Yeah,

Panagiota Hatzis 58:23

up front actually. And so I have people actually write business cases for each hire and and so it's not only what is the title of this position, what do you like think at a high level, like some of the bullet point responsibilities might be, but then it also outlines, how does this have a direct impact to you as their direct supervisor? Like, how am I going to get more maximization of you at a higher cost per hour and hiring somebody at a lower cost per hour? Where are you going to be reallocating that time? And then there's also the opportunity for you to evaluate the system flow and say is what's currently in place for your department, like, are we solving for like, inefficiencies in process or communication or collaboration, or are you just wanting to throw a person at this versus this person will have substantial impact, absent of some of that stuff, where they're going to lead the creation of some of those things, all of those things are presented to me, and then I talk about it with the C suite, and then we have conversations around whether or not that actually makes sense for us moving forward, and it makes it a little bit more of a collaborative process.

William Harris 59:38

I love it. I haven't heard that said before, so I really appreciate that, because as I think about it, what's really interesting there is, when you're looking to hire somebody, you're already likely at the point where you're kind of a little bit stressed and overwhelmed, and you're like, we need to hire somebody, right? Like, so that's the first thing that you just go to and then to say, like, Hey, before we do that, I need you to write this business case. It feels a little bit tough. Um, but I think that it makes sense, because now, to your point, it's like you can critically think about, like, wait a minute, what is the problem that you're solving with this one area where I like this, but I'm I'm not as experienced in this as you, and so I'd like to know what you think about this is if there's somebody that doesn't sit in the seat of something, so I can't necessarily say that it's going to take a whole lot of time off of my plate, or anything like that. It might not take, let's just even say for me as a CEO, and maybe, speaking for other CEOs here as well, it might only be taking four hours a week off of my plate. That's only because I'm only dedicating for as a time to it, because I don't have time to dedicate towards somebody but nobody else is sitting in this seat to be able to say, thinking about it in a way where it's like, this is your job, and if this doesn't get done, it's your fault. Where it's like as a CEO, maybe I can let a few things go, because I have other things that are bigger priorities. So finding somebody sitting in a seat not relieving a whole lot of stress or time off of my plate. How would I approach that? Then maybe, is this maybe, let's just say, you know, you're a CEO of ten million business, you approach this and you say, Well, okay, maybe it's not relieving a lot of your time, but having somebody who cares about this maybe it can become a bigger thing. And that's where the business case is, because somebody cares about this now it actually gets measured. Now it actually gets done. So

Panagiota Hatzis 1:01:17

such a great question. And I think one thinking through the other part of the business cases, being able to also put together some rough idea of KPIs like this is what the person would be responsible for, and how you would hold them accountable to what success looks like, right? And I think that because CEOs are so focused on the up and out. There's plenty of crap that you just don't want to do, right? I mean, like, we all don't want to do certain things. And so if you come up with something new and you're like, I don't want to focus on it, but you're thinking through the lens of, okay, I like, it doesn't always have to be attached necessarily to EBITDA or top or bottom line revenue like you can, you can think through the lens of what's the legacy that you want to create in the organization that you are spearheading. And if you want people to have conversations about you, like they do Patagonia, right then, okay, hire somebody to do that stuff because you're so focused on all of the numbers and the expansion, then, yeah, get a counterpart that can focus on the down and in, and then think through what KPIs are, a mixture of numbers as well as the qualitative. I want high employee satisfaction. I want low turnover, like there's you can get creative in how you're tracking some of this stuff, but I think think through what you ultimately want to do with your business. I Yeah, it does that answer your question. Does that? Does

William Harris 1:02:52

it does very much. What? What happens to the culture when you go from 20 to 100 employees? What are founders and executives going to need to think through now, as they are, you know, they're mapping this out, and they're saying, Great, here's the trajectory that we're on. They're mapping it out. They're thinking numbers and thinking about the culture.

Panagiota Hatzis 1:03:11

Yeah, I think that at every 25 hires, you should just anticipate crap is gonna break right? So going from zero to 25 it's one thing, 25 to 5050, to 7575 to 100 and then it can it definitely like compounds, as you double in size, from 100 to 200 etc, etc. But that goes back to the communication and having somebody that is really good at helping to create the narrative, more people are going to want to know what's going on. It's up to you and leadership to figure out, well, what do you actually want them to know about, versus maybe not knowing about what's too much information versus not enough, and are people actually digesting and understanding the stuff that we are sharing with them, and saying it once like you and I talked about, isn't enough making sure that you, like, have a whole marketing strategy or a whole marketing plan outlined for what you're going to be talking about if your office is moving, for example, saying to the entire staff the day before that, hey, we're Moving tomorrow, probably not going to be very well received, you know. So how do you how do you work backwards from that and plan for it?

William Harris 1:04:30

I like that. I want to dig into the next segment, which is, who is Panagiota Hatzis. Tell me a little bit about your childhood and how that's helped shape you, because I believe that you have a very interesting approach towards people ops that I haven't seen or heard talked about the way that most people are. What about your childhood has helped make you the person who is thinking and acting and, you know, impactful in this way? Yeah. Yeah,

Panagiota Hatzis 1:05:01

so I am first generation Greek American. My parents immigrated from Greece. They are from a small, little village in Greece. My mom has like, less than a sixth grade grad education. She grew up picking cotton and corn and watermelons in the village, right? And they immigrated 50 years ago, and they did the very Greek thing, which is very much like My Big Fat Greek Wedding. They opened up restaurants when they immigrated. All of the families did, and I was born and like practically put in a box in the back of the restaurant while they were still working every day. And so very quickly, I learned that work isn't contained between the hours of nine to five, Monday through Friday, right? And then I started working very young in the restaurant, you know, cleaning and, you know, I was in the third grade waking up at 6am on the weekend. It wasn't child labor, or maybe it was, I don't know, it was just the thing that we had to do, yeah, testing tables, the hostess with the mostest and so, yeah. Like, I understood very quickly, like, if something great happened at work that translated and carried into home long after work hours were done, or if something crap happened at home, it would be unreasonable to expect that, you know, if somebody's dog got hurt, that they would just come in and like that wouldn't matter to them at all, or like, their kids are throwing up, and they would just be able to show up, like, completely unfazed, even though they didn't sleep through the night because their kids were sick all night, right? Like being able to understand that there's fluidity between all of it, I think, is paramount. And so as a result of that, I I decided in my senior year of high school that this is what I wanted to do, which is uncharacteristic of a lot of people. I knew that I wanted to make an impact on making work life better. We spend so much time of our lives there. Like, what could I do about that. And I discovered industrial organizational psychology, which is what I went to graduate school for. And it's essentially, why do your employees hate coming to work? And how can you make a How can you make that better for everybody? And that's ultimately my approach. In a nutshell.

William Harris 1:07:15

I absolutely love that. Do you believe in work life balance? Then?

Panagiota Hatzis 1:07:21

I don't I think that a phrase that you had introduced me to actually was like work life integration. I think that for anyone who thinks that work is external to life, you got a bigger problem, or you might be a sociopath, because work is not external to your life, like we just talked about, right? It's work imbalance to who you are as a husband to who you are as a father, to who you are as someone who works out to who you are as a pet parent, whatever that might be. But it's work balance in relation to all of the different parts of who you are. But to think that work is completely separate from your life. Like, yeah, no. Like, there needs to be a little bit more integration. Work is a part of your life. What are you doing to balance all aspects of who you are? I

William Harris 1:08:07

love it, and I agree, right? I want to read to you, because this fits so well one of the core values that we have, and I think you'll appreciate it we talk about, we just have three, be innovative, be accountable and be human. And I did only three because I wanted it to be as clear as possible, but on the human side to say we are human beings. We have emotions, we have families and friends and pets. We have good days and bad days and even some meth days. We have hopes and dreams and fears and heartbreaks. And the same is true for our clients, our team, our vendors and everyone else that we come in contact with even the people on the road as we drive to work. So we will make sure that we are a positive influence on every precious human life to the best extent possible. We will take the time to listen. We will communicate purposefully, thoroughly and kindly. We will opt for more light hearted, playful communication whenever possible, while recognizing the need for seriousness at appropriate times as well. And while we do have people relying on us counting on us, we recognize that we are not perfect, that we need to be as kind to ourselves as we are to others out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks, we recognize that we want to be as positive influence on those around us. We must protect our hearts by showing ourselves grace as well. We must recognize that we are not alone. Take time off, establish good habits and advocate for ourselves and our teammates against unrealistic expectations. That

Panagiota Hatzis 1:09:27

is beautiful and for all of your listeners, what you have done with your core values is being succinct, making them not sentences, not these long phrases, but things that people can actually remember, and then you've operationalize them. That's how people actually live into your culture. That's when people are like, Oh, now I know what be human is, and I know what be human isn't. And you are setting people up for success, and you're reinforcing the things that you want to see and the things that you don't want to see. So just having crap written on a wall. And saying, like, Yeah, you heard about it during onboarding. Is ineffectual. That is really heartfelt and very beautiful. Thanks for sharing. No,

William Harris 1:10:09

I appreciate that. So you Greek immigrants. We were talking about this before. So you do speak Greek. It's amazing, by the way. I love that. I love people that speak other languages as their first language.

Panagiota Hatzis 1:10:23

I also have a dog, and He only speaks Greek. You have really, you

William Harris 1:10:26

wait. Okay, so what are like? What's a basic command that you would give to a dog in Greek?

Panagiota Hatzis 1:10:30

His name is Philos, which means friend in Greek, and like all of his commands to like, sit, is kata? Oh, kata? Kata or come, is Ella like,

William Harris 1:10:44

Oh, that's cool. I like that. Do you? Do you? Do you? Like, how advanced does it get? Like, if you said Come, or if you said like, stop, or whatever, like, would he even understand it at all? Like, an idiot. Only, is he bilingual? Or is he only? Does he only speak Greek?

Panagiota Hatzis 1:11:04

No, I think, I think he is a little bilingual at this point. But yeah, like all of his major like fun, showy tricks, or when I tell him, like you need to go chill out, he'll only listen to that in Greek. That's

William Harris 1:11:18

amazing. Do you still practice Greek outside of teaching your dog tricks. Yeah,

Panagiota Hatzis 1:11:23

my mom, even though she emigrated 50 years ago, still speaks Greek better than she does English. And like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, I went to Greek school for six years, learned how to read and write in it, which I'm not great at these days. But I also like danced Greek dance, like competitively for a very long time in my life. And so the Greek music, the Greek culture, we just had Easter, we had the lamb on the spit, everything Greek music and dancing happened just in the backyard, like all of that stuff was It was magical. And I hated every bit of it growing up. And I am so grateful for all of the torment that it was. Now,

William Harris 1:12:05

for sure, I don't speak really that much Greek. The Greek that I know is more like ancient Greek. My ring actually is Greek. It says First Corinthians 13 in Greek. But there's a story that I always loved, the reason why thing, one of the things I like about the Greek language will come out in this story, there was a missionary who had talked to one of the guys that I know, and he said, I don't understand you Americans. And he he used the word, I think it was the word skubala, and I could be getting it wrong, but the word that he used was where Paul, in the Bible says, next to Christ. I consider everything else to be. Skubala is the word that was used, which basically meant, like, dung or crap or whatever, right? It's like, but like, maybe even a little bit stronger than that, right? It's like, it's like, nothing else matters. And he goes, in English, we have one word for you guys. Have one word for crap. Basically, this is the word that he says. And we have, you know, you have, or we have one word for love, but you have, like, many, many words for poop, basically. But we have like, six words for love. And I don't remember how many it is, right, but it's, like, many, many words for love and only one for, you know, crappy, like, you've, you've got your language backwards. And I think that's one of the things that I love about the Greek language, is the many different iterations of the word love, right? And so correct me. If I'm wrong with some of the ones that I remember, it's like, there's like, there's, there's, you know, store, gate, phileos, there's arrows, yeah, agape, like, like, like, there's so many beautiful ways that you can describe things differently, which I think is really cool.

Panagiota Hatzis 1:13:36

Yeah, I think it's a really cool language, too. We did some cool stuff. We being, I don't know, ancestors, yeah, yeah. Once

William Harris 1:13:45

we were talking about weightlifting before, and how you love weightlifting. What got you into weightlifting? My brother,

Panagiota Hatzis 1:13:52

actually, yeah. But I'm gonna say this almost like begrudgingly, because the joke about people that CrossFit is that you know that they cross it, because they always tell you that they cross it. That was, that was my original introduction into it, and I adapted to both the Olympic and powerlifting side of of that to the point of where, like, we would joke, like, what are you doing for cardio? And I'm like, you lift weights faster, duh. Like, obviously, yeah, I think that that's ultimately what got me into it. And there's just a certain level of confidence that becomes unlocked when you have a better understanding of what your body is capable of and the limits in which you're able to push it. And I don't know, you just kind of carry yourself differently. And it honestly was a transformation for me in a lot of different ways, where it definitely helped me become of more of who I'm meant to be and who I am today, for sure. Yeah. And it also feels incredible to throw some weight around in like when you're upset. As a stress reliever,

William Harris 1:14:57

it is a good stress reliever. What is? What is? Is the hardest thing that you've done in regards to weightlifting, meaning, like, is there something that maybe you found a specific type of workout that you're like? This one scares me. I don't want to do it. Or maybe there's something that you're just like, I don't know, getting into a routine has been hard, like,

Panagiota Hatzis 1:15:20

the scariest thing or the most difficult thing? What was the Yeah,

William Harris 1:15:22

most, most difficult? Which it could be because of fear. It could be just because you're like, I am not a naturally routine person, and so waking up the same time every day was hard for me.

Panagiota Hatzis 1:15:34

I actually think figuring out my one rep max for my back squat, I was close to 300 pounds, and it took a really long time, because I did work in retail for so long, I was in heels, and as a result, yeah, yeah, hey everybody,

William Harris 1:15:54

yeah, in for a second I thought you were saying you did you want rep max and heels? And I was like, That's really impressive, but, well, I put the story together, yes, and

Panagiota Hatzis 1:16:03

that's why there's weight lifting shoes that have a heel on them, not having wearing heels, but because ankle flexibility. And so because I wore heels for so long, my calf muscles had shortened. My ankle flexibility wasn't great, so I had a tendency to be really quad dominant, as opposed to utilizing my glutes. And I remember, I think I had just back squatted, like 225, maybe, and I was at the bottom of my squat, and my coach was to the side of me, who's nationally ranked in weightlifting, and I fully fell forward, and I was petrified, and he fully let it happen, knowing that nothing like horrible was gonna happen. And like, I fell forward and the bar, like, rolled over the top of my head, 225 pounds guys, and I remember being like, okay, like, I really need to concentrate on keeping my chest up and, like, activating my glutes and all of those things. And that ultimately led to me getting to just about 300 but, yeah, I mean, that goes back to having a really great coach, like looking at you and giving you the cues, and then being able to say, like, so, you know, all of that ancillary, like auxiliary stuff that you don't want to do. That's why you need to do it. And I was like, Yeah, I don't want to die cool.

William Harris 1:17:19

You are throwing around some pretty impressive weight. I love that coach. It reminds me of something I've heard in boxing, which I don't remember who said it. It might have even been a movie, right? Like, let's just degrade my sources even more here, which is something basically, it's like, you got to get hit in the face at least once before you get into a ring, because otherwise, you need to know how bad it hurts and that your life isn't going to end. And then you can get in there and you're like, not afraid of you. Not afraid of getting hit anymore. So I think, to your point, like the coach had to let you, kind of like, it's a safe way for you to see and feel some of the extent of these things, and then it will make it more real, real for you to want to do some of

Panagiota Hatzis 1:17:53

these other I appreciate that. And I'm going to say again, I don't recommend that as a record common practice, especially if you've never weight lifted, like, don't let your people do that. I he knew where I was. He understood my limitations. He like all of those things. So please nobody go out and try that. It's not, not recommended.

William Harris 1:18:16

Yep. Well, you're not just a meat head. You're also a nerd. You're telling me a little bit about like you love to read. What are some of the books that you're enjoying right now? Yeah,

Panagiota Hatzis 1:18:26

well, I actually, I just finished Elon Musk's biography. And really, yeah, and I know that we are in a very political climate at the moment. I don't necessarily agree with Elon, and it was my way of seeking to understand and context is really important. And I also think regardless of where you fall on any sort of belief system, whether it's political or religious or whatever it is, you should have frame of context for maybe the other side that you don't always agree with, and it was incredibly educational, is what I'll say. And I don't agree with a lot, and there's also a reason that he has built some really incredible stuff, and it's why I'm also at a stage in my life where I really embrace that many things can be true at the same time, and and you can disagree on a lot of things, but it doesn't make one person all good or all bad, or a decision all good or all bad or what have you. Many things can be true, and you can really think that maybe one part isn't great and maybe some other parts really are. So that's what I'll that's what I'll say about that. And then some just really powerful thought leaders, like book recommendations. One that was pretty transformational for me was think again by Adam Grant, who's an organizational psychologist. He's a top rated professor at. Out of Wharton. And think again, I used to think that changing your mind made you really wishy washy. And, like, you know, if you say that your favorite color is blue, and then, you know, two months later you say that it's green, you're like, you're indecisive. You can't, like, Hold on to your opinion. And he gave me permission to say that if new data is being presented to you that suggests that you might like something different, or changes your opinion on something based off of whatever it is. Why wouldn't you like change your mind when there's data in front of you suggesting one thing or the other? And that's actually allowed for a lot more, I think flexibility, I used to be very this or that, and finding some room to live in the in between has been helpful for me, both as a professional and just as a human. I

William Harris 1:20:53

love it. I think, think again, is a really great book. I've only read parts, but I want to finish the book. But to your point, I think we need to be able to challenge what we think right now, to think that at 20 or 30 or 40 or 70, that we have figured it out, and that there's nothing new for us to challenge or relearn, is insane. I especially love that you're even saying, go read a book about maybe somebody that you vehemently disagree with, yeah, learn to see things from their perspective. Maybe that won't change what you think about what they're doing, but you can at least understand why they're doing what they're doing, and maybe then you have a better way of communicating how you think they could do a different or better job. Because this is people ops, like that. You're You're people op, seeing the government right now

Panagiota Hatzis 1:21:41

like, yeah, literally right, yeah, 100% and it does. It does immediately draw parallels to what your leadership style is. We're all going to have direct reports that we don't see eye to eye with, or like, the person that just wants to refute everything that you say and like, vehemently just disagree with whatever the objective is. And if you say good morning, they're like, I can't believe they say good morning. And if you don't say good morning, they're like, I can't believe they didn't say good morning, like, whatever it is, right? And so the more that you're able to like, seek to understand from people that you don't always agree with, and try to build some equity, um, I don't know, just humanize the person on the other side. I there's just a lot of power in that, and it's helpful for me, things

William Harris 1:22:27

don't get changed if we don't see the other side as a human, because then I think it allows for anybody to go to extreme measures to try to block or change or do anything that, because we, if we've dehumanized them, then there's nothing that's off the table from doing to try to do that. So I'd say that's good exercise for everybody. Go out there this week, this month, read a book about something you disagree with, and learn something. Yeah. Um, Panagiota, I have absolutely loved talking to you, learning from you, getting to know you, if people want to follow you, or, you know, stay in touch in some way. What's the best way for them to do that? I

Panagiota Hatzis 1:23:10

primarily I'm on LinkedIn. So find me on LinkedIn. Panagiota Hatzis, or you can go to HexClad and look at me at people that work at HexClad, but that's the the main place I'm on, the Twitter sphere. It's very big for the D to C space, but I don't post very much. I am entertained when I log in there. I don't, I don't log in there very much. So yeah, LinkedIn is definitely like the primo spot. I look forward to connecting with whomever awesome.

William Harris 1:23:37

I love that. Thank you again for taking your time and sharing your knowledge with us today. Oh,

Panagiota Hatzis 1:23:42

thank you for the opportunity, and you the grace that you extend to all of your guests. Very much. Have enjoyed the opportunity here today, yeah, well, thank you

William Harris 1:23:51

again, and thank you everyone for listening. Have a great rest of your day.

Outro 1:23:54

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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