Interviews from HR Innovator Magazine

Life on the People Side

Dana Ardi
Human Capital Partner
JPMorgan Partners
New York, NY

It's fair to say that most people regard work as one important way to achieve their dreams and realize their potential. But for Dr. Dana Beth Ardi, raised in the midst of a family enterprise headed by a strong Russian immigrant grandmother, work has always been the way to help others realize their dreams. For as long as she can remember, she grew up surrounded by stories of how her grandparents took in immigrants from all over the world and gave them a start in their New Land.

Along with that lesson came the first-hand understanding of the power of human dedication and passion to a cause – whether it is working as one of the celebrated volunteer “Mud Angels” after Florence 's devastating flood in 1967 which threatened its vast collections of Renaissance art and architecture, or helping companies build their potential from the inside out by shepherding the human capital side of entrepreneurial vision.

Today, as Human Capital Partner with JP Morgan Partners, a private equity firm with approximately $13 billion in capital under management, Ardi helps match the most sought after talent with the best opportunities within the firm's portfolio companies. With a Ph.D. from Boston College, she is also using her on-going post-doc work at the William Alanson White Institute to provide counsel and coaching to her portfolio of companies to give them the necessary skills and insights to design the ideal organizational architecture and deploy people against that strategy.

Before joining JP Morgan Partners, Ardi created the same position with Flatiron Partners, which was a JP Morgan Partners affiliate fund and served as co-chair of the Global Communications, Entertainment, and Technology practice of TMP Worldwide. Her resume also includes a tenure as senior vice president of New Media for R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company, where she was responsible for joint ventures/strategic alliances. Before that she was President of The Infotainment Corporation, where she consulted for various leading studios, publishers, technology, retail, and telecommunication companies.

Who inspired you to build a career helping people realize their potential through their work?

My grandmother. She came over to this country from Russia when she was only 16, holding her five-year-old brother's hand. They were the only surviving siblings of 13 children. All the rest had been killed during a raid on their village. Because they had a relative in America, the two of them came over all by themselves. But the relative was less than welcoming and treated my grandmother as a domestic. And she saw it as her responsibility to take care of her brother and get a place of their own. One of her chores was to do the shopping. So she went to the local store and convinced them that she was a good worker. She told them that if they would give her a job, she would help them grow their business.

They gave her a job and she and her brother lived in the store. She eventually fell in love and married the shopkeeper's son, who would become my grandfather. They adopted her brother (and he would grow up to become a famous doctor and surgeon in New York ). For the rest of her life, she helped over 500 other immigrants from all countries. They knew they could go to my grandfather and grandmother, who would give them a good meal, clothes, a couple of hundred dollars and help them think about how they could get networked. There are many people I still meet to this day who talk about the fact that when they came over and knew no one my grandparents inspired them to find something in themselves to succeed here. At the time of her funeral, people came from all over the country to give respect and to tell their stories. It wasn't about the money, it was about her being a role model for believing in herself and for giving them the courage to believe in themselves as well.

Seeing that throughout my life, there was nothing else I could do. I was always very proud to be part of that kind of mission.

What makes you happy when you do this work?

I made a strategic decision early on that I wanted to be on the people side of industry. Nothing makes me happier than to see growth – growth of organizations and individual growth. I love new ideas, and I love entrepreneurialism. I love people who are constantly surprising themselves with their capabilities. To me nothing is more exciting than getting individuals and teams of people to recognize that kind of revolutionary growth and self-awareness. The best part of my job is when I really help people raise the bar on their thinking and give them a fresh perspective on the road that they're traveling and some of the other paths that can be taken.

I like to call it “stake in the stream” not “stake in the ground” thinking. It's what's happening in today's current business and personal environment. We all have many more options. You do need to focus but you're always thinking about how the stream is moving. And you're reevaluating, recalibrating, self-checking, “Am I the best I can be? What are my goals? Am I meeting my goals? Am I stretching myself enough?” It's helping people and organizations probe that part of themselves. That's really the best part of my day.

That level of overall inquiry into life and organizations presupposes a certain level of core stability – an inner security that doesn't seem to have room for fear. So much of what's done on a daily, quarterly and yearly basis inside organizations has some fear base to it. Don't you need to be somewhat secure on a deep level in order to allow yourself the freedom to think like that?

I think that organizations have to allow people the safety of ideas. People have to be free to contribute on all levels of an organization. Really good organizations have that value built into their cultures. But remember, there's no courage without fear. Fear is the unknown. People would change if they knew the change was good. But they're afraid of change because they don't know what the change will bring. So part of what we need to do is really think about change in a positive way.

A lot of people are motivated at work by fear. But those environments are not the most productive. If fear is what drives you at work, then it's time for you to rethink where you are and what are you're afraid of.

How can HR strategists sustain that sense of possibility in change when they're working to maintain the status quo…not for cultivating the excitement of change?

There are ways you can inspire people in any company to think about how they can do their jobs better. How can the company be tighter, more efficient, more community-like? How can people get satisfaction regardless of what tasks they perform?

I call myself a corporate anthropologist. If more people thought of themselves as anthropologists and strategists rather than administrators, they would change their perception of what is permissible for them to suggest to their management team.

Many of us have been trained that management teams are our clients. And that's right. But it's also our responsibility to see to it that our clients get the best advice and counsel. Again that has to do with taking the leadership role. Explore and be aware of your own leadership competencies and opportunities. Stay current with innovation. Be willing to be creative and try new things. Be willing to speak up and say what you really feel. Keep asking yourself, “How do we create an environment in this organization in which we allow people to do their best work and innovate?”

It's this highest level of thinking about the precious asset that we have. The value creation for the business is not necessarily the things that we can touch, but it is the people that we touch. That's a completely different way of thinking.

It's money. It's assets. It's opportunity through which people can come together. It's about diversity of thought and ideas. It's about people being empowered to socratically challenge each other, to raise the bar on their own thinking.

I'd think it's also about being willing to raise your own personal bar of standards and expectations.

There are many ways we, as human capital leaders, can administer value-added services in any kind of company where we bring our skills sets. But I think many, many people have been used to the idea of being less than empowered. We've been put in a box as a profession. Once we break out of the box and say, “Hey look at me, I'm capable of helping you in other ways,” we also discover that the team welcomes the help.

Do you have to wait for permission?

You don't need permission to propose, to offer to bring value, support, creativity, expertise and insights to whatever the company is working on. And when I bring people together in unusual combinations to share their expertise with each other, I stay with that meeting. Then I too have an enlightened perspective when we share ideas.

There are many ways HR professionals can create an opportunity for the free flow of knowledge, both internally for the company and outside the company. And, while no one calls me this, I like to think of my role as chief knowledge officer. When I see a learning area for a company that's necessary, I jump right on it.

We also need to be the sounding-board for senior management. It's very lonely being a leader of any kind of company. The senior leadership, the CEO, really doesn't have anyone, other than the human capital executive, to give them perspective.

A lot of people don't even know that they have that personal currency as advisors on such a high level.

Exactly. But human capital executives are able to have dialogues with senior managers at that level – really difficult conversations that raise the bar on thinking and help the senior person create the awareness that they may not have.

I started something at JPMorgan Partners called tribal learning where I facilitate intimate dialogs around particular topics. I bring in the elders – the ones most experienced in that situation – with the juniors, and it's safe to talk about anything and everything in that room. Every idea is safe. I started it to create a way where some of the junior people can learn from the senior people. But what also happened, which I couldn't have anticipated, was that the senior members of the team recognized how much had changed and how much they needed to learn. That had been making assumptions based on the way things were when they had come up, and as a result they were removed from the real needs of clients and the customers.

HR professionals would also benefit from keeping a closer contact to what's going on at the points where the company and the clients meet.

I insist that the HR person go out on a customer call in our companies. They can't really talk about customers or understand customers if they haven't been in front of them for a while. Good human capital executives feel that they want to be part of the process. They want to understand how the business works. Once they do, they can start to understand what knowledge they need to bring into the organization.

We're so caught up in staying in our offices, taking our phone calls and troubleshooting that we don't think about the other things: “how I can be proactive, how can I serve the organization? What are the areas that no one else is thinking about? How can I fill in the gaps?”

We're all leaders and followers. Organizations are successful if they're ones in which individuals share each other's aspirations. So it's not about competition. It's about “what do we dream as a group?”

What are the biggest mistakes that truly called, elevated visionary HR players put themselves at risk for committing on their own career paths?

Not taking risks in what they do. And waiting for other people to take those risks themselves. Being ruled too much by regulation and not looking for areas to assume leadership and innovation. Not recognizing the high potentials and finding ways to fuel them.

Do you see HR as relieving pain, restoring hope or bringing beauty into the world?

It's about hope. It goes back to the aspirations of the individual in the organization. You can't separate who you are from who you are at work. The truth is you're the same person throughout the day. The best you can be with your family also comes into the best you can be with the organization. We can inspire people with hope – the hope for better employment, the hope for satisfaction with their jobs, the hope for the ability to be part of the community of work, the hope for being part of a family.

This article originally appeared in the March 2005 issue of HR Innovator magazine. Reprinted with permission.