CHANGE MAKERS EVAN WITTENBERG

Prior to being the Chief People Officer at Pivot Bio, Evan Wittenberg ’87 was most recently Executive Vice President & Chief People Officer at Ancestry, the world leader in both genealogy and consumer genomics, with $1B+ in annual revenues and 1,500 employees world-wide. As a member of the senior executive leadership team, Evan helped to guide the privately held company through a period of fast growth by finding, developing, and retaining amazing talent and ensuring a fantastic culture. Before Ancestry, Evan spent five years as Senior Vice President of People at Box, a public cloud content management software company. As Box’s Chief People Officer, he was responsible for scaling the company from around $50M to close to $500M in revenue and from 400 to 1,700 employees in 14 countries. He was a member of the executive leadership team that took the company public in 2015. Prior to joining Box, Evan was Hewlett-Packard’s Chief Talent Officer, where he was responsible for the largest technology company in the world’s diverse global talent.

Previously, Evan spent four years as Head of Global Leadership Development at Google. He created and grew the function and was responsible for leadership development globally and cross-functionally, leading a team that built a variety of programs, courses, and development opportunities for Googlers, therefore enabling the company’s rapid growth and ground-breaking innovation. Before Google, Evan was the Director of the Graduate Leadership Program at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. In this role he was responsible for all of the leadership development activities for the school’s 1,600 M.B.A.s, taught the core course in Leadership and Teamwork, and ran the school’s experiential leadership learning program, the Wharton Leadership Ventures. He was also Associate Director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management. Evan received his BA with Distinction in Psychology and English Literature from Swarthmore College and his M.B.A. with Honors from the Wharton School, specializing in Strategic Change Leadership.

How did you first become interested in your profession as a Chief People Officer? For as long as I can remember, I've woken up in the morning with two thoughts. One is, what am I going to learn today and how am I going to get better? And the second is, how can I help somebody else be great today? These questions are ingrained into my mindset. Luckily, both of those are imminently achievable if you focus on them over the course of your day. In organizational life, this lives in people-function. I'm an accidental Human Relations (HR) person. I never was interested in being in HR, but that's where learning, development growth, and development leadership tend to live in organizational life. It’s about how you help individuals, teams, functions, and organizations achieve their full potential, and that is what I love doing.

How has your role evolved over the years? I’d like to think I'm innovative, but certainly, it's also true that tech companies, Silicon Valley tech companies specifically, have been really pushing the envelope on a lot of people issues for a long time. I think there would be more pushback in more conventional industries or in some longerterm companies. The job has changed in many ways. Twenty years ago, people had a seat at the table, right? I think the background of a lot of people in traditional HR was HR. It was hard to get a seat at the table because traditional HR is not very good. It typically just does what it thinks HR should do instead of what the company needs to succeed. As a business leader, I think about the business first and how I'm a leader of the company first, and then I run my function second. So I had a seat at the table because I understood how to solve problems for the company, not just for the function. I tell my teams: your job is to solve for the employee and for the company, both. Most companies solve for the company, and that's why nobody wants to work there. And some managers solve for the employee, and that hurts the company. Increasingly in recent years, my function has become that of babysitter, political advocate, or trying to make everybody happy, even though everybody disagrees with each other. I think the hardest thing, frankly, over the last five or six years for this function, has been the divide in the country.

Have you seen a change in the way people are engaging with the workplace given recent world events? I can't find a time in history where the power has shifted so much from employer to employee because of scarcity of talent, the Great Resignation, and people knowing employers can only run their company if they get the talent they need. The talent they need now has certain expectations of that company, and so employers are having to get really flexible.

In economics, there's this theory called the tragedy of the commons, and it's based on the old English commons, which was the grass area in the middle of a town. People were allowed to let their cows graze there because it was common to everybody. The problem was, if everybody optimized for their own cows, the cows would eat all the grass, it would be a mud pit, and everybody would lose. So it's the idea that people's self-optimization actually ends up with the whole being a disaster. I think there's some of that happening where people optimize for themselves, saying, “I want to come in when I want to come in.” The thing is they want it to be the same place they left it. They want everybody there that they want to see, cooler talk, and snacks, etc. But if everybody's deciding to come in when they want to, then when they go in, it's crickets and nobody’s there, and then in turn, nobody wants to be there. It's a self-fulfilling spiral to the bottom. My take is, if everybody self optimizes, you lose all the goodness that you had from the community at work. So I think we're going to have to come up with some other solution. And I think, probably the best answer is a different hybrid model.

The best answer is probably a couple days in the office where everybody comes in together. So you get that community, and a couple days that are flexible to work wherever you want.

What is your proudest professional accomplishment to date? The great companies I've built and the great people that I've had the opportunity to work with who have now gone on and done amazing things are the things I'm proudest of because I'm about growth and development. I think if you need a specific one that kind of highlights both of those concepts, it would be standing on the podium at the New York Stock Exchange, taking Box public in 2014. We couldn't have gone public if we didn't grow the great people we had when we were a company of just 400 people. They got better and better, and over time we grew a great company that's still around today doing great things.

What would you say is your biggest career challenge you've had to face? The biggest challenge has definitely been the last two years regarding both COVID-19 and social justice issues. My team and I did some amazing things to protect our employees, to respect our employees, to take care of our employees: everything you would think you would need to do. Most of the people at Ancestry said, “Wow, I really feel like the company cares about me as a person,” which most companies don't get. At the same time, my team and I took more personal attacks for things like our belief in science and for caring that the police killed someone. It was exhausting.

In what ways do you feel that MKA might have prepared you for the path your life has taken? I learned critical thinking skills from Mr. Dower in eighth grade and humanities from Mr. Hemet in AP history. There were so many leadership and teamwork skills that I learned in football and baseball (baseball with Mr. Hrab, football with Coach Monahan and my teammates, of course) as well as extraordinary leadership lessons as Student Council President. There were so many opportunities to learn the skills that I now have to use every day. I was one of a handful of scholarship kids at the school, and I just can't say enough about my opportunities there and how much I learned and grew as a result.