The MitchelLake Group and Sequoia Benefits partnered to sponsor the HR2.0 event on May 14th, hosted at the One Medical Building in San Francisco. The open forum event featured guest speaker Evan Wittenberg, SVP of People and member of the Executive Team at Box. Prior to joining Box, Evan spent time as the Chief Talent Officer of HP, Head of Global Leadership Development for Google, and Director of the Graduate Leadership Program at Wharton.

HR 2.0 brings together over 400 HR professionals from High Growth Tech companies around the Bay Area. HR 2.0 has held six events since the beginning of 2013, bringing the top industry thought-leaders together to share their stories and offer the opportunity to network with peers.

All HR2.0 Events follow an open format, allowing the guest speaker to discuss topics of his or her choice. But, after 5 very successful events, we wanted to involve our attendees a bit more by asking what topics they were most interested in hearing Evan talk about. The four points that were most important to our audience were:

1) Cutting Edge Leadership Development
2) How to keep your culture as the company scales
3) How to gain credibility with Executives
4) New Approaches to Time Off

With over 150 people in attendance One Medical Group, the event was full of great conversation and networking. One of the biggest takeaways of the evening was when Evan was asked what are some of the competencies of great leaders that he felt are very important and how he develops those leaders when they come in. He responded, “ I believe you should spend the money and time on managers at all levels that they have a lot of experience/practice/training. We want leadership behaviours from everyone not just role related leadership – we hope everyone takes on leadership skills and then there are some roles where leadership skills are required. The number one thing I look for is learning agility; we can hire the best people today but they won’t be the best in 6 months if they’re not interested and curious. Secondly is authenticity; what’s their self-awareness, do they believe in who they are and what they do and lastly, we hire someone who’s highly collaborative since our product is highly collaborative.”

Have a suggestion for a future topic or speaker? Please let us know. We’d love to hear from you! Be sure to follow us and HR2.0 on LinkedIn and Twitter to be informed of future event dates.