How NerdWallet’s CPO Is Leading Through AI, Change, and the New Talent Reality
What does People leadership look like when change stops being a phase and becomes the operating environment?
In this episode of The Leader Lab, Lynee Luque, Chief People Officer at NerdWallet, joins Michaela Mathre to break down what it takes to lead through ambiguity in today’s workplace. From remote-first work and acquisitions to AI transformation and shifting talent expectations, Lynee shares how she’s building a People strategy for a business environment that keeps evolving.
You’ll hear why her leadership approach has shifted away from fixing processes first and toward asking better questions. She explains how tension at work often comes less from broken systems and more from misalignment, uncertainty, or a lack of shared understanding. That mindset shows up across her work, whether she’s helping leaders navigate new operating models, guiding teams through change, or preparing the People function for AI.
About the Guest:
Lynee Luque is the Chief People Officer at NerdWallet, where she works closely with the CEO and executive team to shape People strategy, build scalable systems, and support a remote-first workforce. Her career spans accounting, HR, and People leadership across major organizations, including Intel, Mozilla, Twitter, Envoy, and NerdWallet. Over the course of her career, she has led through hyper growth, acquisitions, IPOs, and organizational transformation, always with a focus on helping people see what’s possible and building the conditions that allow them to move forward.
“What I’ve noticed is that organizations are asking people to embrace AI without really defining what that means. It’s all very blurry, and it’s often presented in a way that feels unsafe; like ‘embrace AI because it might take your job.’ Then we wonder why people hesitate. Without clarity and psychological safety, people struggle to experiment and take risks.” – Lynee Luque, The Leader Lab
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Lynee Luque 00:00
What I have noticed is at organizations we are asking people to embrace AI but we’re not really defining what that means.
Micaela Mathre 00:09
Very blurry, yes.
Lynee Luque 00:12
And it’s also not presented very safely to me because it’s like embrace AI because AI is going to take your job. Okay, so you want me to embrace this thing that is going to displace me and then we wonder why people are hesitating to embrace AI.
Micaela Mathre 00:30
Welcome to the Leader Lab podcast. I’m Micaela Mathre, Chief Marketing Officer at Life Lab’s Learning. If you’re a senior people leader, you’re navigating a workplace that’s changing faster than ever. This season, we’re exploring what it really takes to build resilient and adaptable leaders, managers, and teams. Let’s dive in. Welcome to the Leader Lab, everyone. My name is Micaela Mathre. I am our Chief Marketing Officer here at Life Lab’s Learning. Today, I am thrilled to be joined by Lynee Luque, who is the Chief People Officer at NerdWallet. At NerdWallet, Lynee works closely with the CEO executive team to shape people strategy, build scalable systems, and support their remote-first workforce. Her career spans accounting, HR, and people leadership across some of the most dynamic organizations in tech. She began her career at two of the big four accounting firms, most notably as part of the audit team for Google’s before earning her MBA and transitioning into HR leadership roles at Intel, Mozilla, Twitter, Envoy, and NerdWallet. At Twitter, Lynee spent six years navigating hypergrowth, acquisitions, and even an IPO. She helped scale the organization from roughly 800 to more than 4,000 employees globally. She later joined Envoy as the company’s first head of HR, built out their HR function from scratch during also a period of rapid growth. Today at NerdWallet, she leads through a different kind of change, uncertainty, macroeconomic pressure, and a shift from what she calls the war for talent to the war on talent. At the heart of Lynee work is a deep belief in helping people see what’s possible and building the conditions that allow them to move forward. Welcome to the Leader Lab. Lynee, I’m so thrilled to have you.
Lynee Luque 02:12
Thank you. I’m glad to be here.
Micaela Mathre 02:14
We like to start our episodes with the same question every time I’ve gotten a variety of responses from it. Talk to me about one small behavioral shift that you have made recently in your own role as a leader, and what impact did it have?
Lynee Luque 02:27
Really for 2026, one of the things that I’m working on as a leader is to not default to fixing a process if I hear about churn or dysfunction or that seeming like, you know, this is all going wrong. And why that’s a learning for me or something that I’m trying to shift is like, I am a doer. I love to roll up my sleeves, get in there, fix things and shift things and move really fast. So instead, what I’m practicing, and this is just because I’ve seen it over the years, rarely is it that step A and step B of your process doesn’t make sense or that there is a missing step. What I have found over time is that it’s the question is not answered, or people are not necessarily in agreement with what that process stands for, or they’re fine with that process for the rest of the organization, but not for them. And so it is kind of that human part of the conversation. So it’s before I go and do my natural default thing of reworking a process, I’m challenging myself to say, all right, let’s ask some of those human questions first, because really, it’s like my job here is to make things that are seemingly implicit in the process more explicit in understanding for everybody who’s involved.
Micaela Mathre 03:53
I love that example. What are some processes that you’ve looked at lately where you almost were like, oh, I’m going to reconfigure that or think about that differently, but you took a pause and you’re like, maybe there’s a few questions to ask before I get into it.
Lynee Luque 04:04
So one of the things, and we’ll get to this later, is we really are a different organizationally designed company than we were when I first got here. So we have more of a portfolio set of companies. And one of our goals is to stand up these portfolio companies as autonomous units that can work and operate, you know, fully within their unit. And so we’ve created a process where it’s like, when does the core HR team step in and help? And just the other day, we have a really well documented process, chart and table and everything. And it was like, if this type of compensation question comes up, they should be able in theory to handle it themselves. But as you know, one thing starts with the first question, but then it leads to like another question and another question. And it really just started causing churn on my team to be like, wait, I feel like I’m moving from consultant to doer. Is that right? And really, what some of the tension is, is just like, this is a brand new process. It’s a new way for us to work. We don’t have it figured out. It wasn’t necessarily that like, we needed to add a different step to the process. When I sat with the team, it was more just like, we need to have a couple of cycles of working out actual questions and problems together. And then I think we’ll know what we need to change management, right? So through a couple of things together, as with all leaders, I’m sure if you’re on that fifth time where you’re having the same conversation, or third time having a safe conversation, let’s go to the process. There might be a step that’s missing or something that we need to document.
Micaela Mathre 05:53
that’s such a great call out, but really like being able to sort of iterate, learn together. I’m sure we’ll dig into this more, but that like leading through ambiguity is a theme that just keeps coming up time and again. One thing we’ve been talking about at LifeLabs actually is there’s some culture shifts that we’re working on internally with our team. And I think kind of our background for the organization as a founded by academics, we have a lot of like reliance, we love a good process, we love an if then is how we think of it. I’m like if this, then that if this, then that and one of the things I think anyone in leadership knows is like that just gets you so far. And then you have to start really just kind of problem solving or thinking through it in real time. Shifting gears a little bit Lynee, I’d love to hear about your background and then sort of what brought you to NerdWallet and then talk to me about your current role as well.
Lynee Luque 06:42
What was great hearing my intro is sometimes I’m like, I did that. It’s been many, many years since all of that has happened. But as you mentioned, I didn’t start my career out in HR, but I’m also not one of those people who are like, I didn’t start my career out of HR. And therefore I’m better. I really am one of those people that I intentionally made the shift into HR. I’m fascinated by the dynamics that take place when people are involved because all of us can have a good OKR or a strategy or whatever, but it’s, it’s really the people, um, that make it all happen, but I started off in financial services, you know, both with auditing and then internal and external auditing. And then I made that intentional shift by going to MBA school. And then I didn’t know much about like the practice of HR or how to do HR. All I knew is that I was interested in it. So I went to a really large organization with that whole hopes of like learning what I didn’t know. So my first step into it was Intel. And why I tell that story is like every single thing that I’ve done since then has been a learning journey or a learning segment for me. So I asked myself before any career move or even any inflection point within my career, can I learn something from this? Am I interested in learning that particular thing? And if the answer is yes, then like I go and I kind of keep this cycle of asking myself the question. How that led me to Nurg Wallet is we were in a very interesting time. It was 2020, like of COVID. My interview process, I only met one person in person during the whole interview process, taking us all the way back to you.
Lynee Luque 08:41
Yeah. And they wanted to transform. They wanted to do something different. So of course, as a learner, that piqued my interest. And then as I started digging in and understanding what they wanted to do, they wanted to prepare to go public. They wanted to grow through acquisitions. So in an inorganic way, something they hadn’t done before, they wanted to intentionally shift the organization to a remote first company from kind of like part of the company could or COVID made us. And so I was able to look at that set and say, can I learn something from this? Is it something that I want to do? And the answer was yes. And five and a half years later, I’ve just continued to ask myself that question and I’ve been able to answer yes. And so that’s how I’ve kind of ended up here and how I think I’ll continue to approach my career.
Micaela Mathre 09:36
Thanks for sharing that. I’ve got two follow up questions. The first one is when you made the shift or as you were kind of in that career transition moment in the world of accounting, was there a person or an experience that made you think like, I want to go get my MBA. I’m really interested in the people side of things. Like what, what was that for you that kind of triggered that shift?
Lynee Luque 09:59
Well, for me, I was really interested in the recruiting aspect. So when you go to these large consulting or financial advisory companies, one of the main problems they have is recruiting the next class. It’s something they do every single year. And one of the fun opportunities for anyone who’s new is you get to participate in that. And so I found myself always interested in raising my hand to say, I want to go and tell the story of the company, communicate to people why I’m here, why I made the choice, what are the pros and cons of my firm versus the other firms that are out there. And I just got joy and excitement from interaction in telling the story, but also in hearing their story and understanding what their motivations were and matching those two things. And so in many respects, I feel like I still get to do that and interact with my team or employees. It really is understanding where are you coming from? What are you trying to solve? And how do we marry those two things together, whether that’s what the business is trying to solve and what the team is trying to solve.
Micaela Mathre 11:19
Yeah, yeah. Oh, that’s so interesting and really leading with a lot of curiosity. It sounds like it’s for for you. My second follow up question is you kind of perfectly described and I feel like I got a little peek into how Lynee thinks about job opportunities in your own career. You kind of perfectly described the opportunity at Nerd Wallet as you envisioned it when you were
interviewing and sort of coming on board was the job that you stepped into and have been in now for the past few years what you initially thought it was.
Lynee Luque 11:47
In many ways, yes. In many ways, I couldn’t have forecasted it. So I think I’ll say two distinctions. What they were trying to accomplish stayed very true in many respects. Like we went public. We’ve done a lot of acquisitions. We are a fully remote organization and there are many other things that we were trying to do. But the really interesting part of the work is like the how you get there. Let’s take the example of going to a remote company. It’s like, great, the CEO wants to do that. Some of the executive team wants to do that. And so you think really easy, right? It’s like, oh, some employees don’t want to do that. That isn’t what they were thinking about for their career or they think that that wasn’t the directive when they got hired. So just with any goal or strategy, again, it looks really clean on the top line. But then it’s like, if you look at all the stakeholders involved to make that happen, that’s where the work just gets complex. That’s where you earn your paycheck, right? And so those things were true. I think there’s obviously it’s been a while, right? And there have been things that I just couldn’t have known were coming. And again, it’s like those learning opportunities and just embracing it that way.
Micaela Mathre 13:23
Thanks for that. I’m curious as well to hear a little bit about what’s it like leading the people function at a fully remote organization.
Lynee Luque 13:33
Well, one of the things is when I started, it was COVID, so it was forced, remote, and I think those were good training wheels for what it would be like in the organization as a whole. I think one thing that we did differently at NerdWallet, because we wanted this to stick and it was an actual strategic shift that we wanted to make, is we made goals around remote and diversifying where our team members were. So we had our hiring plans and it wasn’t just hire as is, because as you know, the default mechanism would be, okay, well, I have 10 people on the product team in San Francisco, so naturally, if I’m not intentional about it, I’m probably going to grow that team in San Francisco. So we made some really intentional goals to say, all right, if we’re embracing this, we need to practice this. This needs to be our real life. And we started looking for talent in other parts of the country and really hiring in other parts of the country to the point where we didn’t have that same center in the Bay Area that we had before. So even if we said, everybody come back to office, it would be really hard because now we’re all distributed around. So I think that part was, you know, being very intentional about that part when we came out of the lockdown era and everybody had come back, that’s when we really got to practice and build that muscle of, all right, we’re back and we’re all distributed. So we can travel, we can meet in person, but this is going to be a little bit more difficult because my person sits in South Carolina now or my person sits in Arizona now. So we did a lot of things just across the employee experience to prepare for that. You know, we redesigned everything for that remote first. If it happened to be in person, great, but we assumed that everything was going to be not in person. But yes, logistically, there are pros about it. I have East Coast members of the team. A pro in theory is the working on stuff for three to four hours before West Coast comes online and then we can kind of, you know, take over and then there are comps, right? Like maybe you get that one item that’s urgent and you get it at 5 p.m. PT. Right. It’s 8 p.m. over there. So, you know, I think it’s just a continuous thing to think about and adjust.
Micaela Mathre 16:14
Shifting gears a little bit, one of the themes that I noticed throughout your career, and we talked a little bit about this in the intro, is that you’ve been in leadership roles for various phases of growth for companies. So we talked about Twitter’s hyper growth, building the HR function from scratch at Envoy. Tell me a little bit about what those experiences of leading through growth taught you and what you kind of take with you into your role today.
Lynee Luque 16:42
all very different. Yeah, yeah. You know, they are similar. One thing I learned early on is solutions and what I do at each company is very situational. So I think when I was very first starting out in HR, I had a bit of a tendency to kind of copy paste. Like I came from Intel, that was a very established, well, like, you know, oil machine. And it was like, why wouldn’t this great process that works at this company work over here? Yes. And so I used to do that very early in my career, like try to just take what I knew and put it over here. What you miss then is the cultural context, the size, the stage differences, the scale, the stakeholder differences in terms of what they’ve seen. They haven’t seen exactly what you’ve seen. Lesson number one for me is each organization is unique. I have a ton of pattern recognition and a lot of models that I can lean on. But I truly do say like, this is a unique organization. What piece of this could make sense? What piece of this do we need to design for this unique experience? So that’s one thing throughout all those large scale, small scale, like that has remained consistent for, you know, for me. Another one really is, you know, the kind of communication and change management. No matter if it’s really large organization, a really small organization, a big part of our job is to understand all the stakeholders, what they’re trying to accomplish and take them through the change. It’s why, you know, some of those frameworks, we joke a little like you did at the beginning is like the framework can only get you so far, but it does get you to a really good place, right? To be able to identify, okay, we got here now, maybe there’s something unique in this situation that will get us to to the next phase.
Micaela Mathre 18:55
You really caught my attention with what you said about understanding your various stakeholders and their different experiences and how right you’ve got your experience. We learned a little bit about your background and your career and what you’re bringing to the table, but then really recognizing this is the power of the people function to like recognizing the other folks at the table. Also, and let’s maybe think about like at the senior leadership level have, you know, at any given time on any senior leadership team, you have over 150 years of experience, right? Like sitting at that table, but it is all different experience. Like, how do you kind of way find in that, especially as you’re leading the people function, how do you bring folks together, bring your experience, but then also as you’re talking to like understand that the context, the business context, the stage of the scale of the company and the culture. Is just as important as sort of the experience that you’re bringing to the table.
Lynee Luque 19:51
That is definitely the difficult thing. The first step for me is that curiosity and that acknowledgement that obviously, maybe not that obvious, we didn’t all come from the same place and we all have the same exact experience and exposure that led us to this seat at the table. So that is like step one, building that relationship, understanding what has been important to them, especially as it relates to like how they do things, like you’ve run a sales team before, that’s probably different than another sales leader. Like what’s your special socks? That, what are those principles that you have when you wanna do that? So step one is learning about their style, how they like to accomplish things. And if I role model that curiosity and any times that same curiosity is role modeled around me. I think there also has to be some clarity from the organization, whether that be the CEO, whether that be what we decide on as a leadership team, because it’s kind of like we all have this belief, right? Individually, now let’s look at what we are trying to accomplish for the company and for this company, right? I’ll give you another example. I worked with this great leader and he was running a function and he was like, I have to run it entirely different than my last company because my last company money was flowing out of the vents. Like we could do whatever we wanted. We can pay our way out of that problem and stuff. But if the company we were sitting at, it was very like online driven. We did not have that type of resourcing. So it’s like your style, your principles and beliefs as a leader matched up with the actual context of the business that you’re sitting in. If you could look at those two things and it builds from there, that’s when you start getting that like unique, special playbook for your company or leadership team.
Micaela Mathre 22:12
This is great, Lynnae. So officially, I feel like I’m getting a coaching session right now. I’m like, this is excellent. I feel like I should be paying you.
Lynee Luque 22:22
Any way I can help. I am always that way. Like, any help we can give people, like, take it. Because I certainly, like, reach out to my network when I am.
Micaela Mathre 22:31
I feel like I’m learning a little bit about how you approach things and working cross-functionally and how critical that is in the people function. Shifting gears a little bit, I know Nerd Wallet in particular has gone through a lot of acquisitions. It sounds like that’s been a part of this strategy since you came on board. I can imagine that has far-reaching implications across your role, your people team, like how has that impacted your work, what have been some challenges, or maybe things that have been really positive about that strategy as well.
Lynee Luque 23:05
Going back again on the learning journey part, I have done many acquisitions before. Twitter was definitely a use case of like, so many different acquisitions. The difference at NerdWallet and what’s made it like a different learning opportunity for me is we’re not trying to copy paste and make these acquisitions like us. So it’s not about a typical integration cycle of like, all right, let’s get them. Now they’re all, you know, in a year, they’ll all be in our systems. In a year, they’re all gonna be on our face scale. In a year, they’re all gonna wear a t-shirt and like, you know, espouse our values. This is really one of those business strategies to elevate who they are and elevate their differences. So not integrate, but rather elevate the business. And they will retain in many ways their own branding, their own values, their own styles. Of course, if we wanna get into the operational nitty gritty, there are just some things that, you know, are easier if they are integrated with us. But our first principle is like, how do we help them retain who they are as a company and just elevate it by adding on who we are as a company, some of the core competencies that we have that they can benefit from. You always have to kind of like go another layer when people say, oh, we’re acquiring or we’re doing this. Like, what does that really mean for you? What does that mean for your business strategy? And there’s always something you can learn in a situation like that. So for me, it really has, that is the new part for me.
Micaela Mathre 24:48
That’s so interesting is there like a challenge associated with having you know so many different entities under one roof like is there a sense of synergy that you’re trying to create like it sounds like it’s the way you put it was adding on versus you know going down to like okay you’ve got to get completely on board with the way we do things in our values it’s more additive than that.
Lynee Luque 25:10
like the first challenge is the mindset of our own teams, internally. Because we have hired people, we have grown our company, we have shaped our company around a certain set of beliefs that we think are like the right way to operate a company, right? The right way to run a people agenda. When I’m asking my team, okay, set aside what we do for us, and try to think about what would be best for this other company, there’s always a little bit of tension there, right? Like it’s a little bit of unknown. And it was the example I put at the very beginning. I think one thing we’re trying to do is where there can be a framework, where we can document the differences, where we can identify like what do we really want to force on them, versus what don’t we want to have a conversation about right now. That really has served us to be able to add on more and more and more, because we have that like initial framework, you know, devil’s in the details, right? Each situation is different. But if we start from a framework, at least we can get to like, what are the nuances of that particular situation, a little bit faster. So mindset shift first, and then everyone is so capable. Then it becomes like, all right, now that I understand what we’re trying to accomplish, like how I flex my functional skill to accommodate that, that almost feels like a little bit easier, not easy, but a little bit easier. Yeah.
Micaela Mathre 26:49
that really resonates. I can’t tell you how many times just in the past few weeks, I’ve said the word mind shift. My team is probably gonna laugh when they listen to this because they’re like, Oh, there she goes, talked about mind-shift again.
Micaela Mathre 27:02
Yeah, it’s literally a great deal. It’s everything. It’s like…
Lynee Luque 27:06
And so I’m sure you see things at a different altitude than, you know, maybe some team members. And like that really becomes the blocker at the end of the day. And I know you may get into it just macro economics, the AI, like again, another example where it’s like, can a person learn how to create a GPT? Sure. There’s a whole other layer before we get people.
Micaela Mathre 27:35
The motivation, the engagement, you know, we’re thinking about this a lot at LifeLabs because clients have been coming to us more and more saying we’ve got this AI initiative or we have this that’s where the money’s going right now and we’re doing all this training but what learning leaders and people leaders know is that like that’s just one piece of the equation. They’re like we need the foundational ability to collaborate, work together, think strategically, coach each other like piece of this you know to run parallel with some of these initiatives and I think it’s like it’s been exciting for us to work with some clients on that and really build out like what is that kind of people intelligence piece look like as you’re sorting through which is every company in the world right now has an AI like look of view of okay what are we doing this year where’s the innovation coming from and at the end of the day like I think about this a lot in marketing because there’s been so much innovation.
Micaela Mathre 28:37
I mean, like I just, I was on a marketing podcast recently and I was like, it’s just like night and day from when I started my career in marketing 15 years ago. I’m like, what is possible today is so different than before. And you need people who are willing to think about things a little bit differently than we ever have before and have that kind of like, I think it’s mindset and engagement to be able to try new things, learn, share, share the learning too. So it’s like, you’re not just like operating in a silo, but you’re like, I learned this and then be able to be like a force multiplier. I’d love to jump in a little bit, Lynee. I know you’ve worked with LifeLabs for a number of years. So actually would love to hear about your original experience working with LifeLabs. Like take me back. I know you were also on our client advisory board, which we call our Council of Youthful Elders previously, but would love to kind of hear about the context and your work with LifeLabs over the years.
Lynee Luque 29:35
a bit of like building off what you just said about what is it that makes an organization effective and many times it’s like getting people to row in the same direction or at least have the skills to begin um to row in that same direction even if there’s a link up here and there but what really you know got me to go to life labs is i first started using them at scale at envoy okay and so as you can imagine there was no hr we were a very slim team we were hiring ahead of learning and development but no matter the size of the company you still have um the human component where you have goals and you need people to line up and know execute to those goals and what we noticed is that our managers just didn’t have that like baseline of understanding of how to coach their teams how to align their teams how to have you know interesting complex sometimes difficult conversations with their team members so my first real introduction to life labs was bringing in that manager set of training i think it’s like manager core one and core two and three so you can even progress and part of the reason that i went to life labs is because when i looked at the materials it very much aligns with like who i am and how i value education so i really think about it as like a shared partnership i like to make it explicit about each person’s role in that partnership and i like to teach through examples framework example framework example and that was like the spirit of what i saw in the manager core training at life labs and basically it felt like it just like an extension of me and my team like it wasn’t in the budget to hire a whole good learning to folks without you know having that budget similarly at nerd wallet when we first started working with life labs it was at the manager stage as well and we did have more budget and we were a little bit bigger but it also just takes time it takes time to kind of figure out what you stand for and how you want to design a manager training and this really allowed us to get those skills in the hands of people as we started to evolve like what we wanted to build house versus what we didn’t want to build in house what i have noticed is at organizations we are asking people to embrace a ai but we’re not really defining what that means.
Micaela Mathre 32:34
very blurry very blurry
Lynee Luque 32:37
But it’s also not presented very safely to me because it’s like, embrace AI because AI is gonna take your job. Okay, so you want me to embrace this thing that is going to displace me. And then we wonder why people are hesitating to embrace AI. If they have this whole conflict going on in their head of like, wow, like if I embraced it, does that mean my job goes away sooner? If I embrace it, does that mean that I have to think about an entirely new career? Like what is it that I should be doing? So what I’ve noticed within my own team is just some of that psychological safety and the willingness to take risks and do new things was being stopped because we weren’t talking about like what this means what we know today, it to me, what it could mean for them in their careers. So we’ve brought that in to our organization into my team first, almost in parallel, like you were saying with we’re also experimenting with creating our own GPTs. We’re looking at different tools that would do jobs that maybe we don’t want to do. And so it really has been parallel pathing. And I like that flexibility with the life content.
Micaela Mathre 33:59
That’s so interesting. Talk to me about starting with the people team. What was the thinking there or why your people team first?
Lynee Luque 34:07
Well, one thing I say is the people team is always a good gauge for the rest of the organization. You can go and take the temperature there with the people team. And if they’re like struggling with something, it’s probably showing up in the organization as well. So I almost think it’s a really good test ground for anything that you want to go on. And also the reality is our customer is the employees. So if we learn something, if we embrace something, then we can start to role model that in our interactions with the employees. So through our programs that we build through the one-on-one, you know, chain or interaction that happens like through an HR business partner. So it really has like a multiplier effect in impact in my experience. So it’s almost like, you know, they say put the, you know, oxygen mask on the adult first before you help anyone else. Like since our main job is to help people, you know, move through change to embrace what the organization wants and needs. And it’s like, let’s put the mask on ourselves first, then we can help the rest of the organization in that.
Micaela Mathre 35:25
that’s so interesting I think especially with the focus on AI transformation so much of it is coming to people leaders and HR functions like to drive to figure out to source and that’s a lot of pressure that’s a lot of like okay this is the new nobody has the blueprint nobody has we don’t know like we’re all figuring it out in real time you know
Lynee Luque 35:47
It has a lot of similarities to like where we found ourselves in COVID, right? That was some medical experts, right? We had to like, you know, a health crisis and stuff. It was like, oh, well, the people leader knows people.
Micaela Mathre 36:07
So they’re going to help us figure out people in this like unprecedented like era, right?
Lynee Luque 36:13
You know, I really think it’s interesting and it’s why I have such a like respect for what we do, obviously, because I do it. But I think many times like people underestimate what we do, like, yes, we have to understand how our company makes money, where the money is going and like what that means for the bottom line and own budgets and resource appropriately and right size solutions. And we have to understand like the human element of like why people are struggling to get that business unit going. Why people are struggling to, you know, have that efficiency mindset that we want them to. So I have a real respect because, you know, coming from finance, we spent a lot of time on like what the numbers were. And I feel like now in this career, it’s like table stakes, what are the numbers? And the real work starts in like, why are those the numbers and how do we make those different if we want them to be different?
Micaela Mathre 37:20
Yes, and it always comes back to people. I think about this a lot like having worked like in my career across a lot of startups and also fast growing companies and like the core differentiator between the businesses that do really well and grow and thrive like they just work together really well like they have they hum and there’s some foundational understanding the culture is such a key piece of it and I think that’s something that as somebody who’s constantly thinking about how are people perceiving the change we’re going through at this organization and how can I address that how can I get in front of it how can I think of employee comms and what we need in this moment like all of that is such a part of this but I really love kind of going back to what you were talking about with starting with your people team and some of the programming you’ve been doing with life labs we always say at life labs that your managers are your multipliers like if you can change manager behavior you can change your organization because they are the ones in real time in one-on-ones either focusing on the right thing or causing swirl or you know like in that’s that is like really where so much of it happens and I like your thinking around like the HR function is similar to that it’s like they are kind of the barometer for the organization and they can be real multipliers if they’re on board and they’ve got the right mindset they can really help to change course or redirect or double down on like what’s working as well the managers.
Lynee Luque 38:50
Yeah, managers turn to for coaching. Exactly. So it’s like, all right, let’s get it right with us. Yes, we are going to help those managers be the like, be the multiplex, right? Yeah, it’s really like this kind of like sequencing event in many ways.
Micaela Mathre 39:10
I’d love to talk a little bit and just kind of hear from you actually about this. Like you’ve described in the past few years this shift from a war for talent, which folks are very familiar with to a war on talent. Can you first just tell me a little bit about that? What do you mean? And how do you see that?
Lynee Luque 39:27
One thing, I mean, we can all probably look back a couple of years and be like, how were we all adjusting every program, every part of the employee experience so that we could just keep our people or attract people because that was the number one focus, right? Like, let’s look at our pay again. Maybe we’re not paying market. All right, you work all the way out in that remote city, but I’m gonna pay you the same as New York or San Francisco. Like, we were just going to all ends. So the pendulum probably swung a little far on what we were doing for employees. And just as quickly now, the conversation is, you know, 996, you have to be in that office. You have to always be fully available. If you don’t want it, oh, well, right? Like, step aside. Maybe else will. So we’ve really had this, like, huge shift in a short amount of time. I’ve been working long enough where I’ve seen these shifts. This one really was, like, pretty dramatic and, you know, kind of a controversial statement or kind of like a statement for dramatic effect. But this really has shown up in our conversations. I hear a lot of my peers, a lot of other executives, more focused on profit now, more focused on doing more with less, even some talk of like, well, that job won’t exist and I will do that in the future. And I think that’s one key differentiator. In the past, when the pendulum has swung to be less, you know, employee-centered, I think in the back of leaders’ minds, they always thought, oh, but it’ll go back. And I think the difference with AI is I don’t know that they believe that’ll go back because now we’re talking about displacing jobs and creating, you know, something new and meeting fewer people. Now I think there’s a whole different conversation to be had of like, well, you’re building this great B2B SaaS product, but if there’s no employee that has a paycheck, I think we’re gonna need a lot fewer of those products. So there’s like a third piece that like, no one is talking about there. And I think in the macro environment, like how are we thinking about what people do of this new era that’s probably a totally different podcast that we can have. But really what I’m describing is that, that like extreme shift in a shorter period of time in the narrative around what employees mean, what they should expect from the organization. It’s been pretty dramatic.
Micaela Mathre 42:09
How do you manage that in your role, sort of having a different, it sounds like a changed and different conversation at the executive level, but then being the person who’s translating the strategy to the team? And like you said earlier, still really in service to employees, like how has that been for you?
Lynee Luque 42:31
One thing I start with is like, what’s in our control that you’ll hear me say that to my team, like over and over, like, let’s bring it back to like, what’s in our control. And then I try, you know, another mantra that I say to my team is like, my job is to invest in you and grow you in your skills. Yes, for the current company that we’re working at. But my bigger goal is to set you up as like a great professional, wherever you land. And I’ve been lucky enough to like land at the same place and be able to bring team members so I know it pays off even at different companies. Again, starting from that mindset of like, what’s in our control, what would make you almost like foolproof, even if it means something different at this company versus another company. So my focus in my job has really been like, let’s embrace this AI together, brought in some of the training on the mindset stuff. We’ve also brought in skill building and are really trying to disrupt the way that we do our work as people team. In a week or two, we’re going to have an HR hackathon all around AI in HR. You’ve been partnering with different companies to get ideas about what we should do. So I’m really trying to make this tangible for them and make it less scary. And whether that means that they can continuously apply that within Nerve Wallet, you know, I can’t say with any certainty and I don’t, you know, I don’t have a crystal ball. But I know for sure that they will have the skills to apply this anywhere in their professional lives. So for me, it’s just like staying focused on what we can control, staying focused on skilling my people. Again, if we’re talking about something that is happening or change within our organization, a lot of it is just like identifying where’s the misalignment? Where’s the gap? How can we close that gap for people with dignity, with respect, right? And help kind of like usher us all along no matter, you know, no matter what the message is.
Micaela Mathre 44:44
When you were working through some of the psychological safety stuff with your team, was there training or workshops you did with life labs in particular that was helpful? Or did you make progress in that? Like, I’m curious what that programmatically looked like.
Lynee Luque 44:58
Starting with our people team, we started with our people leaders first, and at our last off-site in 2025, we brought in the leading change module, I don’t know the exact title, but we brought in that module and that trainer. And one of the things that I said to Life Labs is like, I want this to be conversational. Yeah, because I, you know, yes, there’s a framework and let’s go through the framework, but I also want my leaders to be able to name their fears, really go into like, where are they on the change curve? Where were you? Where do you want to be? You know, on the change curve. So we stayed with that for a while, and then we brought it to our entire bowl team. And this was like, you know, very intentionally designed in terms of at the end of the year, we’re starting to talk about what we’re going to do for the next year. So we brought this change management framework and concept to our whole team in alignment with releasing our 2026 strategy. We’re now going to talk about our 2026 strategy. A lot of it is not like new news, but some of the how, like how we were going to embrace AI, how we expected people to do things in a different way than they had done in previous years. We knew that that was going to be supported by this change management training that we had brought in.
Micaela Mathre 46:28
I would love to hear the linkups and how you think about both the big picture and then like the more practical implementation of it. What is one small behavioral shift that you would recommend for listeners who are working to build resilient and adaptable teams, possibly something that they could, you know, literally try after they listened to this episode.
Lynee Luque 46:47
Well, for me, it’s a lot about asking questions like to myself that sounds a little bit silly, but like just taking a beat and asking myself before I react. So the whole mantra of like, you know, respond instead of react. And one area that I really want to practice continuously practicing is a question that we have for our team is, would the business pay for that? So when we’re bringing, we’re recommending learning or we’re recommending a program or a solution, because we’re in these like efficiency times right now and because like AI is disrupting so much of what we’re doing, I really want to challenge myself and to think through like, what, you know, would they pay for that? Like if I was a consultant, an independent consultant, and I was bringing them a proposal, like, am I clear that they would actually see value in the same way that I see value? So really just putting a different path on, you know, us as a people team and the work that we’re recommending and that we’re guiding the organization through.
Micaela Mathre 48:00
That’s excellent. Thank you so much. Lynee, thank you so much for joining us on the leader lab. It was such a pleasure speaking with you today. If folks want to find you, are you active on LinkedIn or what’s the best way to kind of follow?
Lynee Luque 48:14
Best way. I am, I’m active on LinkedIn. I have a very unique name as well. As you can see, it’s so pretty easy to find me and that is the best way
Micaela Mathre 48:25
very SEO friendly, you and I both, it’s a total benefit.