Michael Fraccaro recently left his role as Mastercard’s chief people officer, a position he held for almost nine years. After helping cultivate what he considers one of Mastercard’s “major differentiator[s]”—its strong culture—Fraccaro passed the reins to his successor Susan Muigai, and he will continue to serve in an advisory role until the end of the year.
As part of our new Exit Interview series, we spoke with Fraccaro during his last week on the job and asked him to reflect on his time as chief people officer and how he sees HR changing. Here are highlights from that conversation, edited for length and clarity:
How do you see the HR function evolving over the next few years?
Clearly the first one is around technology and AI disruption. HR has an opportunity to reinvent itself in terms of its operations, the scale, the way jobs are done. HR also plays a role in how it will help the organization transform itself. So there’s one around transforming the function, and the other one is around how you navigate and transform the workforce itself—the kinds of jobs that will need to be reskilled or upskilled, what new jobs will be created, how you leverage data and AI to take friction out of particular processes.
The second one is really around compliance and regulatory change. Savvy HR professionals and organizations need to obviously ensure that they’re complying with the law, but also think about how they navigate that [in a way] that remains true to the culture of their organization.
Can you say more about that last part?
Our company culture, we have this ‘Mastercard Way.’ We’ve embedded the way that we talk about our culture through three principles. So we talk about creating value, growing together, moving fast. They’re key tenets of our culture. We embed it in our performance management system. People’s year-end performance is [based] on their objectives, on their ‘what,’ and on their ‘how.’ When we recruit people, we look at their IQ, their EQ, but more importantly their DQ, their decency quotient. That’s a core element of the culture.
We want to make sure that whatever changes are happening around the world from a legislative perspective or a compliance perspective—for example, pay transparency is a big thing in Europe and many other parts of the world—we need to make sure that we comply with that law, but this isn’t just about complying. It’s also a change management effort. We need to make sure that elements around how we describe differences in pay structures because of people’s jobs or particular skills that people have—that element of transparency is a core part of the culture. Things like diversity, equity, and inclusion. We have to make sure that we do the right thing by complying with the law and the executive orders, but we also stay true to what’s core to our business and core to our culture, and do both equally.
What are some ways that a hiring manager at Mastercard would assess a person’s decency quotient?
We don’t say, ‘Hey, can you tell me if you are decent or not?’ It’s more around, ‘Tell me how you think about your community.’ Quite often the question might be, ‘Tell me something about you that’s not on your LinkedIn profile.’ We hear stories of people saying, ‘I’m volunteering at my local volunteer fire brigade’ or ‘I’m doing something at the Red Cross or my local school.’ Or it could be, ‘I help my little brother or sister with their homework.’ There’s an aspect of humanity that we want to hear come through the discussions in the interviews.
What advice would you give to junior employees entering the workforce today?
Don’t wait for things to happen, go out there and grab them. In every organization, there are projects that are waiting to be started, there are things that need to be done. As long as it aligns with the mission and the strategy of your manager or your company, showing a level of proactiveness is a really good attribute to have.
Being nimble and agile and always wanting to learn, networking and building relationships, having the right communication skills—[those] fundamentals [are important]. Technology and AI, yes, you need that. But the real differentiator is going to be how do you tell your story? That’s a really key skill that we need to continue to celebrate for people.
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