Goldman Sachs
Dane Holmes is Goldman Sachs' HR chief.
- Career advice from Goldman Sachs' HR chief Dane Holmes focuses on looking for opportunities to learn and grow.
- That's partly why Holmes is leaving the bank after 18 years to join the HR tech startup Eskalera.
- Like other successful execs, Holmes advises against thinking of your career as linear, and says unexpected or lateral moves can be valuable, too.
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As head of HR at Goldman Sachs, Dane Holmes has spent a lot of time thinking about how to keep people engaged.
In speeches to Goldman interns and articles on his personal LinkedIn page, Holmes distilled what he'd learned about career satisfaction into actionable advice. Choose a job based on how much you like your prospective coworkers. Challenge negative thoughts about your performance at work.
Recently, as Holmes began to reimagine what the next decade-and-a-half of his own career would look like, these nuggets of wisdom took on new, and very personal, significance.
After 18 years at Goldman Sachs, Holmes is leaving the bank to helm the brand-new HR-focused startup Eskalera. The startup's pitch is to help tech and finance organizations improve their performance by providing tools to measure levels of diversity, inclusion, and engagement. It's part of super{set}, a startup studio founded by Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaiyda, who previously sold companies to Salesforce and Microsoft.
Holmes told Business Insider that he evaluated the opportunity at Eskalera much the same way he approached every move he made within Goldman.
It comes down to three questions, Holmes said, which he would ask himself and the team he was considering joining:
- Does this matter?
- Do you want it to change a lot?
- Do you think it needs new energy and new strategy?
If the answer to all three was a resounding "yes," Holmes said, his response was typically, "Ok, I'd love to do it."
Holmes' framework for making big career decisions recalls other executives' insights on professional development. The most important part of a career transition, these executives say, isn't increased prestige. It's the chance to take on a new challenge.
The chance to tackle a new challenge matters more to Holmes than the subject matter
Holmes is among several Goldman partners who have recently said they're leaving the bank, including cochief information officer Elisha Wiesel and cohead of the securities division Martin Chavez.
About 50 partners have announced their plans to leave since the end of 2018, when David Solomon became CEO, Business Insider's Dakin Campbell has reported. Solomon has also been making partnership at Goldman more exclusive and focusing on revenue-generating partner roles.
Holmes said his next career transition isn't much different from the moves he made within Goldman. Throughout his career, he said, he's had a "growth mindset."
That's the term social scientists use to describe the belief that your talents can be developed. (The opposite is a "fixed mindset," which refers to the belief that your talents are innate and can't change much.) Research by Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck and others suggests that people with a growth mindset tend to be more successful; it's more recently migrated from the classroom to corperations, where it's notable powered the cultural (and HR) reboot at Microsoft.
Holmes talked about growth mindset in a slightly different context. He was always curious and humble, he said, and would tell himself, "I know what I like doing, but there could be a million things out there that I haven't thought of that I would like as well."
Earlier in his Goldman career, Holmes held positions in investment banking and credit-risk management. He subsequently became head of investor relations, and then head of the leadership-development group Pine Street and human capital management. He wasn't exactly prepared for these jobs, he said, and hadn't been formally "groomed" for them by his predecessors in those roles.
But Holmes knew that he "really liked building things" - businesses, teams, cultures. So when he saw the potential to do just that, he said, "I was always excited about those opportunities, and that dynamic was more valuable to me than the subject matter." It didn't faze him that the job might not be the obvious next step in a linear trajectory.
Instead of thinking about his career at Goldman as "a set of rungs on the ladder," Holmes said, he was more drawn to the chance to revitalize a part of the organization. And as for the technical stuff, he could learn that as he went along.
Being excited about learning is a useful attitude in today's labor market
Holmes' approach recalls observations from former Googler and Facebook exec Libby Leffler.
Leffler previously told Business Insider that she "was really always drawn to things that intrigued me, gave me the chance to learn as much as I could, and gave me the opportunity to learn something new, with plenty of room for experimentation." Leffler made a series of lateral career moves, like by jumping from client partner to the chief operating officer's business lead to strategic partnerships manager.
Now Leffler is president of the Northern California region at real-estate technology company Compass. The company was valued at $6.4 billion after a July 2019 financing round led by Softbank, who also invested in WeWork. Compass has talked about going public, according to The Wall Street Journal, though several top executives have recently left the company and its former COO said in April that it didn't have a clear monetization strategy.
Even if you don't relish the thought of joining a fledgling startup, or an organization in a period of upheaval, you'll want to flaunt your "learnability," or "the ability and desire to quickly grow and adapt one's skillset to stay employable for the long term." Given how quickly the nature of work is changing, an employee's willingness to tackle new challenges is just as important to employers as their knowledge and experience.
The job at Eskalera appealed to Holmes largely because he was impressed by the team
Eskalera, which launched in 2018, develops technology to help medium- and large-sized companies develop more inclusive hiring and overall HR practices.
Holmes has known super{set} founder Chavez, who also founded Eskalera, for years. (Chavez's brother is Martin Chavez, cohead of the securities division who's soon retiring from Goldman.)
When Chavez approached Holmes about the CEO role at Eskalera, Holmes already knew what they were building and was excited about it. The company's products include Eskalera Engage, which uses artificial intelligence to measure an organization's D&I practices and how employees are feeling generally. Organizations can see that analysis displayed on a dashboard, and use the data to inform key business decisions.
Holmes sees cultivating diversity as not only the right thing to do, ethically speaking, he said. It's also "an immensely under-tapped asset that will make both societies and companies better if you unleash it," he says - an observation that's backed up by research.
Though Holmes said he never consciously thought about leaving Goldman and joining Eskalera - and Chavez's offer was "a total surprise" - he may "subconsciously" have been coming up with "ideas about how they could build their product and their company better." He was impressed by the team Chavez had assembled at Eskalera. "They're people that I can both grow and learn from, and also achieve a lot with," he said.
What Holmes really wants to know, he said, is whether a new job will be fulfilling. That's something you can afford to think about when you're making partner-level money ($950k as a base, as of last year) and you'll always have Goldman on your résumé.
Yet even for professionals who have less financial freedom, and who haven't worked at a major investment bank, it's worth questioning the value of professional prestige.
"You can have a big title and you could have a highfalutin role," Holmes said. "But if you don't feel connected to the work, energized by it, passionate about it, if you don't think you're doing anything with it, my guess is it's unlikely that you're very happy in it."
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