Guild Education Names Former Patagonia Executive Dean Carter Chief People Officer In ‘Expansive’ New Role

In most companies, leading human resources is an insider’s job. Chief people officers traditionally spend their time setting compensation and benefits, strategizing over headcount and navigating administrative hurdles rather than working with customers or bringing together peers.

But when Rachel Romer, cofounder and CEO of workplace education and upskilling platform Guild, recently decided to redesign the chief people officer role at her company, she wanted something different. “The job is as much being the leader of the chief people officer community that we work with as it is focusing inward,” says Romer, comparing it to chief technology officers at tech companies who run internal systems but also act as tech advisers for their customers. “We’re a human capital company, so we wanted to have a broader chief people officer remit that looked externally.”

To fill it, she tapped former Patagonia human resources leader Dean Carter, a widely followed executive who left the outdoor retailer in May after a seven-year run. At Patagonia, Carter told Forbes in an exclusive interview, he instituted a four-day workweek every other week, eliminated ratings in the company’s performance reviews, rethought its employee engagement surveys and helped build up a purpose-driven culture in a place known for employee activism.

“A lot of the [CHROs] we work with really want to spend more time with Dean,” says Romer, who says she met Carter “serendipitously” when he was a keynote speaker at a Guild event. “A big part of his scope is to be available to the chief people officer community. … We're going to really carve it out as part of his job.”

Industry experts say that kind of expanded role is reflective of a growing trend among human capital-related companies to have chief people officers who are more external facing. As H.R. tools increasingly do more than just administrative work like counting workers’ hours—and help with strategic issues like employee well-being, upskilling or development—it matters even more to have leaders with H.R. credibility who can speak with partners or clients, says industry analyst Josh Bersin.

At companies whose clients are H.R. leaders, “the CHRO is increasingly the culture officer who represents the company to customers and can speak peer-to-peer with the buyer,” says Bersin, who says he’s seen similar set-ups at companies like Workday. When H.R. leaders buy tools or platforms like Guild, he says, “they’re staking their careers on it. They want to know that this company is the kind of company they want to be affiliated with. Dean has the kind of gravitas to do that.”

Carter’s H.R. experience includes not only leading the function at Patagonia—which, with its lofty mission to save the planet, might make culture-building seem an easier feat—but running human resources at Sears when it was a troubled retailer closing stores and facing credit downgrades.

The move comes at a time when chief people officers have been gaining stature in the C-suite after playing the role of public health officer, social issues coordinator and remote-work puzzle solver amid the pandemic’s workplace disruptions. At the same time, a tight labor market and need for tech skills across industries has elevated the role.

Covid and the racial reckoning that followed the killing of George Floyd, Carter says, were a game-changer for CHROs. “Every single day and in every single leadership meeting, you’re the person who speaks first, for two years,” he says, making “decisions almost weekly on life and death [issues]. … [As a CHRO], I’m now the chief medical officer, I’m now head of not just DEI, but of justice and anti-racism.”

Jason Hanold, who runs an executive search firm and recruited Carter to Patagonia, says that in meetings about new CHRO searches, he’s even asking whether a candidate should be a potential CEO successor, a question “I never asked 10 years ago,” he says. “Now it’s met with almost this unflinching ‘oh, absolutely.’ That’s different. That lends itself to rethought roles.”

Hanold says Carter quickly built “followership” in former jobs at Fossil and Sears and “gets and [understands] how a founder influences culture.” Among chief people officers “who actually look for counsel and advice and outside perspective, he’s very credible.”

Carter left Patagonia in May, he says, wanting a break after the intensity of the pandemic; he also knew at the time that the Chouinard family’s decision about giving away the company was on the horizon. “I went there, to Patagonia, to make change, to build the team, to understand the DNA and replicate it in systemic ways, and I think I did that,” he says. An email to a Patagonia spokesperson was not immediately returned.

The day he left Patagonia, Carter says, he got a call from his urologist saying he had prostate cancer (after surgery, he says tests now show he is cancer-free) and within two weeks got a speaking request for a Guild event, where he and Romer connected.

He takes over at a time when many companies, especially those in the tech sector that are venture-backed, are cutting headcount. Some may also consider trimming resources like employee training as they look to cut costs in a downturn. But Romer says Guild primarily brought costs down earlier this year by closing open or planned jobs, and has not had to do large-scale structural cuts of its workforce; she also sees the long-term labor dynamics at play in the current market.

“We spend most of our time thinking about Main Street, not Silicon Valley and Wall Street,” says Romer. Those companies, she says, are “hiring and we still have tremendous job shortages. … No matter what happens in the next six or 12 months, the demographic trends—the five-year and the 50-year trends—are so problematic for the United States when it comes to labor.”

At Guild, which has roughly 1400 employees, Carter’s early internal focus will be on career paths for employees and continuing to work on diversity and inclusion. But his job will also be to help develop Guild’s leadership team and work externally with Guild’s CHRO partners. He plans to create a consortium of leading CHROs, develop a curriculum that H.R. leaders can take through Guild’s marketplace to develop their careers and serve as an advocate for H.R. leaders in webinars and events.

“We have an opportunity to really shape the future of work,” Carter says of the ideas he hopes will drive these external conversations. “We had a moment where the future of work was how you consolidate the opportunity for everyone into just a few people, and I think we have to figure out—all of us, not just a few—how to spread opportunity across lots of people.”