Chief Chat: Brian Miller

Brian Miller is the chief talent, diversity, and inclusion officer at the software giant Adobe. Overseeing HR at an organization of Adobe’s size—the company has around 25,000 employees globally across 66 office locations—means the normal responsibilities of an HR chief are put on steroids.

Miller takes a granular approach to the big job he’s tasked with, however, placing an emphasis on DE&I initiatives that spread throughout the organization. An emphasis on diversity and belonging is built into employee engagement and retention and informs Miller’s broader philosophy.

HR Brew recently talked to Miller about how culture starts with middle management, the importance of DE&I, and his gig at Adobe, which he started just six months ago.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What motivated you to get into the human resources field? I have always been a very curious person. And I’ve always been enamored with, ‘How do you really help people learn and grow?” It started way back before I joined HR [and when I] was a teacher. I taught fifth-through eighth-grade math. So I’ve always had this curiosity about how do you really help, whether it’s students or employees, be the best version of themselves. And I think that brought me into HR.

I have often been more curious about…how you put a business mindset to this idea of what I call ‘helping employees reach their full potential?’ So if you think about it from a business standpoint—shareholder value, the ability to really generate customer experiences that drive product innovations—you want to think very similarly about how do I really maximize employee potential and help them reach their full potential as well?

How does the emphasis on diversity in your role inform your approach to all other aspects of the HR business? Diversity and inclusion is about behavior change. It is about this core belief that in changing our behavior, we’re able to actually progress toward a goal to do something great. If we can simplify and get to that core, then how it ripples becomes a very focused approach. Well, then, how do we hire? How are we going out to different diverse pools of talent and really understanding what their needs are? So that would be a diversity lens to hire...

The other anchor we’re putting in Adobe is that every employee deserves a great manager…So what does an inclusive manager look like? What are the core capabilities that we would want?...So now you’ve moved this into more of a manager, learning [and] development conversation…​​How do we continue to really create progression upward mobility within Adobe? How do we do that in a way that’s genuine to us, but also says, “See, this is important”? This is really important. We want you to learn and grow here at Adobe. So we’re willing to invest in that.

What is the biggest challenge that you think the HR profession has faced since the onset of Covid? There’s two things that I’ve noticed. One is that the challenge is no longer an intellectual one...When you think about diversity, inclusion, and equity, and you think about overall HR and look back five years ago or even 10 years ago, the challenge was microaggressions.

How do we deal with unconscious bias? How do we deal with intersectionality? How do you create a culture where you have moments that matter? These were all the words we were using five years ago. And now, I truly believe there is a deeply felt wanting that people have now and you see it, you hear [it]—whether it was the George Floyd murder, the social unrest, the attack on the Capitol—it caused within companies this tension of taking action…And now employees not only expect, but they have a voice to really articulate that. And here’s the world we’re now in.

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