Executive Spotlight: L. David Kingsley

We’re back with another Executive Spotlight post! This showcases the integral leaders and executives responsible for shaping our culture and driving business here at Illumio – exploring everything from their business priorities and leadership philosophies, to what they like to do in their spare time.       

Below, Illumio's chief people officer, L. David Kingsley, shares his thoughts on making Illumio’s People team a critical enabler and trusted advisor, what it takes to scale to 1,000 employees, and how he’s supporting Illumio’s global, largely hybrid workforce.

Take us through your career journey.

As I reflect on my career so far, it’s not where I thought it would be. 25 years ago, I would’ve told you I was going to be a partner at Anderson Consulting, now Accenture. That was the career path that I was set on when I left college. But I believe you get where you’re supposed to be.

My undergraduate is in politics and theology. My senior year of college, I attended an information session on consulting by Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). It got me really interested in the discipline, and I started out at Andersen as a systems integrator for their client PeopleSoft.  

Five or six years into my consulting career, I had my first meaningful encounter with the Human Resources team that missed my expectations. I was a manager at the time, and my team and I were meeting to do account planning. Someone from the HR team was also in the room, and he was derailing our meeting trying to talk about policies and programs unrelated to our discussion. They were important things to the firm, but not germane to what we were trying to do in that meeting. I called time out, asked him to step out into the hallway with me, and asked him to join a future meeting so our core team could finish our planning work.  

Later that day, I was reflecting on the incident with my mentor, but he stopped me and asked questions I hadn’t thought about. Have you built a relationship with this person? Do you understand what they’re trying to accomplish? They are on your agenda, but are you on theirs? He asked me these tactical questions about how I was showing up in the organization.  

This planted a seed in my head that maybe these are the kind of things I want to contribute to long term in my career. Fast forward, I have joined other tech companies leading their HR functions. My goal is always to help HR be a critical enabler and a trusted advisor.

How would you describe your leadership style?

I’m an analyst at heart who got old and lost his hair. I want to stay close to the work, possibly to a fault sometimes. I get involved in the work because I care deeply about it. It matters to me what we do in the company.

I think I have a participatory leadership style, if I can make up a leadership style. I try to surround myself with people that I think are even better at what they do than I could ever be. That’s how we learn and grow. As one of my former colleagues used to say, iron sharpens iron. I think it’s the right way to show up and the kind of people I want to work with.

What’s your approach to supporting Illumio’s culture in a global, largely hybrid team?

A small, very thin silver lining of the pandemic was that it accelerated our conversations and mindset around work-life integration. It’s always mattered, but it matters now more than it ever has.  

I think we’ve all placed a greater priority on our health, wellbeing, and family. The companies that will succeed are the ones that take a more inclusive approach to work.  

We have about 650 Illumineers around the world, and a meaningful amount of them are remote full time. It’s important that we’re regularly having conversations with each other about what we need, what we’re working towards, and how we can help each other achieve our goals now and beyond. Those are the kinds of things that help you be happy and successful at work.

What do you think are the biggest challenges or opportunities in attracting top talent in the cybersecurity industry?

I’m sure if you opened the Wall Street Journal today, you could find at least three stories about cybersecurity. It’s our industry’s moment as much as it is Illumio’s moment. Cyber is now in the global consciousness, certainly in business but even in our personal lives.  

People want to be part of our industry and build a career around it. And that’s creating a lot of demand for people who want to work at Illumio. We have to make sure we’re on our game and staying aware that we’re in a competitive environment. People are looking to us and our industry to set the standard.

What are the main priorities you’re focused on for the People function at Illumio?

No one wakes up in the morning and wants to spend half of their day on HR stuff. You’re focusing on your stakeholders, customers, and partners. And I believe that HR’s role is to make it easy to be an Illumineer so you can focus on the core work you came here to do every day.  

That means our processes, tools, and policies need to be frictionless and aligned to what the business is trying to do. Our People team is setting our priorities based on what our workforce needs.  

We’re now talking about the path to 1,000 Illumineers. It’s a lot of growth for any organization to take on, and it’ll be here before we know it. We’re putting policies, practices, and processes in place that will help us scale to 1,000 and beyond.

A big part of this planning is feedback. How are we doing? How’s it working for you or not? Where can we improve? We’re all ears. The People team’s customers are Illumineers, and we want to build in ways that work best the Illumio team.

When you’re not leading the People team at Illumio, what are you doing?

When I’m not working, I’m spending time with my wife, Erin, and our three kids: Jack, 5, Kate, 4, and Madeline, 2.  

We also recently had an inadvertent addition to our family in the form of two goldfish. Jack and Kate won them at a fundraiser for our local library where my wife volunteers. Their names are Tickley and Aurora, and they live on the kitchen counter.  

When I’m not with my family or cleaning the fish tank, I have another very important job in the house as the head of shipping and receiving. I get the Amazon boxes off the front porch, question their contents (unless I ordered them), put the items away, and then go back to the porch to see what new boxes arrived. It’s an important part of keeping our household running!

Interested in joining David’s team? Check out our career openings.