The Calm in the Storm

Even when some of Dalana Brand’s employers experienced significant change, or attracted public scrutiny, she’s given steady guidance to their workers. That was true at Twitter—now X—where Brand was chief people and diversity officer during Elon Musk’s tumultuous takeover.

And it’s true at Peloton, where Brand, as chief people officer, is helping the technology and fitness company rebuild after its pandemic-era high (with unprecedented sales), and its recent lows (with recalls and layoffs).

“Fostering a workplace where talent can thrive is my No. 1 business imperative,” Brand says. She joined Peloton in March 2023—about a year after its CEO, Barry McCarthy, replaced co-founder John Foley.

Brand helps Peloton’s people thrive by focusing on their careers and leadership development within the organization. This focus partly stems from a larger business reality at Peloton: In recent years, the company has laid off thousands of workers and pumped the brakes on new hires. That means Peloton must develop talent in its own ranks.

“Peloton went through a period of tremendous hiring and could get all the talent it needed,” says Brand, who oversees about 173 HR team members supporting approximately 5,300 employees globally. “Now that things have slowed down, it’s really imperative that we take time to build our own bench.”

Brand leads people through organizational transformations like Peloton’s by relying on a leadership style she describes as “leading with empathy, listening to team members, making decisions based on people’s diverse perspectives and ideas, and prioritizing team members’ well-being and engagement,” she explains. “I want everyone to be seen, heard and valued.”

A Natural Leader

Jennifer Christie, now chief people officer at DocuSign, recruited Brand to Twitter in 2018. Brand started off as vice president of total rewards and reported to Christie, who was then head of people strategy and experience.  

“I realized quickly Dalana had the capacity and ability to take on more,” Christie says. After Christie became Twitter’s CHRO in 2019, she says, “I saw Dalana as my successor and made sure I set her up for that transition, knowing I would someday pass the torch to her.” Brand became Twitter’s vice president of people experience and head of inclusion and diversity in 2019, and its chief people and diversity officer in early 2022.

“There was no hill she couldn’t climb or didn’t want to climb,” Christie says. “With any issue, if she got up in front of the company and talked about it, people trusted her.”

“ ‘Unflappable’ is a word that always springs to mind when I think about Dalana,” adds Leslie Berland, Verizon’s chief marketing officer, who was Twitter’s CMO when Brand was there. Christie agrees: “Dalana was always the calm in the storm, and we had a lot of storms at Twitter.”

The Twitter Storm

Brand’s skills were tested at Twitter, where Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of the company played out publicly for many months—“marked by on-again, off-again lawsuits between our company and Musk,” Brand says. Between the time Musk announced his intention to purchase the company in April 2022 and when he assumed leadership in October of that year, “the situation was highly distracting for the business and very stressful for our employees,” Brand says, adding that she felt limited in her ability to relieve that stress. “I pride myself on being a problem-solver, but there was really no solution here.”

Still, that didn’t stop Brand from doing all she could to support Twitter’s workers. She knew the importance of seeing, hearing and valuing employees during times of rapid—and unexpected—change. “I tried to create the best experience for employees that we could under those circumstances,” she says.

Brand did that in numerous ways. She regularly provided Twitter leaders with talking points with which to engage employees and let them know where they should (and shouldn’t) focus their energies. Brand’s team conducted listening sessions to understand employees’ concerns and priorities and to determine how best to address them. Her team made sure everyone was aware of the well-being benefits and resources available to them. And Brand implemented “days of rest,” which gave everyone in the company one day off each month.

Before Musk’s takeover of Twitter, Brand achieved what she considers her biggest professional accomplishment: a new inclusion, equity and diversity (IE&D) strategy for the company, with programs and metrics to accelerate and measure progress. That success didn’t come without its challenges, however. “I’m incredibly proud of that work,” she says, “but we ran the risk of having leaders not wanting to involve themselves in the changes because of the rapid pace of the things we were doing.”

Brand brought company leaders on board by working with them to determine which changes they could implement without disrupting the business. Critically, instead of deploying all the new IE&D initiatives right away, Brand gained buy-in by creating a phased approach, allowing the company and its managers to reach numerous IE&D objectives over several years.

Brand made sure Twitter’s strategy set clear, measurable goals—such as having the workforce composed of 50 percent women and 25 percent people from underrepresented groups, creating more diverse hiring committees to help expand the company’s talent base, and paying leaders of employee resource groups for their work. Under Brand’s leadership, Twitter also tied senior leaders’ compensation to the company’s IE&D outcomes and released the salary ranges of all employees globally.

Then, in April 2022, Musk’s acquisition of the company was announced—and, after protracted legal battles, he took the helm in October. “It was like nothing I’d ever encountered,” Brand says of that time. The day after the deal concluded, Brand resigned. “I just was wanting to move on at that point,” she says.

Leading in Times of Change

Brand also helped employees navigate through unexpected change at Whirlpool, where she worked as head of global benefits from 2006 to 2015. “I learned how to bring others along on a journey of change and communicate difficult decisions,” she says. Brand recalls a moment when that lesson took shape. After Whirlpool altered its benefits program, she says, “employees were confused and concerned.” So Brand set off on a “road show”—visiting most of Whirlpool’s U.S. manufacturing locations. “I took people off the line and met with them face to face so they could hear the changes directly from me,” she says.

“That experience stuck with me,” Brand reflects. “I learned you have to be transparent and honest with people. Even though they might not like the message or outcome, they’ll feel respected and seen. That goes a long way toward getting acceptance of major changes.”

After Whirlpool, Brand worked for more than three years as vice president of total rewards at gaming company Electronic Arts (EA) before joining Twitter. “I learned at both EA and Twitter the need to strike a balance between driving innovation and change, and ensuring the stability of the workforce,” Brand says. “Too much change, and the organization can’t function. Not enough change, and you don’t get the outcome you want.”

With her knack for handling companies in flux, Brand is keenly attuned to current shifts in the field of HR—specifically, how emerging technologies such as AI are transforming the nature of work. To keep up with this evolution, HR will need to help organizations move to a skills-based approach to hiring and expand training and development, Brand says. “There’s a real role here for talent acquisition to target candidates not for roles, but for skills that can be transferable throughout the organization.”

Grounded in Education

When Brand and her sister were growing up, her father was a marketing professor at Michigan State University and her mother worked in insurance.

“Being raised in a college town and by a college professor made education important in our household,” Brand says. That environment gave her a natural inclination to explore new ideas and embrace new challenges. “That’s probably why I gravitate to roles and companies that have challenging and complex situations,” she says.

In 1995, Brand earned her bachelor’s degree in finance at Michigan State and got married soon afterward. She and her husband have three children, now in their twenties. “My entire career has been shaped by being a working mother trying to find the balance between growing my career and spending time with my family,” she says. That experience has led Brand to become a strong advocate for providing workplace flexibility by giving employees the option of remote or hybrid work.

“Sometimes you have to do something different than the original plan,” Brand says of her approach to leadership—a sentiment that applies equally to her own career.

After college, Brand worked in corporate finance for about five years, and then realized: “I wasn’t really enjoying the work I did. I wanted to do work that was more strategic and impactful.” Following advice from mentors, Brand went back to Michigan State to get a master’s degree in finance. For her second concentration, Brand picked HR, and something clicked: “I got so surprised by how much I enjoyed all my HR classes and found myself spending more time on that work than finance.” Her background in financial analytics led to her first HR roles in compensation and benefits.

“Witnessing employees thrive because of an initiative I put in place, seeing people advance or get new skills or fulfill their dreams because of things I’m putting in place,” Brand says, “it’s deeply gratifying when I think about that and about where I started in finance, when I didn’t know that was the piece missing for me in my career.”   

Novid Parsi is a freelance writer based in St. Louis.