Been There, Done That

The short answer is that I partner with organizations to create engaging employee experiences and teams. 

The longer answer is that I am obsessed with the employee experience because it is the single biggest multiplier to business results I have seen, so resources spent on architecting experiences across one or more phases of the talent lifecycle are investments in business outcomes, and I believe every body deserves access to these experiences because it makes the workplace a better place to be and therefore increases business success. Win-win! 

I spend my days guiding companies on the creation of engaging experiences and teams, and the results that come with that are impactful and exciting.

For me it was always about making things work better, driving progress.  I could see even at an early age that when organizations focused on doing right by their people, that performance and profitability followed.  So for me, HR wasn't about helping people thrive but about ensuring organizations could thrive because of the way they cared for, engaged, and grew their people as a central focus.

It's so hard to identify one thing when my whole career has been about designing and introducing evolved and new experiences. One big change that impacted many others was shifting our focus on surveying employees as more of a check-box to really going in deep to assess their voice and their feedback as it related to our culture and overall experience at the workplace. It changed everything about the programs my team was running and how we all thought about engagement and employee voice.

I started my career in college recruiting in the late 1990's, right before the Y2K scare, when companies were in heavy competition for technical talent in order to correct databases with the change over from two-digit years to four-digit years.  Not only did I learn program management from this work but I was serendipitously right at the beginning of the start of the talent management profession, and fortunate to be working for companies on its leading edge, who were later to be studied and quoted in the WAR FOR TALENT book that defined the profession.  

So, I cut my teeth in what was a masterclass of talent management, learning the best practices in the best ways. This was followed quickly by the dot-com bust and 9/11, both of which combined to make talent management's purpose be questioned - and that actually had a positive impact on me because it made me start really defining my profession's purpose and impact in very real terms.

That as an external consultant I have all the answers. I have had a lot of experiences and tools, and bring these to bear in ideation sessions with clients, but often times we are co-creating the answers and needed practices based on their needs and unique culture. 

I don't have a prescribed model I rely on; every situation and organization is unique, because as humans, we are each unique and that is one of the things that makes our broader HR and Talent profession so interesting.

More and more HR professionals are realizing that our calling is to create an environment in which our people can engage and therefore perform - rather than create policies or run payroll. Those things are absolutely crucial but the driver is an engaging environment and those more operational elements are enablers to driving the engaging environment. 

When we lead with experience and engagement rather than activities, we lead with the impact HR has on the organization instead of what HR does, and that shifts the whole conversation and perception. I call this having a talent-centric mindset.

At the same time, as we get more and more specialties in HR, we are becoming more siloed. And when we work in silo's, we don't work strategically together to further the experience and engagement of our people. I am so over the statements like "I'm in the fun part of HR" or "I do bread and butter HR" or "Well I'm in training so I guess I'm in HR but not really" because all those do is separate us from one another and denigrate our colleagues. No one HR function is better than the other, we need all of them for a holistic lifecycle approach for our people.

While I appreciate a really eggy brioche French toast with brown sugar syrup, my preferred breakfast when out is either a veggie benedict (runny eggs! hollaindaise! spinach!) or avo toast.  And always, coffee.