Best of Series: How Deep Listening is the Essential Fuel Needed for Building High Performance Teams

Dr. Jim: [: 00:00:00

In fact, You can't even begin to consider building a high performance team without taking this step. Let me give you a little bit of background on The person that's going to guide us through that conversation . 30 year veteran of HR, 20 years in HR leadership, featured in who's who in America's top execs.

Inc magazine as a top HR business leader. She's been featured in vision magazine. She's a top 10 influential business leader and now currently the vice president of HR for Boston university. Whew. I left out a bunch of stuff. I'm pretty sure, but I got that in one breath.

I want to welcome Amanda Bailey. To the show.

Amanda Bailey: Thank you, Jim. It's a great pleasure to be here.

m: I'm super excited to have [: 00:01:00

Amanda Bailey: Absolutely. And thank you for that. And thank you for this opportunity. As you mentioned, I've been in HR a long time now, and I'm one of fewer, I'd say, HR professionals as each year goes by, who's remained in HR from an individual contributor role and been very fortunate to advance, learn new skills and experiences and advance in the HR profession.

And I think that's a really key piece about my background that will inform our discussion today and share a little bit about my confidence. And what I really have felt works, and I've been very fortunate to lead teams of other HR professionals who've seen that vision and really adapted to it and aligned to it, and we've seen great success from it.

and coming HR folks, and I'm [: 00:02:00

Dr. Jim: So I appreciate that context and I know that we're going to talk about a different topic and in just a second, but your trajectory from individual contributor to senior and executive level HR leadership is really interesting.

And I'd like for you to share a little bit of wisdom from your first transition from individual contributor to people leader. What was the big realization that you had? At that time frame that really helped you accelerate to the later stages in your career.

Amanda Bailey: Yeah, I think for me what I wanted to do as individual contributor in those roles was learn as much as I could and collaborate with other colleagues whom I could learn about, learn their functions and learn other things about my first real position.

actually by function. And so [: 00:03:00

great benefit of observing presence, cadence, information, and the value of information, value of relationships and understanding data around H. R. In a way that when presenting H. R. Data and presenting H. R. Period, how influential the data becomes. And so that had been a little bit of a different path, I'd say not the usual treaded path, but it did allow me great experience and great bandwidth of understanding how to lead very [00:04:00] large teams.

Dr. Jim: If I'm taking what you just said and putting it on a bumper sticker, I think the advice, or at least that bumper sticker would read, don't think of your career as a ladder. Think of it as a lattice. Hopefully I'm on the mark there.

Amanda Bailey: Absolutely on the mark and I'm glad you said it. That's right.

Dr. Jim: Let's get into the meat and potatoes of the conversation. And that is about building high performance teams and specifically what was the game changing realization that you had that really shifted your thinking and your ability in terms of how you build a high performance team.

Amanda Bailey: I think that a few consistent things I've learned along the way is regardless of the culture of the organization, it is what it is when you walk into it as an HR leader and our goal in trying to manage change throughout an organization hinges on how we steward the culture towards that change.

f you've already been in the [: 00:05:00

are hallmark tenets and principles of great leadership. One, that's really important. The second piece is doing that listening tour, what I like to call a listening tour, and really understanding within the organization what is creating the most problematic experience for employees and for supervisors.

If we don't understand that, we are, as sometimes HR is left to do, shooting in the dark. and marginalized to be very suspect about what could actually bring tangible and productive change for employees and for the workforce. And so for me, coming into any team, I've always tried to figure out what am I learning?

needs to stay and it's best [: 00:06:00

And they're waiting for their leader to have a vision to help them get there.

Dr. Jim: There's a lot that you said there that I think is really valuable. And even in that segment, I caught a quick framework that we could apply when we're talking to the broader HR community. And here's what I gathered from your conversation.

When you walk in, deal with things as it is versus how you wish it to be. Next, deeply understand and align on values across the entire organization. So your values, the organization's values, and then align everybody on the team to that. Next, so step three is listen first and then change next. So if we're talking about a simple framework, even in that entry stage.

That right there is gold. Is there anything else that you would change about what I just described?

Amanda Bailey: I [: 00:07:00

Time tends to not be on your side, and you can't really think of it in that way. Although all of us desire to be agile, what I have learned painfully because sometimes I don't have patience to be as slow as it needs to be but everybody has to learn and be patient with learning the skills, the culture, the values, both of an organization and of the leadership in HR to make those changes happen.

very obvious to me in their [: 00:08:00

In their compliments in their accolades for our leadership team, the teams we've built and the work we've produced in just 24 months. So there is time that's necessary. It's not a lot of time, but make sure each of the pillars you outlined, Jim in the framework are informed by what are the cultural stakes where table stakes and what is the time that's going to be necessary to have the conversations with key constituents across the community?

And what are the conversations that need to happen with your HR leaders so that you can bridge the gap on what needs to be better aligned in order to execute change?

Dr. Jim: Even in that there's a lot that we can peel back and I'm annoyed that we only have a short amount of time to get through all of this, but you mentioned gaining alignment and you also mentioned limited time and oftentimes when there's a, an urgency.

t for a technology solution. [: 00:09:00

Amanda Bailey: Yeah, that's a great question. And I'll just say it makes two of us. I too do not think it is prudent for any HR professional to take the risk of not being informed by executing quickly. And going through the very research informed process of what technology can do.

nce for a new employee or an [: 00:10:00

Does it produce a successful experience? Experiences change and evolve. And with that, technology solutions have to be informed by those experiences and our desire of what we want to create. If we don't do that, then it's exactly, why, Jim, you and I and other colleagues have reticence about adding the technology solution.

It will do nothing more for you if you can't tell it what to do. And that's an important piece.

Dr. Jim: Let's tie this all back to what we opened the conversation with. Again, I think you and I can agree that if you're leading with a technology first solve to whatever problem you're facing, you're probably going to make it a bigger problem.

nment perspective? Should we [: 00:11:00

And making meaningful changes in terms of the outcomes that we're trying to drive.

Amanda Bailey: I'm really grateful that you asked about it specifically towards talent. We know that globally, nationally, there is a need to upgrade the skill sets of our existing workforce. That is not an unknown.

What is also not known, is we have to start figuring out where our workforce in progressing their skills, where are the appropriate roles that they can develop and with the social norms of hybrid work. And other mental health pieces that need to be in place. If you know if it's not a hybrid workplace, how do we figure that out?

And all of that has to inform the talent strategy. And what I particularly found useful is that as we talk about culture norms and values every talent strategy is going to be modified according to that organization, where they are in their culture, where they are in the maturity of understanding talent strategies, where they are in their resources.

And [: 00:12:00

U. I took probably the first 120 days to make sure I understood very key questions around talent. What was the experience of the employee coming in new? What was the experience of the hiring manager, both from HR, my office's responsibilities, the responsibilities of their unit, and where were the gaps in those experiences that they wanted to see made differently?

hink they should be. I think [: 00:13:00

What I need is to go find highly qualified applicants. And what I would love is for your office to help me find diverse professionals to fill some of our roles, which we don't get enough of. It was very simple. It was simple from their point of view, and that's a very good thing, because in their minds, they're leaving it to us to figure out the complications.

They just want to simply tell us, here's my experience. And so informed one by one, I met with over 120 Constituents in my first 60 days. So lots of meetings, but that was super important to get their feedback, distill it down to key themes and then be informed by what I could do to solve that. And what we learned here at BU was that we needed to restructure the talent model that would allow us to go find diverse applicants.

final piece was a new piece. [: 00:14:00

And all three of those sub teams now comprise the Talent Recruitment Services model. And we've seen tremendous benefits from that. Cycle time was about 55 days, starting from the time the hiring manager had a need and advertised a position to the time that somebody was sitting in the seat. And within our first quarter for just all new jobs alone, we saw a 13 day cycle time.

So significant improvement and overall for jobs that even had been out on the market for some time, whether due to specialized sales or some other influence, it's dropped from 55 to 36 days. And so I think that efficiency could never have been accomplished. Without understanding with clarity what the pain points were and responding to that.

that I really liked that you [: 00:15:00

First practice before you start doing anything. You should probably take the time to listen and understand as deeply as possible. Here's the pitfall that I've seen pop up in with folks that I've talked to that can sometimes lead us to a scenario where we've gotten so many different data points.

That we're stuck on what to act on first. How do we avoid being in paralysis mode and instead shift into action quickly?

Amanda Bailey: You're absolutely right. The desire to remain on the margins of analysis paralysis is going to nag, and it often nags at me because I absolutely want to be, Oh, I could fix this tomorrow.

talking to them and in their [: 00:16:00

You're new here. Can you get this done? And I often have to share with folks, for me to make sure it is a sustainable level of change. I've got to make sure I understand what I have in terms of resources. What I need to make sure leaders understand what the problems are. And based on the resources that I need, together, that determines the prioritization. is. If we don't do that, we run into an alignment of prioritization challenges. Oftentimes, we receive commitment for resources, go through the administrative procedures to get them, and we don't get them. And learning from that.

mprovement to administrative [: 00:17:00

So from a spectrum of that level, where everything else is evident to make the problem go away and fix it all the way up to if I had X amount of dollars or X amount of people or X amount of services. That I could tap into, I could make this problem go away. That is critically important, both for the confidence of the HR organization to feel like they are not always at the, doorstep, knocking on the door to get in and build credibility.

Dr. Jim: Really great stuff, Amanda. Before we sign off, we focused a lot of the conversation on around aligning your talent teams. to achieving your strategic initiatives and making an impact.

practitioners take from this [: 00:18:00

Amanda Bailey: Very quickly, I think I would say listen long.

And listen, always as your first posture following your listening learn what are the priority, the priorities for the HR organization from a service delivery model. If we consider us, consider ourselves business partners, and we do, then we have to think of our services as a service delivery model. One that starts with consultation.

So where can we get the biggest improvement with the expertise we bring in consulting on different situations? What resources would we need? And then how do we go about building a timeline and plan informed by the culture of the HR organization? How do we build out a timeline and a plan informed by that HR culture in order to execute on those priorities?

Dr. Jim: Last thing before we close down, where can people find you?

urce or any of the education [: 00:19:00

Dr. Jim: Thank you for hanging out with us, Amanda. Here's what I took away from the conversation. So if we're talking about frameworks and we built on these throughout the conversation for HR leaders and practitioners who are looking to maximize the impact that they're going to make with any initiatives that they have.

You need to first accept the environment for what it is. Don't try to immediately come in and change it without actually understanding the environment. You need to align everybody within the organization to the values both personally and professionally across the organization. You need to listen deeply.

experience that helped them [: 00:20:00