Driving Massive Change Without Breaking Culture

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So let me tell you a little bit of her story. She's a strategic global leader with expertise in leading a full range of global talent activities designed to optimize business, transform cultures, include increase employee engagement and support corporate growth. She's [00:01:00] passionate about developing leaders and employees, as well as creating positive, engaging, and inclusive business cultures and work environments.

She's known for her strong business partnering skills and has a unique ability to quickly build trust amongst employees at all levels of the organization. Now she's worked. At many of the fortune 500 companies, midsize and startup organizations in healthcare, technology, media, manufacturing, and engineering.

She's held several senior human resources positions, including Dow, where she's currently the chief people officer. She's also held roles at B Square, Precor, Intermec, the Washington Post, and PACAR. She's a national presenter and thought leader. She's presented at the Washington Human Resources Symposium on the topics of Gen Z, employee engagement, and special interest groups.

There's a lot more, but we only have a 30 minute show. So with that being said, Gary, welcome to the show.

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[00:01:55] Dr. Jim: The first order of business before we dive into the conversation is to get a little bit more [00:02:00] context about your story. That's going to help the listeners understand the lens that you're applying to this conversation. So why don't you share with us a little bit about that.

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And as I supported myself through college, I had the wonderful opportunity to work in the airline industry. And that's how I bumped into or joined human resources. I started out as a customer service trainer, focused on leadership development. And so I think it's that personal tie for me of loving history, loving to learn about leaders, how they managed to lead their industry.

so to my joy and passion for [: 00:03:00

[00:03:03] Dr. Jim: You said at the, as an undergrad, you studied history and that was the space that you were in. And then you popped into the airline industry. So one of the things that I'm curious about, and especially with the airline industry at the time, it's not really an industry that's known for being agile.

So what did you pick up in that industry that better informed some of your philosophies later on in your career?

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And so from that, I learned how leaders do adapt to Becoming part of a larger organization, incorporating a different culture of a company, what that looks like, [00:04:00] bringing the best from the previous company, utilizing it in the current company and helping the employees manage through massive change. So I was able to see and participate in a lot of that as an early human resources career professional.

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[00:04:25] Keri Smith: I appreciate if you use the word stressful because it is stressful. It's stressful to be acquired and it's. stressful to be the acquirer. And I've been on both sides of that situation. And I think one of the key points is understanding that yes, everyone is going to experience. stress, and that is normal under change.

be good for the organization [: 00:05:00

[00:05:05] Dr. Jim: It's interesting that you talk about transparent communication in Helping the messaging and reducing some of the anxiety that might exist as this is happening. That doesn't seem to be in favor in a lot of different ways when we look at the world of work today. You hear about layoffs all the time and you can consider yourself lucky If you're on the receiving end of a layoff and you actually have an outsourced HR person that's actually taking you through that process, I've heard of so many stories of people that are getting laid off via email or even colder ways of doing that.

catastrophic sort of events [: 00:06:00

Tell us a little bit about what those frameworks look like.

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It is a challenging thing to work through. There's no doubt about it, and there are nervous employees throughout an organization when this is occurring, and I think just trying to provide that calm demeanor and to communicate with grace are two really key factors that help leaders manage through it.

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This isn't working out, but here's what we're going to do. If there is anybody that we can facilitate intros for or help you in the transition, we want to make sure that we're facilitating that as you move to that X role. So even something as small as that is certainly better than You know, ending up on an outsourced HR call or being let go by email and that creates its own set of issues. I appreciate you sharing your perspective on that. When I opened the show I talked about how if.

e culture in the middle of a [: 00:08:00

How has that related to experience in building high performance teams.

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And it was quite a journey that we were able to experience as we transformed the culture over time,

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You could just play it safe.

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So we knew over time that was going to change in and of itself. But we would continue to be in that market and work through those changes. But we also knew that we had some internal skill sets and some nascent knowledge as the world started to look at the Internet of Things. And as the world started to look at the Internet of Things, our board and our senior leaders started to think about could we create a product within our own company with current talent, future talent, and use the current profits of the company to build out that new product and also support the future profitability of the [00:10:00] company as well.

integrating SAS markets and the product. So it was really an exciting time.

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One, did you experience that? And then two, what was your plan when it came to getting those people that had those fears? reallocated and up skilled or re skilled into sort of the new model going forward.

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And so we had an opportunity as a leadership team to really convene on what is our messaging and what are we saying to our employees? And our message was, we want to maintain our current business and we want it to continue to thrive, continue to build. So We will maintain that as a key priority, but as we maintain that as a key priority, we also want to build out this new business that we think is exciting.

And if you determine that you think it's exciting as well, then you're going to have an opportunity to perhaps transfer over or build new skill sets to be part of that. But we're going to run these two businesses in parallel with support and energy given to both. And I think that was a key point.

Message that was received. We communicated it a multitude of times so that our employees heard that message that felt secure within the current business. And then we did a lot of work in a short time around what is our new mission, vision and values and incorporated current employees with the quote newer employees.

a lot of team building with [: 00:12:00

[00:12:01] Dr. Jim: So we've spent quite a bit of time talking about how the messaging was executed and I'm putting myself in the shoes of an employee that's hearing all of this stuff. How did you translate all that talk into action? Like we can talk all day long about, Hey, this is where we're going. This is how we're going to do it.

How did that show up from a programmatic perspective that helped? Those employees who are probably terrified about, Oh, I'm going to be surplus to requirements. How did that show up in terms of pro programmatic elements that help them make that transition along with the organization?

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And get to know each other even better. We did things like the [00:13:00] disc assessment, helping employees understand how they could communicate better. Communication was key collaboration. We set up special interest groups. We had really fun. Fun things that appeal to the kind of this software engineering techie geekness aspect.

We had sports fans as much as we had techie geek fans, but we did may the fourth be with you and had a big day around Star Wars and everybody loved it and really geeked out on that. We had employees come to us and say, I'd like to create event. What could I do? And some of those events, while maybe perhaps on company time and taking some time away from the creation of the product actually created a lot of synergy.

A lot of good communication, a lot of teamwork where people could perhaps even confront each other and challenge each other and felt more comfortable in doing so around the business, knowing that they had some personal interactions to get to know each other even better.

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Sets of the organization or sides of the [00:14:00] organization to collaborate and build relationships. But the thing that stood out is that you did this in broad terms on company time. Why did you make the decision to do that within normal working hours versus what is often we think about team building events or whatever it's done after hours,

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Please share in our next all staff meeting how this experience was beneficial to you and our company. And so we just believed that it was a helpful opportunity to create that synergy and alignment. And I will say our senior leaders were really good about it, too. They brought a lot of energy and engagement and how they were presenting the company.

ed within the company that I [: 00:15:00

[00:15:02] Dr. Jim: The the other element of what you mentioned that caught my attention was you created an environment where there was the potential for some confrontation between teams. So what were the frameworks that you put in place to make sure that those. Moments of confrontation were productive when you're looking at this new vision that the organization is going to tell us a little bit about the frameworks.

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And are we being a team player? And perhaps we are trying to hold each other accountable through this conversation. So we utilized our values to focus on how we wanted to have those conversations. And then I always had an open [00:16:00] door policy and still do and actually value and appreciate when conflict occurs within a company.

Cause I think that's when you see the real change. There's power in the conflict of the conversation and there's power in how the conversation ends and what's agreed upon as going forward. So those are natural events that occur that we did help work through with the values of the company.

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This is going to be phased out. What were the things that you put into place that created a bridge for those employees to be relevant in the new organization? I want to get your lens on what you did to build that bridge with an emphasis on development and retention.

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And it was a challenge and it was certainly one that he was up for, but he was used to selling this embedded software, managing that team, and then moving to a product focus, solution focus type of business. So we transferred him over. And I think because of that team saw him as their advocate, and he certainly could understand and speak to both sides of the business.

abulous UK. Engineering team [: 00:18:00

But what we recognized is typical of a startup. We've been doing it for 67 months. We needed some process improvement and we need to define the processes. And our UK team was fabulous at that. So we brought over several key layers, key leaders, key engineers to help us with that. And I think it was the integration of team members and Some of the old with some of the new that helped the employees go, okay, I can see some current leaders and current employees being part of the new business.

I still feel comfortable with what I, what we were doing, and we weren't trying to eliminate the current business. But we knew it would also transform. And so it was a lot of transformation and again, a lot of communication, but I think those two actions helped our employees knew, know that somebody had their back and that they understood what they were currently working through and experiencing.

Also,

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What worked, what didn't work when it came to execution at the front lines and for those things that didn't work. What were the big reasons that, caused that disconnect or cause that inefficiency?

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Or when we did have, I don't want to call them failures, but challenges, I will say we also recognize those and had team meetings and asked for help and let people know that we will overcome this and we need your help. There was [00:20:00] a lot of communication collaboration that occurred that I think the employees valued and appreciated and we needed them.

We needed them to step in and help us.

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Is there anything missing that we haven't covered yet before we transitioned to the back end?

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[00:20:44] Dr. Jim: We covered a lot of ground in this conversation, especially when we're looking at high stress, high anxiety events like transformations or mergers and acquisitions, and what executive leaders and senior leaders need to be doing to smooth. [00:21:00] The the anxiety within their workforce. The thing that I'm wondering is when we look at executing that and if there's other, there are going to be other leaders that are listening to this story, how did you pull that off? What were the key frameworks or key things that you kept in mind that you believe you do this successfully that other listeners need to have on their radar when they're trying to do the same thing?

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So that's all about knowing what motivates them, communicating with them effectively and having an open door policy with all of your senior leaders so that employees can come and ask those questions that they need answers to. And then I would say really focusing on helping the senior leadership team and management team in general, [00:22:00] understand how they are aligning as a team and creating that senior leadership Synergy amongst each other.

And then I think any human resource professional senior leader needs to think about making energy and bringing energy to the company. How are you going to support the company to move forward, to transform and to support the culture that's needed to build out that vision of the company?

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[00:22:28] Keri Smith: I would love that. I think probably the easiest place is via LinkedIn and it's simply Carrie L. Smith, Carrie K E R I L Smith on LinkedIn.

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One is that you need to be able to communicate clearly to that employee or those employees, what's in it for them. You've already spent all this time talking about where we're going and what that looks like, but unless you connect it specifically to what's in it for that individual or that group, you're going to have problems getting traction.

The second thing that you should be thinking about or the question that you should be asking is what does the path forward look like for me? And, this is critical because if you're not painting a vision for the future, that includes that person that's at the front line, you're going to have a lot of issues trying to take that vision and make it a reality without losing a bunch of people.

s how is everything that the [: 00:24:00

So that's what stood out to me in the conversation. I appreciate you bringing that to the table and and sharing that with us. For those of you who have been listening to the conversation, we appreciate you hanging out, leave us a review and let us know what stood out to you in this conversation. Also make sure to join the community. You can find that at www. engagerocket. co slash HR impact and tune in next time, where we'll have another great leader sharing with us the game changing realizations that they had that helped them build a high performance team.