Building an Elite HR Team in Education: Lessons from the Frontlines

CheeTung Leong: [: 00:00:00

Garry Millbourn: Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited.

CheeTung Leong: I'm super curious. How did you go from being, teacher, principal, and educator, and jumping into HR? That must have been quite a transition.

port for my employees and my [: 00:01:00

And so from there, our our district went. Through some turnover over a few years, we had some people coming in from the business world and being in HR and it just didn't, it didn't quite work for our district. And we got a new superintendent and she had said you have this reputation of high support, high expectations and being process driven.

And I think you might be the guy. And I said, okay, let's give it a try. From there, I went back and I did take some classes some HR classes, and then I went to school and started figuring out and learn by doing..

CheeTung Leong: That's the principal having to go back to school and becoming a student again. It must have been quite a journey. And tell me a little bit more for listeners who may not be familiar with how school districts work organizationally, like how does that work for you?

So I think fairly similar to [: 00:02:00

CheeTung Leong: And do you find that the corporate kind of setup is separate from the educators and, basically you've got education and the administrators are they separate organizations or are they all within one? And, educators can flow back and forth like you did.

the in and outs of the daily [: 00:03:00

So I think it is valuable to, to bring someone in from the inside.

CheeTung Leong: Got it. Yeah. So do I. I always think you need a practitioner to at least to inform leadership on what's going on. If not to take on that leadership role themselves.

Garry Millbourn: And I would add about our structure, we have that executive cabinet and then our jobs when you're thinking about the structure is to remove as many roadblocks as possible for our principals and teachers to do the most important work, which is teaching our kids and having our kids reach their learning targets and goals.

's customers are their other [: 00:04:00

CheeTung Leong: This was already quite a transition for you. When you're moving from being an educator into the executive cabinet and you had a relatively short amount of time where you gave yourself a relatively short amount of time to build that team up and align them across a shared vision and shared values in order to inform that the relatively strategic, both the strategic and the transactional work that you're doing and you also talk about a moral purpose. How did you, how do you kickstart this journey? Like, how do you think about it and how did you get it going?

Garry Millbourn: As you mentioned, there's a really short timeline in this transition. And part of that was due. We'd had some turnover in this position. And so when there's a lot of turnover, trust starts eroding and processes start breaking down and things of that nature. So it was really important to me and my superintendent to try to turn this around very quickly.

And I had to do [: 00:05:00

I wanted to start really with my team very quickly and define a clear mission and purpose for our team, going back to that Simon Sinek starting with a WHY and really. Making everybody on my team understand why do we exist? What is our fundamental purpose? And then from there I wanted to create some values of what would all of our internal and external action sound like, look like and feel like?

ngs done within the mission. [: 00:06:00

so what I started doing is breaking that down to 30, 60, 90? So those first 30 days what can we bite off? What can we start brainstorming? What can we actually articulate and then start working from there?

CheeTung Leong: What struck me from that, Garry, is, so first of all, that your reputation for being both strategic and also very structured clearly came across very strongly in in the way you approached this, but, many leaders. Think about the first 90 days and not everyone breaks it down into 30, 60, 90 like you did and, laying out those five key areas.

understanding. Did you find [: 00:07:00

Garry Millbourn: I started I think obviously with one on one meetings with all of those team members and just listening sessions, what what is going well, what would you like to see changed, and how do you think we can improve? So just getting an essence for how our team felt about the work from there, I had a group meeting where I said to them we're going to create our, why we're going to create our unique purpose. Obviously, the purpose of the school district is to graduate our students with a diploma. And we have an extra credential that we ask our students to graduate with. So we have that academic focus, but what is our teams really kind of purpose. Why do we exist? And it was challenging for them to think about because they thought they were living in transactional things, so someone said my, my purpose is to enter, the codes for payroll. My purpose is to recruit. so I really had to challenge their thinking and provide some examples.

And what we [: 00:08:00

And from there I really wanted to whittle that down. And we probably ended up with 15 categories to anywhere from three to five and really the conversations. Going from 15 categories and we end up going. Getting the three really define and sharpened our purpose very clearly, so we landed on select, support, develop, so our job is to select one more employee like our most outstanding employee support our employees.

develop them, create training[: 00:09:00

So select, support, develop. And I was really proud of that moment and we came out of there fortified as a really strong team of, okay now we understand why we exist. So from there, I started saying, then how are we going to operate, and that's where our values came in.

CheeTung Leong: So this is always interesting to me. So you went from almost like 15 different things and you pulled that into three. Did you find yourself summarizing what people were putting out and pulling them together? Or were you finding yourself like eliminating things that, didn't resonate with others?

Garry Millbourn: I would say both. So my job in there was. To continue to question. So what do you mean by this? And start listening with that big net small host. I'm listening for the emotion. I'm listening for the big idea, not the exact wording and trying to summarize and synthesize people's thoughts.

on on those. Maybe those are [: 00:10:00

CheeTung Leong: As leaders of any team after leading for a few years this exercise would feel very familiar. And I think what happens next as you alluded to is key. How do you. operationalize this and you know everyone feels good after a sticky note session you've got this thing you've got the photo that goes up and sent around of email everyone's got it and then what next so how did you translate that into actual operations.

Garry Millbourn: What would internal and external interactions. look and sound like if we were like the best team on the face of the earth. It was very important to me that we were respectful because through the turnover and things falling through it, it seemed like some things got out of, HR wasn't as respectful, maybe as they needed to be, and things were breaking down communication wise, which I think is a big part of respect as well.

trustworthiness, timeliness, [: 00:11:00

And so we're constantly pulling that back out in front of our team members, and they're constantly reflecting on that and saying, I was very transparent with this employee yesterday, even though it's tough information, it was in a respectful manner, it was in a transparent manner. So that was our operating values.

Then that shared vision piece was that third step and we're getting close to, moving into my 60 days here. But those two things were my first 30 and that shared vision is probably getting closer than those 60 time frame. And I kept asking, so if we're living this mission or operating values, what's the result?

y about us if we're operating[: 00:12:00

We wanted to be accurate. We wanted to be timely. And we wanted to free people up to do their jobs and not worry about the HR stuff. And so anytime we're interacting with an employee, it's coming back to that. It's coming back to those values. It's coming back to that purpose. And it's coming back to that shared vision that I'm dealing with you with empathy. We're accurate. It's timely, and we're getting you on so you can do the important work in our organization.

CheeTung Leong: I love how you're also like in this whole process beginning with the end in mind, like what is it that employees are going to say, going to think about HR and leading with that as your North star to guide that thinking and you mentioned this is into your 60 days, if I could maybe take a pause from that and say, like now looking back at that now today do you go out and do data collection from others within the organization about HR's performance?

s that something that you do [: 00:13:00

Garry Millbourn: We absolutely do. I'm the kind of the only department that does a yearly survey. We do many climate surveys and things in our building. We're getting our employees thoughts and temperatures around many things a year. But I have an HR specific customer experience survey that I give every year.

And we were at like 84 percent and 82 percent last year. And, one of the questions is like, how are we living our values and how are we operating? And I'm very proud of that data for it. A lot of HRs don't score in the 80 percent yes, we, it is important for me to go back and seek that feedback.

I asked those two questions about our purpose and our values, how we do it on those. And then I ask. What's something we've done well and what's something you'd like to see improve. So it's a four question survey. We get a lot of great action steps out of, what would you like to see improve. We hold that back in our yearly plan almost every single year.

all that kind of good stuff. [: 00:14:00

Now, how did you go from that to the 90 days? What would you say was some of the biggest things that you managed to achieve and to lay that foundations for your elite team of HR?

Garry Millbourn: I, so I would say between that 60 and 90 now that we have. That strong purpose. We have those values. We have that vision, of that feeling. It was really the last two things was sharpening that focus. I knew I could not come in and I kept seeing things like, Oh, I want.

I want to change that. I want to fix this. I want to change this. We have to fix this. This is broken. This process is unclear. And it was really about sharpening the focus about, what are the transactional things we need to focus on right away to, sometimes we call it the low hanging fruit.

And then let's identify some [: 00:15:00

And let's identify some metrics and goals around. Once again, with my team, and now I'm getting input from my stakeholders, which is mostly principals but also the teachers through the teacher unions and things like that. I'm getting feedback on transactional things that we should focus on and strategic things that we should focus on. And so that is, once again, synthesizing sessions and listening sessions and capturing those big items.

CheeTung Leong: It's, it sounds like a lot of work, but it's, it also feels like you gotta put in that work, especially at the beginning. Where we started this conversation was how did you go from someone who wasn't even in HR and then taking on that leadership executive role and very rapidly driving the team towards objectives.

nerous enough to share. What [: 00:16:00

Did you see these four pillars as main kind of operating pillars that you were going to work with it? How did you come up with these four things?

Garry Millbourn: The easy answer, but it's very complex in action, is by listening and having these conversations with stakeholders. And, a large belief of mine and a tenant of my leadership is engaging. When you engage the people closest to the work, they'll help you solve the problems because they know it better than you do.

e four categories shook out. [: 00:17:00

are the major strategies and then we put our action steps underneath those and that's been our . HR action plan moving forward ever since , we can always fit something under those four categories, but it really came from listening and engaging others.

CheeTung Leong: I feel like the 30, 60, 90, Was more of an acceleration plan for you but it was also just became part of building that operating rhythm of listening and acting on what you're hearing. How is it that you operate and infuse that into your daily operations today?

Garry Millbourn: If we'd done all this work and then it just went in a binder somewhere and we didn't live it, it would, it'd be worthless. I think we communicate our priorities by living them, and that, that sounds trite, but like I mentioned, we pull out that HR action plan about once a month as a team, we look at it, we start our meetings by reflecting on how did we live our values this week?

e our goals we're reflecting [: 00:18:00

What's our metrics like and then that refocuses them and they go back in the transactional, which is great because we don't exist without transactional action steps each day. But. I have to always refocus on the strategic because without it, we can get lost in the day to day in the minutia.

CheeTung Leong: So if you were to give advice to another leader or some another chief HR officer in different organization in being able to infuse this moral purpose quickly and operationalize excellence within their teams. If you could boil everything that you've done down into a few key principles, like what would you advise them to take note of or to bear in mind?

g today. So that define that [: 00:19:00

That's my template, those five things. And then from there. Put in regular check marks and in reminders for you to always be checking in on it. So you're living it and communicate, communicate, communicate listen. Because the listening piece is once again, engaging the people closest to the work would be the other caveat to that. They'll tell you they know what they want it to feel like. And they understand the core work that needs to be done and how we're here to and how we can help them do it better.

CheeTung Leong: So you've got a five step process. You've got both communicating and listening and engaging people that are closest to the work because they know stuff that we don't. This has been a real pleasure speaking with you. If anyone wants to find out more from you, what's the best way for them to reach out to you?

Garry Millbourn: On my LinkedIn it would probably be the easiest way, Garry Melbourne.

anks so much for hanging out [: 00:20:00