How Does Systems Thinking and Empathy Help You Build Elite Teams?

CheeTung Leong: [: 00:00:00

He's an expert in end to end lifecycle management. For employees, which is actually really code for saying he really cares about his people and their experience Within the organization. So here to tell us more about Stash is Matt. Welcome to the

show.

Matt Dyason: Thanks CT for having me. It's an awesome opportunity to connect with you, connect with your audience.

g term. And so it's got some [: 00:01:00

CheeTung Leong: Maybe share with us, what does the vice president of human resources have to do every day at Stats?

Matt Dyason: Sure. It's ever changing. So you have to be nimble. You certainly have to understand what the business strategies are and what we're focused on as an organization centered around serving our customers.

Making sure that we're making excellent hiring decisions, we're providing opportunities for them to develop their skills, their competencies, and reducing that friction out of their day to day work in order to get them to deliver, whether they're an engineer, working on code, Whether they're in marketing, whether they're in finance or sitting on the HR team themselves.

idate experience all the way [: 00:02:00

CheeTung Leong: It's very cool how you

describe all of this, these as touch points and you're clearly a scientist of the people experience. Yeah.

Because, that's it's really important to break down that experience into these different touch points to allow you to then optimize each of them. And when you think about all of these in totality, what has been the game changing realization for you that has helped you to construct and build elite teams?

really having a seat at the [: 00:03:00

What are the problems it's trying to solve? Once I better understand that, I can build people programs that enable that success. So when I think about, HR or people based programs, I think across three different sort of pillars. There's the people themselves that enable the work to get done.

There's the programs and processes that enable that to function. And then there's the technology piece. And that technology piece is the interface in order to serve their needs. Having that full scope sort of understanding and being nimble in order to meet those needs. We can really be successful as a function within the organization.

nice framework to be able to [: 00:04:00

And a big part of that is building trust in your team, building that safe space which kind of underlines everything, right? How have you gone about approaching this with the teams that you work with?

Matt Dyason: A couple of things come to mind. One is trust is such an important factor in building a strong foundation and culture within an organization.

Without that trust, it is very difficult to get work done on a consistent basis in terms of a safe space. Over my tenure, it seems every year we tend to move faster. There's always the desire to really if you're looking at a scale of speed and quality is tipping that scale towards speed.

They're [: 00:05:00

And in order to do that, nothing is going to be perfectly built out. And a perfect path to follow. And so when you create that safe space, you need to create some guardrails for them to operate in. And one of those things that you mentioned is an anchor point, which people can rally around which takes some

of that gray or some of that ambiguity and it really encourages, long term success. When I think about, about psychological safety or a safe working environment is the opportunity to learn. And if you don't take the opportunity, you're going to make mistakes.

No one's perfect. If you [: 00:06:00

CheeTung Leong: Let's dig into this a little bit more because, the old saying always give someone a second chance, but never a third, like how do you go about this this idea of dealing with failure and.

Underline this safe space because you can, obviously, as you, you try new things, you're gonna fail. And if you're not failing often enough, as they say in the startup space you're just not innovating enough or not pushing the boundaries enough. But at the same time there's failures.

And there's failures, right? So how do you know if someone's taking the right kind of risks or whether the wrong guy for the job?

Matt Dyason: It starts with empathy. I think as a an effective people leader or an effective organization, you have to lead with empathy. You have to assume good intent.

innovating as a large scale [: 00:07:00

What's the problem? So across, my experience, there's another framework or there's another tool to use, which is defining the problem statement of why what happened. Why was that mistake made? What was the root cause of that particular issue and you inform that with data, qualitative data, quantitative data, and then it gives you a chance to then propose recommendations to move forward.

s a different situation. But [: 00:08:00

And then sharing that amongst the team, let's say you have to celebrate the failures. You definitely want to have. Hopefully fail fast, but there are techniques in order to escalate issues quickly in order to fail quickly. raise the issue, understand the root cause and fix it right away.

CheeTung Leong: I'm glad you talked about root cause analysis and collecting data . Cause I think that pulls us back up to the main framework that you you brought us to at the beginning.

For those listeners who are new to this, the end on cord is basically what the Toyota production system had at any point. In the production chain, anybody could pull a cord that would then stop production for the whole factory. And at that time it was revolutionary because it, obviously, production halts like this cost a lot at the front end.

But what they [: 00:09:00

So the people side of things need to be right, like people need to be okay and understand why we are pulling that cord, for example. Now, that root cause and data side of things, when we think about the overall people experience, And if we believe that optimizing the performance of our teams is about optimizing that people experience and channeling it towards high performance.

How do you go about thinking about each of these different touch points in that people experience? Which is the most important? And then how do you go about investing in those areas deliberately?

Matt Dyason: I think those touch points are fairly consistent regardless of industry.

o get it right or correct it [: 00:10:00

R. team or their managers. And so when I think about the employee experience, I'm thinking about Onboarding. I'm thinking about how do we set that employee up to be successful on day one? A very specific example about common problems that you find during the onboarding phase is is the time it takes from like candidate offer to getting them started on day one and be productive.

And that can take that can take a relatively long time. You need them in on Working on day one, you need them to be here as quickly as possible. You might have a gap when someone is to leave. And so you break down that process into what are the tasks and activities that need to occur.

ed offer letter, you need to [: 00:11:00

I think related to that. So that's just getting them here. But how do you take care of that employee after they started on day one? Are you setting them up for success? Are you providing them the tools to have productive one on ones with their manager? Are you providing them? Enough specificity in their role and the expectations of what they need to deliver in 30 days.

As a system thinker, I'm always thinking about process. I'm always thinking about how do I enable success and how do I repeat that success? And you can do that through mechanisms and touch points are those mechanisms in order to deliver that.

CheeTung Leong: It sounds like one of the first steps that you need to do.

high level what those touch [: 00:12:00

But then I think the devil lies in the details for each business, right? Like how you tease those steps out and then optimize The process at each one. And do you go, how do you go about mapping the data for this? Identifying which are the choke points in that experience that needs your attention?

Matt Dyason: There's a couple ways of doing it. Journey mapping. There's a number of companies that have journey mapped the customer experience. And so H. R. professionals have now journey map the employee experience to identify those touch points. You're right. There are functional areas within a business that operate differently.

across the world. But if you [: 00:13:00

It takes a lot of the guesswork out, so you want to allow some flexibility. So even if you build quote unquote, an excellent process, you have to measure how effective it's working. How quickly can we get through the process? Where are the choke points? Is it? Going back to the onboarding experience, is there a choke point between when you're thinking about system provisioning?

eing transferred from system [: 00:14:00

And so you have to be analytical. You have to get into the details of figuring out where those choke points are, and they could be slightly different for each of the organizations that are out there.

CheeTung Leong: And, that brings us to the third big pillar of strategy that you talked about earlier with technology.

And I think one of the common misperceptions is let's go out there and buy this tool and then we'll fix our process. It might have been Bill Gates, actually, who said that if you automate an inefficient process, What then happens, you just get a lot more inefficiency rather than efficiency, right?

and then build that up over [: 00:15:00

Build that stack first before the process. What has your experience been on this,?

Matt Dyason: You're bringing up a lot of my history working at several different tech companies. The shiny new object, let's go out and buy it and it'll solve all our problems. One of the things I think about when it comes to technology are really ensuring you have your defined requirements.

What do you want the technology to do? What do you need it to do in order to drive a business outcome? When we think about HRIS systems like the Workdays Workforce Now, you want to make sure that it has the capabilities and features you need to be successful. And you're configuring the system that aligns with your mission, vision and values as an organization.

that went into configuring a [: 00:16:00

And it's just not you think it's just not going to solve for everything because. Inevitably, if you don't have the right business processes, workflows configured, a new system is not going to solve that problem. So really robust business process is the way to measure.

CheeTung Leong: There's a nuance to this, right?

Because I do often come across other HR leaders that struggle where. You've evolved the process to a point that actually there's no software on earth that would help you with that process because it's so tightly defined and you're stuck figuring things out on Excel spreadsheets and you just can't get out of that because it's such a neosyncratic process.

So how do you balance that against taking a best of breed piece of software and then balance it with with the unique needs of your own process? How have you dealt with this balance?

ctually do and what the tool [: 00:17:00

So based on whether you go with a monolithic system in HR, your classic workday, or you go with the best of breed approach that offers a marketplace like a bamboo HR ADP workforce now. It's with your with that in mind, it's designing the process that still meets the goals.

. No solution is going to be [: 00:18:00

CheeTung Leong: So we've covered today a lot of ground in a really short amount of time, and we're almost at time. Basically, if I can summarize for the from listeners, we have people, programs, and processes, and technology, and each of these pillars, I think what we've gotten from you is a very fundamental problem solving approach when we deal with this, so mapping it out at a high level, finding the right kind of data that you need to assess and evaluate your theory, and then coming back to refine that again, which I really think is useful.

about these three components.[: 00:19:00

Matt Dyason: If you're at a leadership level in HR, more likely than not, you lead with empathy.

I think if you couple empathy and trust with mechanisms that defines how work gets done, that is a pretty powerful combination and make that available and transparent to the employees, work will become you. much more robust. They'll reduce the friction and people understand what's expected of them and actually how to achieve it.

When I think about self service is taking advantage of tooling and mechanisms in order to self serve so people can be successful. So leading with empathy, building a sense of trust and really providing mechanisms in order for them to be successful in their role.

CheeTung Leong: Thanks so much for sharing with us today, Matt.

If people want to find you, what's the best way for them to reach you?

h you folks and continue the [: 00:20:00

CheeTung Leong: Thanks so much for hanging with us today. And for those of you who are listening, I hope you've enjoyed the show.

Please do drop us a review and tune in the next time on the HR Impact Show where we'll have more great leaders sharing with us their best practices around building great organizations. Thanks so much for listening