Playing to Strengths: How Focusing on What Employees Do Best Drives High Performance

Dr. Jim: [: 00:00:00

He's a senior people executive with a proven track record in strategic planning and business HR alignment, talent development, and promoting enterprise wide employee engagement in competitive fast paced business environments. He's deeply regarded as a strategic, visionary, and transformative tactical leader who focuses on delivering real business results while building highly collaborative working relationships across the organization. He's had a track record for being an effective communicator, a strong strategic and tactical skills to drive HR strategies and priorities to drive HR strategies and initiatives aligned to business priorities, the strengths of talent, executing the results.

eople centric leader, and he [: 00:01:00

D'Mar Phillips: Thanks, Dr. Jim. Glad to be here. And I need to take you along and do all of my introductions for me. That was great.

Dr. Jim: I butchered it along the way, but we'll we'll let that one slide. So I appreciate you hang hopping on and hanging out with us. I know we covered a lot of stuff in the bio, but before we get into the core discussion, I'd like you to share with the audience, anything that you feel would be important.

For them to know about you, that's going to inform this conversation that we're going to have.

D'Mar Phillips: Thanks for that opportunity in the platform. 1st, I think this is an important conversation that we're having and 2nd of all a conversation I had last week with my supervisor is telling and I'll use that as an example. We were discussing, just where I feel like my career is moving and just the insights within the organization.

st [: 00:02:00

He's come from big, huge conglomerates, just massive as chief operating officer. And for him to tell me that I'm the first. HR person who is truly put people first, I was blown away. And so I think that really is what I would say is what people need to know about me is that everything that I have done and everything that I do involves people. And I've worked for the world's largest organization at Walmart, and I've worked with some very small ones in between, but without being people centered or people focused, I'm not sure how businesses operate. Yes, you can cut to save money.

ut. Heads to save an expense [: 00:03:00

You still have to verify that the content and the subject matter is correct. And so I will let everybody know is I'm a people centered person. My faith, my family is what grounds me, what centers me. But I'm in this profession because I have a genuine care and concern for people and trying to get the best out of them and try to maximize the talent that they have.

Dr. Jim: I really like how you shared that experience. I'm not necessarily shocked that your leader mentioned that. Because if we look at the broader world of work, HR has only just recently gotten a seat at the table in a lot of organizations as far as being at the executive table.

recognize this, but part of [: 00:04:00

So I'm not entirely surprised that the leader that you report into mentioned that. I think one of the things that I'm curious about given your answer is when you've worked at large publicly traded organizations and medium sized publicly traded organizations, how are you intentional about being people focused versus task or compliance focused?

foremost, we're gonna comply [: 00:05:00

So state, local, federal law, we're going to comply with that, but I need people to understand that someone has to do that work and that work involves people. And instead of putting the customer 1st, or putting whatever else initiative that you got going on 1st, if you put your people 1st, the rest will take care of itself.

And I think that's the fatal flaw that most organizations have is that they start trying to make sure the customer is number 1. Yes, the customer is strategically important to us, but that customer is not doing your work. That customer is buying a product. That customer is buying a service, but that customer is not.

whether they stay with your [: 00:06:00

You have given a well rounded individual something that they can utilize for the rest of their life, and they will be loyal to you, but you have to earn that loyalty. And I think we try so hard to earn the customer's loyalty that we forget about earning our employees loyalty because you write me a check does not make me loyal.

It's what you do for me when the chips are down. And when I make a mistake. Do you cast me aside? Do you push me aside and say someone else is better than you are? Or do you provide me with the right type of training, background tooling, things that can help lift me up out of that situation so that I can focus on becoming a better employee.

Dr. Jim: I like the point that you brought up Demar about it's not an either or it's an and, but what stood out to me the most about that answer the part where you said what is your people strategy look like?

ople in and if they mess up, [: 00:07:00

It actually provides a great segue into what we're going to be talking about through the rest of the conversation. So I appreciate you bringing that out. When you look at your current role. And all the things that you've accomplished in in roughly the year and a half, two years that you're there. What's the proudest accomplishment that you have to date?

D'Mar Phillips: hiring great people and probably, people will be in a lot of my answers because it's so true, I've hired a director of executive compensation, total rewards Leslie Bingham, Leslie is a fantastic leader. She brings new ideas and creativity potentially she could be a successor and a long term for me.

us, that we're replaceable. [: 00:08:00

And that's the fatal flaw that's in business. And I talked about these fatal flaws. It's things that take away from your ability to be successful within an organization, not because you intentionally you're doing it. These are unconscious biases that we don't even recognize that we have. Hiring somebody that's smarter than you should not be a threat to your job or to your role.

It should truly be a way for you to be able to get better, to be able to empower them to get better so that you can promote and grow within the organization.

Dr. Jim: If we're talking about building high performance teams. You're just going to race down to the mediocre if all you're doing is approaching your hiring strategy as a job protection racket versus a promotion and development.

ess of building a great team [: 00:09:00

What's the moonshot that you're planning for in your current role?

D'Mar Phillips: Yeah, it's around talent and it's around what, how we procure talent within the organization. We have too much of a reliance on outside agencies right now. And so we have several of them. My goal is to reduce agency dependency by 75%. That percentage means nothing to you guys. So I have 20 agencies right now.

I want to get that down to five. Right here, who are my top 5 and they can be across, whether it's direct placements, or if it's just temporary support that we need from time to time, I want to go from 20 to 5, right? Getting that reduction down with who we rely on 1, it's going to help challenge my talent acquisition team to be faster, be smarter with how they review resumes, how they bring in folks, and then partnership with our hiring managers on training them to get through the process faster, quicker.

Will allow us to be [: 00:10:00

However, what I want my talent acquisition team to fully understand and embrace is that an open position is a detriment to the organization because we have someone that could be doing a job that someone is having to cover. And so I'm not getting the best out of them, nor am I getting the best out of the organization if we have open positions.

And so reducing that time from eight to 12 weeks of four to six, four to eight weeks would be a huge opportunity for us in a way to improve the organization overall

ink that's a pretty important[: 00:11:00

Are you emphasizing more development internally before you tackle the vendor population?

D'Mar Phillips: That's an all of the above approach. So 1st, I have to reeducate my talent acquisition team on what I look for when we're sourcing and providing candidates to our internal hiring teams. Whether it's reduce the amount of resumes that you're reviewing from 6 to 3 and submit those over Yeah.

Making sure that the training that you put the hiring managers through. How they look at resumes, how they ensure that the talent population is hitting the job description correctly. Those types of things are all critically important for us. And so it is a combination of.

orts to me. So we're able to [: 00:12:00

We're going to retool. We're going to reskill. We're going to upscale those types of things for our internal team, as well as the external. And then for those five vendors that make it, they need to understand that they're getting a larger portion of our. Work because the positions are not being divided by 20 agencies.

It's going to be the five agencies. So we'll be able to help them improve their bottom line. They will understand our initiatives, such as diversity, recruiting efforts that are needed. We're looking for female engineers within this space. We're very diverse company as it stands, but more diversity and management roles and those types of things are also important to us as well.

ch assignments is completely [: 00:13:00

How has that helped you get on the path of building high performance teams.

D'Mar Phillips: One is a book called finding your strength's finder where At Walmart, even in my Walmart years I read that book and it listed some of the traits that are very, that I was really good at, and it pulls out some of those natural tendencies. I didn't really fully understand that until my mentor, cloud, Barbara, no fonts, no, who's CEO of feeding America set me down for developmental conversation about running away from a stress or from a person instead of running towards.

to help them supplement the [: 00:14:00

And if you focus on that strength, And if your leadership understands truly what that strength is, then that can put you in position to be extremely successful and extremely valuable to the organization. I'll give another example. Andrew Newey, who's the, was the CEO of Pepsi chairman of Pepsi. She said that her back pocket skill was simplifying the complex and all throughout her career, before she became chairman of Pepsi, [00:15:00] her one major skill set.

Was simplifying complex ideas. So how does she go about doing that? She would deep dive into the subject matter, become an expert in whatever that subject matter was, and she would be able to put it in simple terms so that her team, her CEO even at the time, would be able to fully understand it. And so by focusing on your employees strengths, you're able to identify what above all else that they're extremely good at.

And then empower them to be successful by going to use that strength every time. Sometimes they don't even realize what their strength is. And so having someone to validate what they do extremely well, even outside of what you as their manager sees is extremely powerful moment.

llege. I've watched a lot of [: 00:16:00

D'Mar Phillips: I love sports analogies too. And so thank you and appreciate you for allowing me to sneak one in, in the eighties, the OU Sooners were known as the Wishbowl team. So the Oklahoma Sooners Barry Switzer was the coach and they had amazing athletes.

onal championship. I think in: 1986

Where you have someone like a [00:17:00] Joe Montana who was 4 0 in Super Bowls and before Tom Brady became the greatest quarterback ever, he was probably the greatest quarterback ever, where the little shuffle pass, the little five yard out to the running back coming out of the backfield, they would dink and dunk down the field and then they hit Jerry Rice for a long one and it was over.

That West Coast offense became a staple to the San Francisco 49ers. Look at the Dallas Cowboys. The Dallas Cowboys is always a running team. They have tried to be a passing team. We had Kellen Moore as the offensive coordinator. Dak Prescott threw some unbelievable numbers, even aside from the interceptions.

Some amazing touchdowns and a lot of yardage. But there was no Emmitt Smith in the backfield. There was no Michael Irvin on the side. So teams just like companies. Identify what their strength is. Our strength at Hylion is that we have the best engineers in the field, building something that has never existed, and bringing it to fruition.

[: 00:18:00

They are a strong, high performance player. Technically superior to most, then we'll give them a team because they perform in a technically proficient way. And then we wonder why they're not hitting their targets. They're not coaching their employees. They have high turnover on the team. The joy has been taken out of them from coming to work.

g other than people, and you [: 00:19:00

Dr. Jim: There's a lot in what you said that I think is worth digging into. When we're talking about the highly technical talent that, that we have and making the mistake of putting them into people leadership, that making complex things simple, you referenced that earlier. I think one of the simplest things that leaders need to do is take the time to.

then work on creating those [: 00:20:00

I think that the big lesson that I took away from that conversation or that piece of the conversation was that all of those organizations identified the one or two things that they did exceptionally well. They were probably not flashy things. But they focus on executing it at an extremely high level, and that's how they got those elite results is by focusing on the simple things with a high degree of execution, and that actually is what leads to success. Demar I like what you've brought out in terms of playing to the team's strengths as what you should be looking at when you're building those those stretch assignments and focusing on the simple things.

t to switch to that strengths[: 00:21:00

D'Mar Phillips: Sometimes managers will assume that you're not. Invested in the organization because you're not performing at your highest, right? I see too often where you'll have someone that used to be a high performer, then now something has changed. Okay I need to just get rid of them instead of us accepting responsibility as being partly responsible for putting that individual in a situation that they were not prepared for.

We don't take that inventory of ourselves and say, you know what, as a. As a business, yes, let's step back. Let's re examine why this individual is not hitting on all cylinders like they used to. And then what can we do to help ensure that the individual is taken care of? And so having those conversations are critical.

a coaching to remain at the [: 00:22:00

Is it a lack of? Confidence in what they're doing. Did they receive the technical and people training that they needed to be successful? Were we clear about the expectations of the role? And I think if we are to step back and do some of that analysis of ourselves, more people will be off to stay at the organization or organizations instead of seeking employment outside because the quiet quitting is real.

People are leaving companies because they can find a better fit for their skillset. And at largely, some of this could be based off of you put me in the wrong position, the bad position. And now I feel like my mental health is bad, for example, because I'm not performing where I used to perform.

y want to do. Be part of the [: 00:23:00

Dr. Jim: I especially liked the last bit that you mentioned and the way that I look at a parallel and what I've done is that, when I'm actually building sales teams and building those out, oftentimes we've been conditioned to believe that you start from an individual contributor and then you move to mid market and enterprise, and then you become a manager and all that sort of stuff, because that's like what everybody does. And. I've been pretty deliberate in asking people on the team. Here's the question that you need to answer for yourself before you make the decision to make the shift into management. Are you comfortable being completely not in control in terms of your success or failure? Because if you can't say, yeah, I'm okay with that, you should really think long and hard about becoming a people leader because you're basically putting your career in the hands of other people.

ull and drag people along to [: 00:24:00

D'Mar Phillips: Absolutely. And if you're not a very patient person, I don't recommend managing others, right? Because the one thing that you can't control is someone else's performance. And I've had to learn over the years is to meet people where they're at and not trying to force them to the high expectation I put on myself.

I have to understand their expectations for themselves. I'll leave you with this Dion Sanders, he's taken over college football, really taken over sports right now, probably the hottest story going, but if you listen to any of his. Statements that he makes, he's truly trying to create men out of the boys that went to school to become men,.

parents expectations of you, [: 00:25:00

Because guess what? When you go to bed at night, that is what you wrestle with. Unbelievable, right? And, sports is a great analogy around life. There'll be times when you're beat 42 to 10, Dallas. How are you gonna pick yourself up? How do you get on the plane to take that long trip back home with that defeat and realize, hey, it's just a game, but I can learn something from defeat.

all a single team outside the: 1972

They play not to lose. And that is a losing strategy.

ially at the end play to win [: 00:26:00

That people leaders need to focus on and pay attention to, to execute that strengths based people development strategy that we've been talking about.

D'Mar Phillips: First it starts with loving people. You have to be passionate about. People in order to position them in the best way possible to be able to help grow and lead the organization to because you're people focused. And it's a people 1st type of a thought process. It doesn't mean that you're fiscally irresponsible or that you're just spending the organization's money.

rganization by not having to [: 00:27:00

And then lastly, for me, it's all about identifying the person to be able to meet their passion. And once a person meets their passion, then their purpose can be defined. And I think that's how I operate every single day that we bring someone. The organization is great. I appreciate you bringing someone in for this role.

My goal is to make sure that they receive the type of career and experience that they deserve and that they want. And. To help empower them to be successful wherever they see the road taking them.

Dr. Jim: If people want to continue the conversation, where can they find you?

D'Mar Phillips: I'm on LinkedIn a lot. Just Demar Phillips. I'm more than willing to have a conversation and connect with anyone and everyone who wants to engage.

the things that stood out in [: 00:28:00

And I think for those who are listening, if you're sleeping on that as part of a central piece of your strategy, you're never going to build that elite organization because you're going to have one note that exists within your team. The other thing that stood out about the conversation that we had was obviously that we spent a lot of time talking about build with your eye towards the individual strengths and in particular, people should be looking at those strengths.

details and doing the small [: 00:29:00

So those are the big themes that I pulled out of this conversation. And I appreciate you sharing that with us while we were chatting for those of you who have listened to this episode and have liked the discussion, leave us a review. Tune in next time where we'll have another great leader chatting with us on the game changing realizations that they had that helped them build high performing teams.