Chief Talent Officer’s “Talent Insights” series is dedicated to sharing the insights and expertise of influential talent executives. In this Q&A series, we garner strategic insights, innovative approaches and challenges overcome from C-suite talent and HR executives, chief talent officers, chief people officers and more who are shaping the future of talent management.
What initially drew you to a career in talent management, and how have your experiences in the field evolved over the years?
It was pure luck how I ended up in a career in talent management. Initially setting out to be a high school teacher and softball coach, a family friend encouraged me to take an internship in corporate learning and development. I landed the internship and have never looked back. The internship opened my eyes to the amazing work inside companies and how you are free to adapt and develop meaningful content to enhance employee growth. From there, I began to understand that learning is only one piece of the puzzle. Starting with the candidate experience in recruitment, through onboarding, performance and succession, you can help make a difference in an employee’s career trajectory. Over the years I have come to love the shift from the traditional career ladder into a career lattice, taking employees into different areas of an organization for more exposure to the company. Where possible, this is a great way to expand options for career growth and it can also result in employees having multiple options to explore as they grow in their career.
What core values and principles do you believe are essential for building a positive and inclusive company culture?
Respect, accountability and psychological safety are essential for building an inclusive company culture.
Can you share a significant challenge you’ve faced as a talent leader and how you successfully navigated through it?
One of the biggest challenges I have faced is resistance to change and accountability to see the change through. Change is hard, no matter what the situation is. However, it is important to continue to execute your strategic plan and not let the noise around the change derail the process. While rolling out a new performance management tool, I was asked to take the existing program and turn it into a best practice solution. I reviewed the existing program, as I had only been with the company for three months and determined there was not a streamlined process to the current program. It required a complete overhaul, moving the existing method of rating employee’s overall performance in a spreadsheet to having managers rate employees on each goal and competency within a performance management system that we would implement the following year. Needless to say, as we navigated through the plan that was approved, there was significant push back that resulted in having to pivot and regress back to old habits to “lessen the change impact” on the company. While I did not agree with the plan, and gave pushback, eventually we compromised and moved forward with the majority of the changes, while not implementing others. The changes resulted in all employees having fully executed mid-year and end-of-year reviews, which had not happened over the last five years.
What strategies have you found most effective in attracting and retaining top talent in competitive industries?
Being active on LinkedIn and social media helps to create your company presence online, as well as being active within the community. Those pieces are fundamental to attracting talent. To retain talent, listening to your employees and actioning the feedback received from engagement surveys is key. Additionally, being competitive in the market on benefits and work-life balance is essential.
How do you balance advocating for employees’ needs while aligning with your company’s business objectives?
Being clear and transparent on the business objectives helps to level set employee expectations. Leveraging employee feedback from engagement surveys helps to prioritize what to advocate for employees.
What leadership skills do you prioritize and cultivate as a senior talent leader to inspire your team and drive talent initiatives?
Psychological safety, active listening and strategic planning are priorities. If I actively listen to my people and promote an environment where they feel safe to speak up, take action and give pushback, then strategic planning becomes that much more effective. My role as the leader is to empower my people to be ready to jump into a next level role and allow them space to try new things, speak up and execute.
What game-changing advice would you offer if you could go back in time and mentor your younger self?
Don’t let pushback make you feel like you failed. The younger version of me felt that pushback was a failure to get it right the first time, when pushback can actually be used to level up your thinking.
What do you feel is currently the single biggest challenge facing talent professionals and the industry as a whole?
True understanding of the role that we play in an organization. So many times we are given a seat at the table, and when push comes to shove on executing plans, I often see that words and actions by the stakeholders do not always align. That can create a ripple effect if leaders see the stakeholders not fully engaging with something they said they supported.
We’re always looking to showcase innovative tools and technologies. Can you share one tech product or platform that has significantly improved your work processes and why you find it valuable?
BizLibrary has enabled our company to upskill our employees and establish baseline career paths through their online platform. Their system takes job capsules and the associated competencies and curates online content tracks for employees to take. Not having to manually curate content has allowed us to launch the platform in five months with fully executed content tracks for all employees.
Interested in being featured in our “Talent Insights” series? Please complete this FORM.
