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?
To answer this question, I must take us back to my collegiate period, where I was adamantly against being in talent or, in this case, learning / teaching career. This was because my entire family, including my parents and my aunt and uncle, were in education. My parents were public school teachers, and my aunt and uncle were university professors. For this reason alone, I was not interested in pursuing a career focused on education. However, God and life have a way of redirecting our energy and focus to align us with the purpose that only we can fulfill. It just so happened that I had no idea when I was in college that my purpose in life was to help organizations better understand how to capitalize on the fundamentals of human psychology to better engage, educate, motivate and empower the people who work for the company to accelerate accomplishing the organizational goals. It would only be through experience and time in the role that I would find my passion for advocating for the people who work within organizations to nurture a symbiotic relationship in which both the people at the company and the organization itself are enriched for having known and interacted with each other.
At the start of my career in talent management, I was in the field of learning and development, learning facilitation and leadership development. Throughout my career, this has evolved to oversee the culmination of all organizational strategies and directions that involve human psychology. I oversee all things L&D, change management, internal communication, leadership development, executive strategy facilitation, guest experience and all other traditional training responsibilities. This journey has positioned my team and myself as the business enablement team. We look to help enable the business by capitalizing on the talent in our organization.
In addition to my work with Hooters, my business partner and I have recently embarked on writing a book that centers on our Learning Design Model, The ABCDE Learning Design™, and our results-proven and empirically founded Skills Proficiency Framework called The ABCDE Proficiency Cycle™. While in the talent industry, we quickly recognized a need to design, test and validate a new model for instructional design and, more importantly, skills proficiency development. In today’s ever-evolving talent landscape with the need for talent agility, mobility and all-around well-skilled employees, we knew there was a need for a results-proven, easy-to-apply, and relatable framework that learning and talent professionals could begin to integrate into their learning programs.
What core values and principles do you believe are essential for building a positive and inclusive company culture?
When looking to build a positive and inclusive company culture, a number of values and principles must be present and widely adopted within an organization. First, we must look at the definition of positive and inclusive to better understand what is needed to build a culture with those qualities. Positive is defined as something or being good, constructive, optimistic or confident. Inclusive is defined as including or covering all things normally included, including all people. After looking at these definitions, we see that for organizations to include those characteristics in the description successfully, employees of the company culture and the leadership team must be intentional in their decisions. When making those decisions, values such as empathy, candor, humility, trust and compassion cannot be undervalued when building a positive and inclusive culture. Principles that I believe are of equal importance are “being the change you wish to see in others,” “cultivating recognition for others,” “thinking people first when making decisions, acting like people are first when implementing those decisions,” and “remembering when you strip everything away from your company that makes you similar to your competition, only a few things are left to differentiate you from them, and one of the most prevalent is the people who work for you, therefore what are you doing for them knowing they can determine the success of your organization.”
Can you share a significant challenge you’ve faced as a talent leader and how you successfully navigated through it?
In the restaurant industry, budgets are often really tight. In an inflationary economy, the reduction in the investment in learning and leadership programs and the reduction in staff to support L&D efforts is a real conversation. Due to things out of my control, my team was reduced twice, leaving us with only a small but mighty team. This is nothing new for learning leaders, but the challenge I faced was that the stakes were and are higher than ever to produce learning programs that elicit meaningful improvement in business objectives. However, I now have 60 percent less human capital and budgetary resources to support that effort. This can be defeating for any leader and team, and compounding the fact that our team is looked to as the optimistic team to help motivate the organization to accomplish its goals makes it even more challenging. However, as a leader, I had to focus on solutions to the problem and create innovative ways to improve efficiencies in our team so we could handle a greater volume of work. We adopted many AI platforms and tools during this time because we had no other option to get the work done. We also adopted a strong stance on agile project management in which we encourage and reinforce the need to prioritize requested programmatic support for those items that will have the greatest impact on the business objectives that need to be improved the most. This approach and incorporating AI into our daily L&D working day has improved my team’s outlook on work and how they can achieve work-life balance. It has also forced my team to innovate how programs are designed and delivered to allow them to accomplish more quality or quantity of work using their “AI interns.”
What strategies have you found most effective in attracting and retaining top talent in competitive industries?
Attracting and retaining top talent in a competitive industry is extremely difficult and is an ever-evolving art mixed with a little bit of science. For Hooters, we have several key factors that have helped us to attract and retain top talent: a unique culture, a platform for development, strong benefits offerings and leaders who deeply care about people. As you can imagine, Hooters’ culture is entirely unique to our brand, and no one else can come close to replicating what we have achieved. We are a brand that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and we recognize and celebrate that we are a little tongue-in-cheek. We focus on providing an environment that is fun, exciting, professional and full of growth opportunities. I believe we are the unsung heroes of talent development and women empowerment. We have provided a platform for more than 500,000 former and current Hooters Girls to build their skills, grow their confidence and make excellent money to accomplish whatever their goals are. We have also done the same for our Kitchen or Heart of House Team Members. The platform Hooters provided, while at first organic but is now intentional, has accelerated the career of all who have worked here, and our mantra is how can we help them build their skills for a life within the brand or beyond the brand, whichever path our team may choose. Now, this mantra may seem somewhat counterintuitive to retaining top talent, but I promise it is not; the reality is not everyone is going to stay with you, but when you adopt a mindset that says you care about the person learning skills while working for you no matter what their carer aspirations may be, that is when they stay longer and want to build a career with your organization because you care simply about them. This leads to our leaders working with our team members every day; they truly care about their people’s well-being and are there as resources to help them build their skills to accomplish whatever they set out to do.
Finally, our benefits package is comprehensive, as are most organizations. However, we offer tuition reimbursement to all our team members, so that if they would like to pursue a career outside of our restaurants, we can provide them with support in skill building and some financial support to ease the burden. Those are the items that make up our formal talent retainment strategy, and we attract new talent by intentionally telling that story to those outside of our four walls. None of those items alone would be enough to attract and retain top talent because it is all those little moments of truth that provide an experience talented professionals want to be a part of.
How do you balance advocating for employees’ needs while aligning with your company’s business objectives?
This is an interesting question many of us face as the talent leaders in our organizations. What I have found to be incredibly helpful is changing how I view the process to shift from balancing advocating for the needs of the employees to how the senior leadership and organization view the people of the organization as our number one strategic asset. This is probably not new information or a new perspective. Still, we spend so much time advocating for the needs of our employees that we forget to advocate for the value our employees bring to accomplishing the business objectives. When we shift our thinking to advocating for the value our employees bring to the organization, it is only natural that the organization would then shift the focus to meeting or exceeding the needs of the employee population because if they view them as the business’ No. 1 strategic asset, you must then invest in them. This is ideological and may not be entirely possible in all organizations. I, therefore, advise that talent leaders begin looking at investing in employee needs as an act of business investment and, therefore, produce ROI studies to determine how profitable those investments might be. This helps put things into perspective and speak the language of senior leaders to ensure that the proposed initiatives to meet or exceed the organization’s needs are funded and supported. This will also inevitably reduce the number of initiatives because if the ROI is not significant enough, it may not be the right initiative for the business at that time.
What leadership skills do you prioritize and cultivate as a senior talent leader to inspire your team and drive talent initiatives?
Many leadership skills are necessary to prioritize and cultivate amongst a team of talent professionals. The four that are the most critical for the success of each individual and the team are autonomy, empowerment, empathy and care. Now, there are many other skills that we work on within the talent management space to ensure we are a top-tier team, but I believe those four are the most critical.
Autonomy is defined as the right or condition of self-governance. In my vocabulary, it means giving my people the space to own their projects, programs, successes and mistakes. Too often, leaders are compelled to manage the day-in and day-out of their team’s activities and, ultimately, the work product their team produces. When a leader does this, they stifle creativity, innovation, the ability for their team to grow, and ultimately, frustration for their team. When you find the right people, give them the autonomy to make decisions and own their results. Be there to coach when needed, but then get out of their way because you will see the results accelerate beyond your wildest expectations.
Empowerment is defined as the power or authority given to someone to do something. It may seem very similar in definition to autonomy, but you can’t successfully empower someone to do something if you don’t give them autonomy. For me, empowerment simply means giving people the space to shine and removing roadblocks and barriers that may get in the way of accomplishing their goals.
Empathy is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. As talent leaders, we face many obstacles and challenges throughout our day, and our Team Members will seek our listening ears and advice. To successfully be a partner to those in our organization, we must be able to empathize with what they are going through. This creates relatability, care, and understanding of what our people are going through so that we can effectively help them navigate the emotional challenges they are experiencing at work.
Finally, care is defined as the feeling of concern or interest. To be a talent leader or professional, you must be concerned or interested in those you serve. People are the only thing that makes companies truly unique; therefore, we must do whatever it takes to ensure we care about and care for them.
What game-changing advice would you offer if you could go back in time and mentor your younger self?
As a young professional, I was quick to get frustrated when others were not, in my mind, taking what I had to say as credible and worth exploring. This frustration was, maybe, sometimes founded on facts, but 90 percent of the time, it was unfounded on any actual evidence and was simply from me not being able to take a moment to pause and see the entire picture of what we were discussing. Problems or ideas are not often one-dimensional; in fact, they are often multi-dimensional, and the lens through which we view the problem or idea to solve it is only one facet of the entire picture that surrounds it. If we pause, ask clarifying questions, and explore alternatives, we will see the multi-dimensional world around us and realize that not every idea or solution can be implemented because many alternative facts and realities may get in the way. If I had known this early on and had taken a moment to pause and observe what was happening around me, it would have accelerated my ability to build relationships and navigate challenging political climates with more grace.
What do you feel is currently the single biggest challenge facing talent professionals and the industry as a whole?
The biggest challenge facing talent professionals and the industry is the ability to move as quickly as possible in reshaping our talent strategy and programs to meet the needs of the fast-evolving workforce. Traditionally, in the talent industry, we are more metered in our approach and want all of the evidence to support our claims before making final decisions. We then want to test and pilot our decisions to ensure we make the right changes. However, in a world where the talent landscape and the actual people are changing daily, we must rise to the occasion and change just as quickly. We have to begin to approach the talent profession in a very agile way if we have a chance at continuing to attract and retain top talent. This means being able to quickly identify where current gaps exist due to changes in the workforce, quickly define what needs to change in our talent strategy, and then either pilot quickly to get some early indication the change will work or choose not to pilot at all and simply roll it out and measure and change as necessary. This also involves being agile to meet the business’s demands and truly creating a space in the organization where learning and talent are seen as business enablers who are trusted advisors to accomplish the organization’s goals. If people are what make us unique, then it is our people who determine whether we are successful or unsuccessful. Therefore, talent professionals must adopt an agile mindset and be willing to stretch the boundaries of what they may be comfortable with because the world around them is changing. Still, they have to choose to embrace it. My favorite quote is this: “Change is inevitable, but growth is optional” by John C. Maxwell. This quote tells the story for talent professionals: change will happen, but growth will be a choice you make every day.
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?
It is hard for me to choose just one platform or technology tool to share; therefore, I have chosen two. First, we all have an LMS, or most do, within the L&D profession. However, I challenge whether those LMS systems are viewed as business enablement tools because of their deep connection to the goals and strategy of the organization to drive beliefs and behaviors that produce greater results. We have successfully positioned our eCompass system, our LMS powered by Schoox, to be the business enablement tool it was designed to be. It is not only the place where they take compliance training; it also allows us to engage socially with others in the organization and role you occupy; it is our internal communication platform, it is our performance management tool, it is one of our L&D analytics tools, and it is our learner and leader enabler tool to help them acquire the knowledge and skills to be successful in their next role.
Additionally, we use Flipbook or Wonderia, which is FlipHTML5 code that has revolutionized how we present our training program guides in a digital magazine in a highly engaging, visually dynamic way. We have successfully transitioned all of our locations to be entirely digital when training, which helps save money and has significantly increased retention of complex topics because of the dynamic nature of the program materials and the connectedness between existing learning assets.
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