Callie and Deanna talk to Johnny about leadership change, how it impacts organizations, the importance of getting managers on-board and HR's role. Together they "pull back the curtain" on the org change happening at SHRM and the need for initiatives like the culture club.
Callie and Deanna talk to Johnny about leadership change, how it impacts organizations, the importance of getting managers on-board and HR's role. Together they "pull back the curtain" on the org change happening at SHRM and the need for initiatives like the culture club.
Callie:
Hello, everyone. I'm Callie.
Deanna:
And I'm Deanna, and this is Honest HR, a podcast from SHRM, where we get real with HR professionals.
Callie:
We want to create a safe space for people to passionately share their HR stories and insights. Because this is a safe space and because we are passionate, we understand our approach, our topics, and our stories aren't for everyone. So come if you're interested. Stay if you like what we're throwing down. We like and appreciate you either way.
Deanna:
All right. So let's jump into this week's topic, and it's a special one. We have a special guest.
Callie:
Yeah.
Deanna:
So take it away, Callie.
Callie:
Yeah, we do. Our guest today is actually none other than Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., SHRM's president and CEO. When Johnny became president and CEO of SHRM, he announced a call for together forward. It's his philosophy that SHRM and its partners create even closer ties in order to elevate the HR profession. He's a business leader, past chairman of the SHRM board, and has experience to know that people are the competitive edge today. He's a practicing attorney and former president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, an organization that helps to develop young minds for the future world of work.
Earlier this year, President Trump named him chairman of the President's Advisory Board on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. We're excited to have with us, as I just mentioned, Johnny C. Taylor Jr. We're talking organizational change today, and the reason that this topic came up for us for the podcast is because we had an individual out on LinkedIn reach out and suggest this topic because it's very near and dear to her heart and her organization right now.
She's going through some changes in the HR department, and she's struggling with getting buy-in from her HR team. I think that really resonates with pretty much anybody who practices HR or any real professional role. So when we were thinking about the topic, that you would be a great individual to come on and discuss organizational change.
So the first question we've come up with is, we've heard you talk about the challenges of organizational change and overcoming employee's natural resistance. So what's the best way for HR to roll out the message in a way that creates excitement rather than apprehension? And I know that's loaded.
Johnny C. Taylor Jr.:
No, no, it's a great question. Frankly, it gets to the essence of how one really implements an effective cultural transformation, organizational transformation initiative. And here's the bad news. There's no easy way to do it. It requires a high touch, time intensive, and time consuming perspective approach, because human beings require that. Just by and large, human beings require that. And frankly, the high performing individuals require it even more, partially because they're naturally inquisitive and they naturally challenge. People who are smart question things. They're curious. That's why they're so smart. So they naturally want to understand why. "Why are we going in a different direction? And by the way, where are we going?"
So you have to spend time answering those questions. What is important and what motivates Person A may not work for Person B, which gets to my point of this requiring a lot of sort of handholding and an individualized approach. The naivete of some leaders is that we can put together a communication strategy that will include a few emails and special communique, and we may update it a little bit with technology, with some well-positioned emails and tweets and whatever to sort of keep people feeling good. But at the end of the day, people require a lot more information and personalized information for them to make a decision.
The decision is ultimately, "Do I buy into this? Am I going to continue to give this organization my all? And frankly Am I going to be at this organization at all?" With the labor market being as tight as it is, we're now at 3.8, 3.9%. Many suggest that by year end it's going to be at 3.5%, the unemployment rate. People have choices, and therefore organizational change and transformation, cultural change, right now is even more difficult and more important, on the other hand, than ever.
So my point is, this is going to take a lot of... Anyone who thinks they can approach this and have sort of a one-size-fits-all approach and that it's not going to require managers individually talking with their employees, CEOs, executive directors, heads of agencies, whatever the work context is, having an open door, and it's going to be more open that it's been, if you are not committed to that, then the chances of this being successful are slim to none.
Callie:
So actually, Johnny, I wanted to follow up on one of the points that you made regarding those high potentials and really trying to get them on board from the start. I know sometimes when organizations are going through big changes, questioning the direction of where it's going can be viewed as resistant. So could you go through how you would navigate as an employer, as an individual contributor, as you're questioning the direction that you're not seen as resistant? You're just questioning, "Where are we going? Where are we heading?"
Johnny C. Taylor Jr.:
Well, the answer there is transparency. If I'm an employee who's wondering if I'm really signed up for this, the one thing you don't want to do is go to your boss and say, "I just totally don't understand this, and therefore I'm not going to do it." Or, "I'm very, very, very hesitant to do it." Sometimes we can be so transparent that it turns your boss against you. I mean, I'm being really transparent, overusing the word, but the idea is, if you go in and say, "I don't know where you all are going. What I do know I don't like, and I'm not really signing up for it," well, the manager may actually help show you to the door.
Because frankly, at some point that manager's going to say, "I'd rather spend my energy going on the outside and finding someone to do the job who will at least give me a shot." If you've already decided you are in total disagreement, you like stasis, you like where you are and you are not ever going to be receptive to change, then the manager may decide then it's not a good use of their time to invest in trying to explain it to you or trying to motivate you in a way, because ultimately you won't be motivated. So that's number one.
What I would do, though, is if I'm the employee, I think the question is from the perspective of I'm an employee who's trying to get with the program but really has questions about the program. My advice then, you've got to go to someone you trust. That might be your manager, and we hope it's your manager, but it may not be. It's uncomfortable sometimes to be totally transparent with your manager, so you may go to someone else who is in management, who's in the know, who you trust, and have the conversation with them. During that conversation, express. Start with, "I'm asking not because I'm saying I'm not committed to it. I'm asking because I want to better understand where we're going and what the logic is." Then go through and ask those questions and try to get answers and reconcile them, realizing that none of us are going to be 100% aligned with any group that we're in.
Listen, I love my family, and we go to family events, and there's never 100% alignment on where we're going to go to dinner that night. Life doesn't work that way. As you know, it just doesn't work that way. But if you are open when you go to talk with your manager or someone in management you trust, if you are open and you share with them you're just trying to understand, and that person believes you, then you're going to be... Ninety percent of the battle is there.
Then the second part of it is, do not go into the conversation, I said, open. Open, being receptive to change. But then the second part of the question is, you cannot believe that you're ever going to be in 100% alignment with any organization, as I've said earlier before, so if the idea is I'm only going to do this if everything I hear works for me, then you also are probably wasting your time and their time.
Callie:
One of our previous episodes was actually about the effectiveness of managers and how important it is to have good managers on board. I turn this question to you a little bit, because it sounds like you think approaching your manager or somebody in management is important when you're trying to get as much information about the change as possible. But what happens when you don't have an effective manager or you don't have anybody in management that you trust? What do we, as organizations, have to do for those managers? Is it a hundred percent transparency at the manager level? Is it manager training? How important is it to get managers on board before you start going through an organizational change?
Johnny C. Taylor Jr.:
Well, it's the only way you can do it. Managers have to be on board, and so just as someone you all have personally experienced this at SHRM, what I did in the early days is met with all of the managers one-on-one. We had departmental meetings, had one-on-one meetings. When I say managers, executive team members, vice presidents, directors, managers, literally people who are managing employees on a day-to-day basis, and kind of got them in the room and said, "Let me be honest. I'm two, three days onto the job. I don't know where we're going, but what I can tell you is I'm going to look at everything we're doing with an eye toward should we be doing it and to what end? There will be things that actually don't do any harm, but we're just not going to do them anymore, because they also don't have, they're not sufficiently doing good for us to continue doing them."
It's about sitting down with your manager, your management team collectively. When I say collectively, I'm saying management team collectively, but individually, and trying to get some idea of whether or not they are willing to change. You can't assume that everyone in management is going to, quote, be an adult about this. Because people approach things from the perspective of how does this impact me? Your managers are human beings too. And so stage one of this work, to your point, is to figure out who are the good managers, who are not the good managers. And then when you have that group of people who are not good managers, there's a further level of inquiry, who can be a good manager with the right interventions, training, et cetera, and who won't ever be a good manager. All of us have worked with people who are great accountants but who could never be managers of accountants. Oftentimes the person who's promoted into a management job is the person who did the technical job the best, and that's the problem.
So what we oftentimes do is we try to figure out, when you're literally inventorying your management team, is who is a good manager, who's not a great manager, who's a bad manager. Let's just be blunt. Who's good, who's bad. And then again, within that group of who's bad, who can be good and who just will never be good. At that point, you have to start making changes. I've had to do that in every company that I've been in, as you identify some subset of the population who are in management jobs who are not management material, period. Tough message, but you do it and you get it over with. For that second category of people, then you put in place things like SHRM U, our university training. You get them to outside training opportunities. You bring in executive coaches and the like.
Because it's hard to find someone with even management potential. So when you have someone who has a potential but isn't quite there, then you invest in them to get them up to speed so that they are the right people to go out and represent you to the rest of the company. So that's a big part of the deal. And I spent probably the first three months of my tenure, for sure the first month, intensively figuring out who's not a good manager. And then the next two months of that group that I knew weren't great, figuring which ones were fixable and which ones weren't, for lack of a better term. And that's a three-month process. Again, high touch, time-consuming, but it is the most important thing you can do for your organization.
Now, you haven't asked this, but I'm going to tell you what happens. So there are a few people who get through. They interview well. They meet with the CEO well. They fake it and you then realize in month four or five that they said all of the right things, but they actually in practice aren't good managers. Then you have to go through one more wave of eliminating those people from the organization. I know that may sound tough to people who are listening, and HR people, typically we like to use nicer words.
But the thing that can hurt you most as the leader of an organization is to have managers in place who aren't living your values, who aren't living the culture that you are articulating. Because ultimately employees are going to judge you by what you do, not what you say. So you can make all of the pronouncements in the world. You can put posters around the organization saying these are our guiding principles, we live them, but if their manager isn't living those guiding principles, then that employee, there's no way you're going to get employees to buy into it, because the hypocrisy will be deafening.
Callie:
Yeah, and as a follow up to everything you just said, and since you pulled the curtain back a little bit on SHRM, I'm going to pull it back a little bit more, something that I'm excited about as an employee is the work that we're doing on what we call the Culture Club. So you've mentioned having high touch feedback from everybody at every level, and we're doing that through the Culture Club. So would you mind sharing with our listeners a little bit of what we're doing as far as practicing true org change and HR and getting this feedback and meaningful feedback from our employees? I think that would be a great share for our listeners.
Johnny C. Taylor Jr.:
Yeah. Thank you. That's phase two of it. So phase one was, as I said, really looking closely at our management capacity, the collective management capacity. And then it was now we've got to talk to the employees in this process. So obviously with 4- or 500 employees, you can't talk to every one of them, and many of them work remotely, and some work in different parts of the world, as far as India, China, and Dubai and California and et cetera. So you can't get to every employee. One of the easier things may have been to take a employee satisfaction survey or employee engagement survey, but those have limits as well. There's nothing better to me than having face-to-face conversations with people, non-management.
So came up with this idea to get eight employees together, randomly chosen, diverse, and I'm not just talking civil rights diversity, like male, female, black, white, Asian, etc. We got that indeed, but diverse in terms of different departments, different tenures with SHRM, just to get an idea of different... I want to really, really get a, for lack of a better term, a statistically significant survey of our employees. So we pulled together eight employees, and they're going to serve for a year on what is called the Culture Club.
And the Culture Club meets with me, the CEO, once a month and literally tells me what's going on. What are the employees saying? What questions do they have? It's not intended to be a gripe session, but it is intended to bring to my attention issues that frankly I wouldn't have thought about, because on a day-to-day basis, I don't know that X, Y, and Z is happening. It's not supposed to be, "Let me go in and specifically tell you about the problem with this manager," because that's not the context.
The Culture Club members are representatives of the larger employee population. So it's not for them to come bring their own individual issues to the table. But they come together. We have what is like a two-hour lunch, and we literally, just me, I don't have my staff in there. I think every once in a while a senior staff will come and collect notes for me. That is my chief of staff or my special assistant. But other than that, the rest of the senior management team is not there, and it is to tell me exactly what's going on. It is amazing, some of the questions that you will get, some of the comments and observations. They help us put a finer point on things that we think went well but that didn't.
So talking about transparency. One of the things that we rolled out just recently was we had in the past given free parking to all employees who were parking in our headquarters building, and as a result of a number of changes in the City of Alexandria, et cetera, we realized that we were being unfair in how we were treating employees. So unequal is the better word. So some employees were paying one amount to park. Some employees were paying zero, and employees who took public transportation were being given a really high number of credits to use on public transportation. So one could be 170 bucks a month. Someone could be getting 125, and someone else could be getting the equivalent of $200 a month and subsidy for some combination of parking or taking public transportation or parking in another building.
Lots of information there, but that's the point. So it came to our attention. So we thought, as the senior management team, that we should sit down and find a new way to do this, which involved change. And what it did was for a subset of our population, people who had been there for a long time, they were allowed to park in the building for free. New employees were not allowed to park in the building for free because we didn't have anymore parking spaces, so we had to subsidize them to park elsewhere in the community, in other parking garages. But all we were doing was subsidizing it. Our check didn't truly cover the cost of their parking. That began to create some real issues, and we had to sort through how to solve for that problem with the culture.
Our answer was, we agreed that employees who made a certain amount or less, we would give them free parking, and that if you made more than that number, that we would subsidize you but require that you contribute. So let's say an employee who would be getting free parking now has to pay $30 a month for parking. I thought, "My gosh, this will go over really well, because we're taking care of the employees amongst us who don't make big salaries, and then those of us who are paid better can subsidize, pay a little bit more, to cover to make sure that those people can continue to park for free."
Oh my gosh, what I thought would've not been an event became a big event. Now, I could have gotten defensive as a leader and said, "Go pound salt. Go work somewhere else. Other people in the market next door to us are paying $95 a month to park." And then we stepped back and I had to listen. That's the key. I had to listen. Listen not to respond, but to listen to try to understand what was going on and what were the employees saying. We heard them, and then it informed a better communication strategy for us.
I use that as a long example, because Culture Club is really a critical part of us hearing from our employees. You can't just listen to managers because managers have their own biases, and so it is filtered through them. As a senior leader of this organization, as a CEO, I needed a way, and it wasn't a suggestion box where people come in, because that's kind of cowardly, frankly. I wanted real people to give tone and texture to real concerns. Or in many instances, we're getting a lot of compliments too. So it's not always negative. They come in and say, "You know what? That worked." And that's where we're going. That's the Culture Club.
I will say this. We use the Culture Club also not just to get information but to send information back. So it's a bilateral communication tool to go back to the employees. There are times when we say to an employee, "I hear you. I know you don't like this, but guess what? This is a part of the new culture." There are employees who then have to make a decision about whether or not they want to work in this organization going forward. We don't want that to happen a lot. Obviously, I like all of our employees and I want our employees to remain on team SHRM. But frankly, there's a time when there's a mismatch. What the Culture Club allows us to do do is to go back to employees and say, "They heard you. There's no risk of retaliation, because we didn't put your name to it, but here's the feedback, and now you've got to decide does this work for you?"
Callie:
Johnny, I will say, as a member of the HR team, I think the Culture Club is fantastic. I've heard some really great feedback about it. Even when we have our org-wide meetings, those are some tough questions that they ask you, and I know a lot of staff-
Johnny C. Taylor Jr.:
Ooh, that's an understatement.
Callie:
I know the staff was I will say even a little shook by the questions that were asked, but they were important questions that were asked. But I will say there are employees that are a little nervous to even come to HR to express themselves, so I think the Culture Club is a really great addition to where SHRM is heading. But I did want to kind of shift to another question.
Johnny C. Taylor Jr.:
Sure.
Callie:
What should HR's role be in introducing and carrying out organizational change?
Johnny C. Taylor Jr.:
HR has to lead that, and that's controversial, because there are folks who say every manager is supposed to be responsible for doing it. HR has to, one, help develop the strategy, because they should have their fingers on the pulse of the organization, not by department but organization wide. So they should help me, and I'm relying very heavily on my HR team to help develop and clarify and articulate what our culture is.
The second thing that HR has to do once we've designed it, and it's a moving target a little bit, what is culture. But when I say that, develop the scheme, the concept, the framework is maybe a better word. Scheme has such a negative connotation, but the framework of what it means to work at SHRM, which is going to be different than what it means to work at PTO, at Apple, at Google, at Pepco. That's the number one thing for HR to do, is to help us clearly identify the unique culture that is SHRM, and that's hard. That's really, really hard.
I had a question yesterday on Capitol Hill about does HR represent the employer or the employee. And the answer is simple, both. And that's tough. It's hard for anyone to understand, because in this world you are either with me or against me. You are either my lawyer or you're the other side's lawyer, and it's hard to understand the concept that someone actually has to have the interest of both in mind when making decisions. Well, that's what culture is. Culture has to be a win for the business, because that's how we make payroll every week, is we have a good solid business that generates revenue, but they also have to be the conscious of the organization and they have to represent the people who actually help us deliver those revenues, and it's a tough job. That's the essence of culture is that balance, trying to find that balance between the employer's sort of responsibilities and focuses, focus areas, and the employee's focus areas. That's what HR can do.
Now, once we decide what the framework is of SHRM from a cultural perspective and a change perspective, HR has to ensure that it happens. HR should know who the good managers are and who the not so good managers are. HR should help us skill up those not so good managers or take them out of the organization. That is an HR responsibility. Then sort of third level tertiary kind of review, HR has to find out who of our employees are on the train or on the bus or not.
In that same vein, to the extent they can help intervene and educate, talk with employees, to get them to get on board, good, but HR also has to go back to the managers, come back to senior management, and say, "Here's someone who just is never... They're miscast. They shouldn't be here. This will never make them happy, and so we need to move on that person as well." It might be, by the way, a great performer. This is really key. You may have a great performer who's just not right for this culture. HR has to help us identify those people and then help us get those people out of the organization with dignity and respect.
Callie:
Very good. So Johnny, we've taken a lot of your time and we've heard a lot of great stuff from you. It's helped me sort of understand where we're going as an organization, and it definitely excites rather than makes me hesitant coming back to our first question, but wanted to just take one more moment of your time and ask you for what we call your mic drop on the topic. So give us one more really good tidbit for our listeners around organizational change. Anything you want it to be.
Johnny C. Taylor Jr.:
Yeah. It's a two-part answer and I'm going to make it brief. Organizational change is hard. It's really, really hard. It's hard on the organization's leadership and it's hard for employees. Why? Because as much as we all say we like change, we don't. I walked into my house the other day and the housekeeper had been here and moved one of my chairs, and I about had a fit. Now, in hindsight, it actually looked better in the place that she put it. But the idea that she moved. You notice that book about moving my cheese, like, "Who Moved My Cheese," I was like, "Why in the hell did she do that? My chair was perfectly fine." And so I use that as an example to say I totally, we all have to embrace that over this next six months, because we're seven months into this. I figured it would take a year, at least, to kind of get us into this.
But the key here is that it's hard and it's hard for all parties involved, no matter how senior or how junior you are, how tenured or not tenured you are in this organization. It is hard. But here's the deal, and this is the mic drop moment. You, only you can decide if you want to work here and if this is right for you. I would say that to every employee. I'd look him in the eye and say, "No relationship is perfect, marriages, families. Nothing is perfect but you've got to decide." Once I understand what this thing is, am I going to want to spend eight, 10 hours, 12 hours a day in this shop? And if the answer is no, you owe it to yourself from a long-term happiness and fulfillment standpoint, and you owe it to the organization as we try to drive this thing forward, together forward, to be honest.
I made this offering to my last two companies that I've run. I've said, "If you get to that day where this just doesn't work for you, for good or for bad, you aren't convinced of the business strategy, you don't exactly like open door, you don't like whatever their thing." There are a myriad of reasons why you might not like it. But if it is so gnawing at you that this is not good, then you have to tell us that. And then what we're going to do is find a way to separate with dignity and respect and in a way that doesn't hurt you. In other words, you can't come in and say, "Johnny, this isn't my thing," and then I say, "Good, today's your last day."
No one should do that, and our culture shouldn't do that. But we should say, "Well, good. Let me help you. Let me help you. I know some head hunters in town. I know some CEOs in town who are looking for talent, heads of HR. Let me help you transition out of here." That's what I'm looking for, is people who are honest enough and adult enough, frankly, and that's what it's going to require, is you got to find your... not your inner child but your inner adult, to say, "I'm just not sure this is right for me going forward." Those are the people who I respect a lot because this isn't going to be right for everyone. I'm hoping it's right for the overwhelming majority of people, but it might not be. But it's going to be hard but to thine own self be true.
Callie:
Yeah. Thank you, Johnny. You said it several times, but thank you for coming on and being honest on our Honest HR podcast. This is definitely an initiative that we see being important for HR in general but specifically for SHRM, and we're happy that you're willing to be a part of it. Thank you very much for your time today.
Johnny C. Taylor Jr.:
Well, I'm so glad to do it and invite me back anytime, because this is, again, this is a way that I can communicate and talk with people and give them a real idea of who we are. We're not perfect but we're aiming toward perfection is a better way to put it, and we're trying hard. So thanks for all that you all do and have an absolutely great day.
Callie:
Thank you Johnny, for sharing your mic drop. We love sharing those moments with our listeners. I think what we want to do, from Deanna and I, is just share our biggest takeaways from everything that you said today.
I think for me, it comes back to the importance of having open communications with the manager. Like I said earlier, we just did an entire episode about how important having a good relationship with your manager is. To Johnny's point, if you don't have a good manager, you need to find somebody within the organization who you have a good relationship with who has the insight that you need to make an informed decision about whether or not the organization that you're at is right for you. So I think that was a big takeaway for me. And I think our listeners will benefit, especially if they're in a situation where they want to know more because they need to make a decision about their long-term career goals and career commitments, finding that person within the management team, even if it's not their direct manager, I think is really important to the success of anybody. So that's my biggest takeaway.
Deanna, what was your biggest takeaway?
Deanna:
Before I even get into my takeaway, I just need to say Johnny's mic drop was so seriously honest. My mouth was agape the whole time, but so happy that Johnny was on here. It's interesting. My mic drop was from an article that I read in Forbes. I think it was just posted a couple months ago, and Johnny touched on it earlier when he was saying when you're rolling out these org changes, you can send out a ton of org-wide communications, all the messages in the world, emails, pamphlets, what have you, but it's really taking the time for those managers, like Callie said, to sit down individually and talk with your direct reports and see how they're doing, if they are questioning the direction of where you're going, making sure those managers are taking the time to talk to them. Everyone deals with change differently. So I think that to me really was my takeaway, is just really finding the time to talk to your individual employees.
Callie:
Great. To Deanna's point, we've gotten some feedback from our listeners, and thank you, keep it coming. We love to hear it good and bad, but we've heard from some people that we're not honest enough, right? So Honest HR needs to be honest, and we hope that our listeners find this episode to be as honest as it could be and can be. And we'll work hard to bring you some more Honest HR topics, and we hope that you come back for our next episode.
As I mentioned earlier on the podcast, the topic from today's episode came from a listener, and we just want to reiterate how important it is for you to reach out to us either with topic suggestions or guest suggestions. Or if you're interested in being a guest, let us know what you think a good topic would be for our listeners. We've got the SHRM LinkedIn page. It's SHRM Young Professionals. We also have shrm.org/honesthr. Both of those mechanisms would allow for you to provide feedback, provide topic and ideas, provide guest ideas. As we said before, we want honesty. We want to provide you with honesty, but we also need to hear from you and your honest feedback. So please keep that coming. Again, we hope you come back for future episodes.
Deanna:
See ya.