How are leaders, in business and in HR, meant to navigate the swirl that we find ourselves in today?
The onrush of AI, the challenge of balancing the people stuff and the business stuff, and, indeed, the fundamental identity and purpose of a company—all these are all at once in play. Meanwhile, the traditional toolkit of HR—reviews and ratings and top-down initiatives—seems increasingly inadequate for the world we’re living in.
Let me help.
I have spent two decades reinventing the people side of work, not in theory but in practice. Working with CHROs and senior business and HR leaders, I’ve created new approaches and systems at scale, and have implemented them in organizations with tens of thousands of employees. Running through them all are these threads:
We are better when we make things simpler
The complexity belongs in the people, not in the systems we ask them to use
We must understand and appreciate human nature before we can help humans work
Tools must be useful to employees if we want them to be used
No organization can sustainably grow that does not help its people grow.
Whether in my advisory work or my executive roles, I have always worked the same way. We spend most of our time working together one-on-one on a complex initiative or in an area where you need a thinking partner. We review challenges and talk things through, and together we arrive at a path forwards. We focus on what is practical, simple, and clarifying. When our work and our ideation is based on a deep understanding of people and how they work, and organizations and how they work, we make fast progress. Our conversations are the catalyst for new ideas and concrete action.
If you want to make your organization more human-centric, adaptable, and future-focused while also evolving leadership and talent practices to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world, check out the overview of my work below, and then let’s talk.
Elevating Leadership Performance
The fundamental task of a leader is to help others do their best work. I help leaders get clear on the what and the how of their approach to performance and growth. I will work with you to:
Upgrade leadership capabilities by embedding a focus on individual and collective strengths, on self-awareness, on instilling confidence, and on group cohesion into your leadership operating system.
Transform leader communications by helping you and your team communicate in a way that builds trust—because all leading is communicating.
At Cisco, in support of a new CEO and new CHRO, I transitioned the organization to a new approach to leadership, spanning leader selection, training, expectations, and evaluation, supported by a rollout of a new approach to performance management to 70,000 employees. Engagement increased by 10% in the years following these changes.
Increasing Organizational Resilience
A crisis demands a balance of agility and stability. I help you figure out how to move—and what needs to be reinforced. I will guide you on:
Leading for resilience and ensuring your teams remain supported and effective.
Building for resilience so that your organization is better prepared for the unexpected.
For a leadership team struggling with a complex reorganization in the midst of the pandemic, I created a weekly cadence of leadership team meetings to anchor on priorities, which in turn became the constant thread of organizational communications. This resulted in increased team and organizational clarity and ability to execute.
Managing Change and Innovation
I will help you manage transformation within your organization. My work on the foundations of employee engagement and the human need for stability is valuable for any organization undergoing a major shift—whether in culture, technology, or structure. I will guide you on:
Anchoring change so that it is comprehensible and focused.
Structuring teams for innovation so that improvement emerges bottom-up.
To restructure a large team whose mission had changed, I created a three-day offsite during which team members explored the overall mission and then designed both the work of their own sub teams, and also how they would work with all the other sub teams. The result was greatly increased clarity of work and connection, and an organization that continued to generate innovation for more than four years.
Elevating Team Performance
Performance is an emergent quality of an organization. But what does it emerge from? I help you:
Build a team performance capability that puts individual and team contributions at the center, and that makes more teams like your best teams.
Revamp performance management to focus more on excellence, on continuous support, and on growth, rather than on annual reviews or rigid metrics.
At Cisco, to lift team performance, I introduced a team-based strengths assessment to the entire company, and followed this with weekly check-ins, team coaching, team leader training, team engagement surveys controlled by the team leader, and real-time listening and intelligence so that company leaders could see which teams were thriving and which needed more help. Following these changes Cisco was named number one on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For in three consecutive years.
Defining your Talent Strategy
A talent strategy answers the question, “How can we increase the overlap between what our people want from their jobs, and what our business needs from our teams?” I help you:
Develop a talent strategy that begins with a cultural North Star and then orients all your people investments to this common objective.
Create a real-time intelligence strategy to track results and course-correct as needed.
At Deloitte, I led an end-to-end refresh of the talent development strategy, which began with a two-day offsite for the senior leadership team, continued via the framing of six strategic conclusions around which to redesign every development program, and ended with an entirely new curriculum being deployed in time for the opening of Deloitte University—now considered the central cultural touchstone of the organization.
Designing Software for Humans
Much of our experience of work is mediated by software, in particular HR software. In addition to working with business and HR leaders on their people practices, I also advise HR software providers on product design. I have expertise in team software, leadership assessment software, engagement measurement, survey and item design, and network visualization, and my work in this space is grounded by the principle that good software must be immediately useful to the teams and leaders using it, not just to the organization overall.