Managing Continuous Disruption (Chief HR Officer Board Sept 2019 In-Person Meeting)

Corning Incorporated, Corning, NY

We had a very enlightening and engaging board meeting this past week in New York City. Special kudos to the 15 board members who were able to attend. We also welcomed three guests at our meeting from: Sirius XM Holdings, Societe’ Generale NA, and TJX Companies.    

Here’s a summary of what we discussed:

 

Day One

Introductions: Everyone shared something they were most proud of during the past year. Here are a few that stood out in the event you’d like to contact the respective CHRO to discuss:

  • ICM Partners (Cindy Ballard) – stellar progress is being made against its ’50-50 by 2020’ strategy. ICM is either near, at, or exceeding every one of its diversity targets. (As an aside, Cindy recently announced that she will be leaving ICM Partners at year-end.)
  • Banner Health (Naomi Cramer) – is successfully addressing one of the healthcare provider’s biggest areas of risk: physician burnout and turnover. They’ve seen a 25% decrease in physician burnout which has led to $18M in savings as well as 36% increase in physician engagement.
  • USAA (Pat Teague) – HR at USAA is leading the culture transformation. The company’s CEO and its board are very pleased with progress to-date.
  • USAA and Transamerica (Julie Tschida Brown) - both are in the process of decentralizing to empower customer-facing roles and get more people out into the business. Note that T-Mobile went through a similar restructure of its HR function over the past few years.
  • Canon (Scott Millar) – has launched a new employee business resource group that is focused on strengthening the alliances of rising professionals across Canon.
  • Land O’Lakes (Loren Heeringa) – has successfully managed the transition of CEOs and is successfully driving the business’ transformation. He is also launching a ‘Talent War Room’ that will focus on how to enable a sustainable pipeline of talent with the skills and capabilities the firm needs in the foreseeable future.

 

5 Essential Elements to Manage Continuous Disruption: Jay Jamrog and Kevin Martin walked the board through a new i4cp Executive Brief (link is below). The five elements are – in essence – the 5 domains of high-performance organizations: Market, Strategy, Culture, Leadership, and Talent. They then led the board in a working session on how to accelerate the path from Sensing, to Insights, to Action – with particular emphasis on techniques and questions to ask to strengthen HR’s and the organization’s ability to sense disturbance.

 

 

HR Analytics – metrics and insights that drive business decisions and performance:  This was a two-part session. First, Long-time CHRO board member and current EVP and Chief of Staff & Strategy at Jack in the Box, Mark Blankenship provided detailed insights into how Jack in the Box optimizes business outcomes via advanced people analytics.

 

 

Next, the folks from i4cp shared their latest thinking on the Human Capital Metrics to Report Out to Boards. This work continues and we’ll be showing a sample dashboard based on the 5 Domains of High-Performance Organizations (Market, Strategy, Culture, Leadership, and Talent) at our December 6 th virtual meeting.

 

 

A Board’s-Eye View of the Opportunity for HR: We finished Day One with guest speaker, Joan Amble. Following a successful career in finance Joan is currently a member of the board of directors at Booz Allen Hamilton, Sirius XM Holdings, and Zurich Insurance, as well as independent director at Societe Generale NA. Joan is also co-founder, Chair Emeritus and Director of W.O.M.E.N. In America ( www.womeninamerica.org ) and was on the Blue-Ribbon Commission for the NACD report Culture as a Corporate Asset. Some of the key points Joan covered:

  • HR and Culture: It’s really difficult to get a pulse of the organization unless you have a deep understanding of its culture. The most important thing a CHRO can do for the CEO is keep him/her in the loop on the pulse of the organization’s culture.
  • Observation of HR: A big challenge for HR is to ensure people from different disciplines cycle through the HR function. Another challenge is that people tend to be afraid of HR. HR yields a ton of power. As such, it needs to develop more empathy (i.e. it really needs to know the workforce) so that the workers develop more trust in HR. HR leaders need to make time to meet/talk with front-line workers often.
  • An action for every CHRO: Write down your CEO’s top 3 expectations of you. Do you know what these are? Do your peers know?
  • Advice to CHROs: Provide clarity on how you are dealing with important issues. For example, the 4 th Industrial Revolution. What are you doing to upskill your people? Precede any presentation to the board with a written (1-2 page) Exec Summary that frames what it is you are presenting, why you are presenting it, and what you are doing about it. Give the board 5 business days to read it prior to your presentation.
  • Know the business and collect data on where your function adds value, where the pain points are in the organization and develop a strategy to address these issues.
  • Have a diverse staff from different backgrounds, but all having the skill to show empathy.
  • Triangulate employee issues with Legal, Finance and Risk
  • The metrics you show to the Board must provide insight to decision.
  • And give the Board themes.

 

Day Two

How to Build a Resilient Organization:  Board member Tim Mulligan (Vulcan) kicked things off with an engaging presentation based on work he led at the World-Famous San Diego Zoo, and he is continuing at Vulcan.   His definition of resiliency? ‘The ability to remain consistent with who you are committed to being and how you are committed to being known’. Tim shared a 5-step model for resiliency: 1. Reclaim self-control; 2. Realign conditions; 3. Reimagine communications; 4. Renew connections; and 5. Rebalance commitments.

 

 

HR’s Role in M&A:

Kevin Oakes (i4cp CEO) led a discussion based on soon-to-be-published i4cp research. Kevin highlighted empirical evidence that shows M&A success hinges on integration success, and the most important element of integration success relates to Culture synergies. Kevin also shared the importance of HR’s strategic involvement throughout all phases of M&A, as well as in unifying total rewards for the combined organization rather than maintaining disparate compensation or benefits policies.

 

 

Board member Darian Rich (Barrick Gold) followed with an excellent overview of his organization’s history with mergers and acquisitions in the mining industry. He highlighted a 5-step process they use at Barrick, that starts with (1) putting the right leadership in place and retaining top talent (2) setting a common strategic vision (3) making integration the top priority with a focus on how to deal with value creation (4) Execution of plans and (5) Address culture up front.

 

 

What CEOs Want from their CHRO:

We finished the meeting with the recent survey data on “Insights and capabilities that CEOs want from their CHRO” and a summary prepared by Mark Englizian who highlighted 4 areas for CHRO’s: (1) A business person first, (2) A communicator who influences with informed insights, (3) An architect of employer brand and employee experience, (4) A champion of innovation and agility. We also discussed how to show the health of the workforce and what the key drivers of organizational performance are. Key metrics from the PPC are included below:

 

 

2020 CHRO Board Priorities: Board members in attendance completed a very brief, 2-question survey that will be used by i4cp to ensure its research and the CHRO board agenda in 2020 best address your needs. If you have not completed this survey, please click on this link and complete the survey by October 10. 100% board participation is our objective: https://www.research.net/r/PDQQMV2

 

Next CHRO Board Meeting: This is a 90-minute virtual meeting on December 6 th at 8:00 PT/11:00 ET.

 

As always, please let us know if you have any questions or comments.

Take care.

 

Kurt Fischer


This meeting is exclusively for members of the Chief Human Resources Officer Board. If you'd like to participate, please contact us to see if you qualify. If you are an i4cp member, please log in to access the registration/meeting details.
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