Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: I think that we're only scratching the surface right now on AI, but I do think we gotta be unafraid to use it and of course use it safely. There's definitely something on shifting humans to higher order tasks and how do we do that and how do we have more flexible organizational models? Using technology is a benefit.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Welcome back to the what Works Podcast podcast series.
Today, Cathy Anderi speaks with Suzanne McGovern, former CHRO of IPSI, about her journey to becoming a leading chro. The two have a fascinating conversation about the role of AI in transforming hr, how a consulting and tech background like Suzanne's has influenced her strategic approach and the ever evolving landscape of HR leadership.
Let's get to it.
[00:00:56] Speaker C: Suzanne. Welcome to the what Works podcast.
[00:00:59] Speaker A: Thank you for having me, Kathy. Great to be here.
[00:01:01] Speaker C: Thanks for joining us. We have a great agenda planned out, so let's jump right in. First, we want to start with you. We want to hear about Suzanne and what's your background? How did you get to where you are today, which is in the theater role?
Tell us a little bit about that.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: Oh, great question. So I will touch on education really quickly and then my kind of corporate career.
So I started in university doing economic history and I graduated with a master's there.
Quickly discovered I couldn't get a job. So this was back in Scotland in the UK a long time ago and I did a master's in it super hard. I did more work in that one year, my second master's, then my other four years put together because I wasn't an IT person. I was working with like software engineers and people who had computing backgrounds. So super tough but really helpful. And that got me to my first work gig which was at PwC in London in consulting. So much like yourself, Kathy. So I implemented large scale systems implementation with, you know, big people change aspects in the uk, in Europe and globally and then laterally in the Bay Area.
So fast forward, I was in the bay area and IBM Consulting bought PwC and so I was consulting in the Bay Area, had my first daughter and she was a baby. And even though I was consulting locally, I was on the highway at 7 in the morning, home at know 9 at night and didn't see her awake. And so I took a very difficult career decision to go internal. So I started working internally in learning and knowledge, it was called at the time, in the people space and really found my passion there and had a major career kind of change.
And a few years into this, my chro at the time, you know, said what do you want to do, do you want to go back to, to management consultancy or do you want to stay in the HR space? I had said, right, I want to stay in the HR space. And she said, okay, you have to do a really large HR business partner role, which is what I did. So I looked after North America HR for IBM Consulting, did that for a couple of years and then was promoted to executive and went to New York and ran Leadership Learners Learning and Inclusion for IBM Consulting. And also the talent transformation.
So really long career there, super fun.
But we weren't loving New York. And so that's when a company called Splunk, a data software company, came knocking. I hadn't done hypergrowth before, so that was super fun. Did that for a couple of years more on the DEI and talent specific basis.
So we doubled our headcount, doubled our revenue in two years. So super wild ride. And then from there I moved from Splunk to a company called ipsy, which is an online beauty platform.
It's private equity backed pre ipo, never done that before.
Billion dollars in revenue, always profitable, but full stack hr. So that was my journey on to Chro.
[00:04:31] Speaker C: Wow, what a great journey. How do you see the role of the Chro changing? Or do you see the role of the Chro changing?
[00:04:39] Speaker A: Oh yes, I think it really is evolving and the rate of pace and change has been so dramatic, particularly since 2020, since COVID And I do think the folks in the role are becoming much more what I would call outside in thinkers rather than inside out, more kind of business leaders who happen to have expertise in people, talent and culture and are really passionate about those spaces and all about employee experience and certainly more consultative, you know, that client service mindset and that everyone is your client, all the internal stakeholders, but also having that outside in perspective of who your customer is, your external customer, who your competitors are, what the business landscape's life, you know, how will you grow? How do you transform? Is it the efficiency agenda? Like what are you trying to do from a business perspective? And then really using people as a value driver, as a source of unique differentiation and coming up with the right people strategy to meet the business objectives.
[00:05:50] Speaker C: How does it look like in different organizations? I know you have worked in different organizations and obviously they were in different industries and different business situations. Can you give us some examples of what this looks like maybe in different companies, how you leverage people and culture for kind of business advantage and business benefit?
[00:06:09] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. I will say it's interesting, with hindsight I would say this is probably A bit controversial. The kind of academy level HR experience I had, I didn't realize at this time this, at the time at all was probably IBM, you know, just big. 130,000 people, 17 billion in revenue and doing things completely globally and at scale. And like back in the day we were using AI and bots and shared services like for inference models to define leadership capabilities, big kind of talent models and you know, workforce planning and or design, but all at a different level of size, scale.
And so I think really that gave me the frame of what good looks like.
And then fast forward to there. When I think about Splunk, that was much more about culture, employee experience.
Like this is 2020 when you're trying to, you know, hire engineers, for example, at Splunk when you're competing against, well you can't compete against Google and Meta, so what do you do? And it was really that differentiation around people and culture and the employee experience and making that absolutely as delightful as you possibly can and then even scrappier on the IPSY side. But again that was like mission and culture for me. So Splunk added dei and then the mission at IPSI is to inspire everyone to express their own unique beauty. And so what a phenomenal mission to be involved in, right? And how as a chro, you can bring that to life in terms of the employee experience. Like having the employee experience mirror if you like the consumer or the customer experience and doing that in an amazing way and really bringing the big academy experience from IBM, right? This is what good looks like at scale scale. And then here's what a cool kind of tech company does in terms of employee experience and bringing those together and maybe picking and choosing what you need at a much smaller scale, you know, like pre ipo, under a billion dollars, not public yet. So does that answer your question?
[00:08:30] Speaker C: Yeah, it totally answers the question. I think it's fantastic to hear you got really trained on the job if you wanted the. @ IBM, right, where there's like incredible complexity, of course, incredible size. And you were doing some fantastic and I think really forward thinking things even at that time where I think most companies were not looking into AI, but now I think everybody's looking into AI and then how you, how you scale that or how you customize that for different situations in different business areas and, and what was most important on like the employee experience, but then also the culture and how you fostered the mission. So really incredible.
So what kind of capabilities, what kind of behaviors, what experiences do you feel were most critical are most critical? For your success as a Chro and maybe for anybody who aspires to be a chro, what should they focus on building?
[00:09:29] Speaker A: That's a great question.
I would say like again leaning into like how the role is evolving.
So building that consulting muscle, being consultative, being a business leader first and foremost, with expertise in people and talent and culture. So like if you haven't done it, could you get a rotation like maybe in another functional area or if you've been in another area or another company, like how do you bring that to bear? How do you draw the parallels and the learnings and bring that to life in your new area?
The other area where I think I would be absolutely trumped by some of my younger generation colleagues is just that agility and nimbleness, like being able to see round corners, which sure comes from experience, but some of it is through technology adoption, new org models, you know, different kinds of enablement.
I also really believe this one strongly is that being comfortable without a playbook and with constant change. And I think experience gives you this as well. Sometimes it's okay to say I don't know, you know, I don't know. But we'll figure this out together. We'll co create the solution, we'll do it with the business, we'll do it in a systemic way, cross functionally.
There's not been anything I can think of that I've ever done that I've done in the HR vertical on its own that's been successful. Unless it's, don't get me wrong, unless it's like a very building block type thing. Right. But if it's more of a solution for a business problem, then you need to engage the other business leaders and collaborate across the business. So I really do think that being comfortable without the playbook with change and then co creating the solution with other business leaders is critical.
[00:11:19] Speaker C: I love that. I always feel a little bit like when we say, oh, here's HR and here's the business. Well, HR is the business too, of course.
[00:11:27] Speaker A: A hundred percent. Yep. Take your seat at the table.
[00:11:30] Speaker C: We're ready with the seat. Right, take the seat and then execute on that. Absolutely. Well, I want to pick up a little bit on a topic that I know is in everybody's mind and I know you had so much great experience at IBM and beyond, which is AI, of course, and how we're going to use AI in. Hi, what's your take on how, where this is going and what the theatre role in AI and HR is?
[00:11:58] Speaker A: Oh, it's a great Question. And it's, it's so big and it's so vast.
But I think what we do know at this point is AI is here, is here to stay. So how do we leverage it better best for the people and talent and kind of culture spaces. So the one that I think we haven't cracked yet and the companies who do this successfully will endure is like, how do you shift humans to higher order problems and opportunities? And how do you get the machines, the AIs or the agents to do some of the very manual tasks, but also thinking about AI not just as cost takeouts and efficiencies again, like, how do you maybe use it for the growth agenda as well and flexible or models and thinking about, oh, some of my workforce are going to be AI agents in the future as well as humans. And you know, so really interesting. I'm fascinated because I sit on an advisory board right now and we look at HR tech companies and everything that's coming is AI. So we reviewed a talent acquisition tool with AI and like I kind of, you know, leveraged this a little bit, like things like background checks and like standardizing job descriptions and stuff. But this is actually interviewing. This is like, hi Kathy, tell me about yourself. And different. It was wild to me, but fascinating. And like, you know, when you think about all the opportunities to make recruiting better, like, you know, getting through every resume, not ghosting people, getting back to folks and not having this, you know, like you, I live in Silicon Valley and the amount of recruiters I know who were laid off, you know, from 2020 and you know, the economic uncertainty, I mean, it's so sad. And these folks were, you know, hired in abundance and then let go really quite brutally in some cases.
And how could technology stop us from doing that and really help amazing recruiters? Because recruiters are like, there's art and science to it, right?
Like maybe use AI more on the sourcing side, but you still can't substitute a great recruiter. A great recruiter will bring a candidate that maybe doesn't have the three things that you put on the non negotiables. But you're like, oh, this one's really unique, you should talk to her. And you're like, oh, okay. So I just, I think that we're only scratching the surface right now on AI and you know, some of the large language models and stuff. But I do think we got to be unafraid to use it and of course use it safely. I think that's a big consideration for us working with our partners. In legal is, you know, how do you make sure the data is protected? You know, you're being, you know, careful with sensitive information and you're not sharing. And folks in your organization aren't just, you know, dumping a bunch of employee information into chatgpt and stuff. So lots and lots of, you know, maybe potential risks, but just enormous upside. And I just, it's not just cost takeout. There's definitely something on shifting humans to higher order tasks and how do we do that and how do we have more flexible organizational models? Those using technology is a benefit.
[00:15:34] Speaker C: Wow, fantastic. Well, the other topic that's on everybody's mind and we hear so much about it, and I know you have some great experience on that too, is the question of should we continue as an organization? Should we continue to be remote? What about hybrid work? What about return to office? And every day it seems like there's new, new news from companies that say, well, everybody has to come back to the office and then employees revolt and then they have to backtaggle on that.
How do you see this happen? And maybe some examples also how you worked on that in your company.
[00:16:13] Speaker A: So at ipsi, I was given facilities as well as the people team, which makes a lot of sense when you think about employee experience.
So, and I'm probably exaggerating to make a point, but like, you know, if I was given facilities on the Friday, on the Tuesday, it was like, okay, you're gonna have to close some offices now because people aren't coming back in. You're like, yay. Okay, that's, that's not difficult at all. It's like, oh my goodness, that's a tough one. But we try. I mean, after, after the initial being paralyzed with, oh my goodness, no playbook, what do we do now? Like, you know, figure this one out was kind of like, all right, what is one of our non negotiables? Well, it was culture. And instead of calling it the future of work, we called it the now of work. Because we're like, this isn't the future, this is happening now. Like, how do we figure this out? And again, it was like co creating with the business.
I'm really proud to say that while we closed offices, we managed to improve employee engagement throughout and really intentional about been as transparent as we could be without, you know, instituting business risk and being very open that we hadn't figured it all out yet, but we were, you know, figuring out as we go. So I think the pendulum is swinging again. Right? And as a student of history, this. Yeah, it doesn't, doesn't really surprise me. But I do think the companies who get this right will trust each other.
The reality is, you know, we, we've laid off tons of people as well. And so that trust has to be brokered again. And my personal perspective is probably hybrid. Right. Just there's some things we love about being human and getting together face to face. You got to do some things together. So what is that hybrid model? When do people get together? How often? For me, the employer employee contract has fundamentally changed and I don't think we can go back. We, we can't go back to pre2020 or pre Covid. So we, we've just got to go forward.
But again, co creating the future and figuring it out together, I love that.
[00:18:22] Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's so important too.
You're absolutely right. And co creating with the employee is absolutely important. Right? Because not every job is the same. And of course for some jobs the collaboration is so important. For other jobs it might not be so important. Right. So it really depends on what's the nature of the jobs, how teams work together and what makes people most productive and most well as well. So I think that balance of productivity and well being, I think really critically important too. So. Well, Suzanne, this has been so great and I know we could talk for a long time. Continue talking for a very long time. Any last words of advice or any last tips maybe for our listeners as they are maybe looking into at the Chro role, what should they think about? Just as kind of the one thing that maybe HR leaders that are listening in could do in terms of the serial role of the future.
Oh, wow.
[00:19:21] Speaker A: That's one piece of advice. Wow. Okay. Just one for.
Maybe I break it down, maybe I'll break it down to folks who are in the role versus folks who are, you know, aspiring.
The one that I love for folks who are in the role is just, you know, keep connecting with each other, keep building community, share your knowledge and experience. Experience which is inevitably totally different from mine. And so I think that's the way that we learn by sharing knowledge, by sharing ideas and exchanging perspectives and just continuing to elevate the role and again, taking the seat at the table for aspiring leaders.
Minds would be that kind of, you know, try and rotate across as many verticals in the function or, or indeed maybe a rotation outside of the function as you can. I think it just gives you such an edge and a different lexicon and also hopefully a level of abstraction that you can take yourself out of your expert Domain, the people space and think about what does it mean for the business, you know, what are we trying to achieve, what's the business objective? And then the fun part is, you know, leveraging people and culture and talent to meet those objectives.
[00:20:38] Speaker C: Oh, that's fantastic. And if you were thinking about maybe the CEOs, if anybody is listening, as a CEO, how could they support their chro in a better way?
[00:20:48] Speaker A: Oh, that's a great one. Well, some are amazingly enlightened, I will say. I know some CEOs who are phenomenal people leaders. They get the talent is at the heart of everything they do. I think for those maybe who are not there yet or haven't started seeing, you know, great a great people function in action or the impact it can have is just really trying to think of people and talent as a value driver. You know, if you don't like, you know, it's likely the biggest cost item on your balance sheet, right? So you may as well do it right. And some of these things that you might think are fluffy, as I mentioned, like engagement, like inclusion, they all impact your bottom line. They're all value drivers. So I think like really shifting that mindset from, you know, people as a cost to people in talent and culture as a value driver, it can be amazing from a, you know, outperforming other companies. From a business perspective, it's also a lot more fun.
[00:21:46] Speaker C: Yeah, a lot more fun.
[00:21:48] Speaker A: We spend an awful lot of time working. You may as well enjoy it. It's much more fun.
[00:21:52] Speaker C: Oh, totally agree. Well, on that happy note, talking about fun at work and creating great work workplaces. Thank you so much Suzanne. This was fantastic. Thanks for sharing with us.
[00:22:03] Speaker A: It's been great, great fun. Take care.
[00:22:08] Speaker C: Thanks for tuning in to the what Works podcast. That was such a great conversation with Suzanne McGovern. She's an experienced CHRO across multiple companies, HR is evolving into a true business leadership function and her insights and how chros can drive strategy, integrate AI and shape the employee experience were really incredible. Her background from technology and management consulting, what we call a business csr, helped prepare her to become a much more business oriented and consultative HR leader. As organizations continue to navigate change, the best HR leaders will be the ones who think beyond policies and processes and focus on business impact, acting as a true C Suite leader leader. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe for more conversations on the future of HR leadership and work.
