Authentic Leadership

Episode Summary:

Best-selling author and talent acquisition (TA) specialist Mike Horne, Ph.D. joins the Subject to Talent podcast to share insights about leadership development, organizational transformation and executive coaching in TA and workforce management. Dr. Horne provides guidance for business leaders on ways that conflict resolution can retain their workforce and developing plans for the shifting expectations of future workers.

Transcript:

Allegis Global Solutions (AGS) presents the Subject to Talent Podcast, a hub for global workforce leaders to unleash the power of human enterprise. Listen in as we explore the most innovative and transformational topics impacting businesses today.

Jessi Guenther: Hi, I'm Jessi Guenther. I'm the vice president of client delivery here at Allegis Global Solutions, and I'm thrilled to host this episode of AGS' Subject to Talent podcast featuring Dr. Mike Horne. Dr. Mike transformed decades of experience in HR, talent acquisition and organizational development into a career devoted to executive coaching, leadership development and organizational transformation. He's a bestselling author of “Integrity by Design,” and his recently released “The People Dividend,” which outlines leadership strategies for inspiring employees to reach their highest potential. He's also the host of The People Dividend podcast, which focuses on the ROI of investing in employees’ growth and well-being. Welcome to the Subject to Talent podcast, Mike.

Dr. Mike Horne: Hey, Jessi, I'm so delighted to be here with you and to be in conversation with you. I'm so grateful for the opportunity that AGS provides through this podcast and how it helps all of us in the HR and the people and culture communities and in the leadership communities. I'm just so grateful to be here, Jessi, and to speak with your audience and with you today. Full disclosure, at some point, I certainly worked in lots of organizations where AGS was a service provider and lots of good experiences there. It was really welcoming for me to see the invitation from AGS and from you Jessi, to participate in the Subject to Talent podcast.

Jessi Guenther: Great. Well, that gratitude is very mutual, Mike, and certainly you've had a storied career with some amazing brands, and yes, many of those have been mutual clients for AGS. Thanks again for being here. We like to start our episodes by asking our guests the same first question. Would love for you to tell us about your professional journey and how it's led you to where you are today.

Dr. Mike Horne: It's interesting. I was out on a hike yesterday with a club that I belong to, and someone turned back to me and said, "Oh, you've led an interesting life." I always wondered about that. In psychology, you learn when somebody says, "Interesting," dig deeper, right? What does that mean? For me, I was always interested in conflict resolution, how people solve their conflicts, and I started off in labor relations and actually was lucky enough to meet Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta and work in the United Farm Workers organizing efforts. I think all of that led to my start in human resources, which was employee relations, labor relations. But after several years of dealing with people who were constantly in conflict, I thought, "Oh, there must be a better way for this."

I went into an organization development, learning and development career. I've led HR teams in some very large organizations. That brings me to where I am today as a coach, mentor and teacher. I'm a full-time faculty member and program director at Golden Gate University for our HR programs and our leadership programs, active contributor to the HR field. I give expression to what I think I'm good at, coaching, mentoring and teaching, and that's how I got a start and I'm just going to keep going.

Jessi Guenther: Absolutely. What inspired you to write “Integrity by Design” and “The People Dividend?”

Dr. Mike Horne: “Integrity by Design” was a long-term project. It took me a lot of time to write it in starts and stops. It was really about bringing more of who you are to what you do. How can we get people to bring the best of what they do? I think about it as align the people. What does it mean to have integrity? It means to be authentic. It means that your words and your actions, and better yet, your thoughts, words, and actions match. I think it was that sense of self – the power of self – that led me to think about agency and “The People Dividend.” I had a lot of experiences in organizations. I don't know if you've had this, Jessi or you've experienced it, you've led a lot of people, you've managed a lot of teams. Sometimes I felt just like a cog in the wheel.

Like here I was usually a talented performer in an organization, and sometimes I think I would have bosses that would say, "Let's have our one-on-one. How are you doing?" They would say, "Well, everything's great." "That's really good." I don't think they were ever really telling me the truth, sometimes. They were managing their own careers and their own interests. These were not bad people. These were people I liked, people I still have affection for, but it was this feeling of being a cog in the wheel. I think in the new world of work, where remote work is a given, where there's a lot of tension around diversity, it's a lightning rod for a lot of people to talk about the fundamental issues that are behind “The People Dividend,” dignity, kindness and respect. I think these are timeless values that are really going to help leaders succeed in the modern workforce.

Jessi Guenther: Love that. Certainly, a topic very near and dear to my heart without question. Through your work, and I'm curious, as clients are engaging you, there's obviously a problem. It's usually a problem that would prompt them to reach out and say, "Dr. Mike. I'm looking for some help," whether that's in one-on-one executive coaching or a leadership development program or full on organizational design. What are the challenges that these clients are asking you to help them solve today, and how does that differ from the challenges that you saw 5 - 10 years ago?

Dr. Mike Horne: That's such a great question, and I think you're the expert in this, because you're head of client delivery. But in terms of, for me, yes, I have an engineering mentality when it comes to organization development and executive coaching, which is that problem-solution orientation. There's a deficiency, there's something that's lagging. I'm not typically one of these people that starts with an appreciative viewpoint, where, "let's focus on everything being rosy." I'm about, "let's understand the situation, let's understand the problem," if we want to call it that, and think of ways that we can use your strengths in order to break through or to solve that problem. I think the challenges of today is that people continue to be overworked. There's always too much to do. There are so many tensions. One of the most downloaded resources from the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) last year, I think the most downloaded resource, was on civility. Civility in the workplace.

Jessi Guenther: Interesting.

Dr. Mike Horne: Yes. I have a client now, we're working on a very big project on civility in their system. I think this, how do we talk with each other? How do we engage with each other? How do we respect each other? How do we treat each other with kindness? While these are old and timeless, I think they're really what's ahead for tomorrow's managers.

Jessi Guenther: Absolutely. I want to home in on something, Mike, that you and I were talking about offline because I find this extremely fascinating. You had mentioned that one of the concerns that you're starting to hear from clients is something you described as the erosion of middle management. Can you talk a little bit about what that means in your context and what are some strategies you're employing to help solve?

Dr. Mike Horne: Well, I do a lot of work in technology, in the technology sector and in the biotech or biopharma sector. That's where most of my client work comes from. That's where much of my work experience comes from. Certainly, as organizations have increased profitability or look for measures to increase profitability, one of the things to do is to reduce head count, reduce personnel count. It's one of the quickest ways to show more profitability. As this has been going on and as [use of] AI increases, there seem to be fewer and fewer middle managers around in organizations. All of those people who helped employees take care of their career development, all of those managers who listened to their employees, is what caused me to write “The People Dividend”. Really thinking about who are the people inside that span that three-legged stool between organization, employee and manager, because your VP is likely too busy because she might have 50 people reporting, not direct reports, but 60 or 70 or 80 indirect reports, and it's a lot to get from you to her in that time.

It's not that she doesn't care, or she doesn't like you or she doesn't want you to do well or make a lot of money or whatever the incentive system is in the organization, but she's busy herself. We have to think – and so much of this is good – because AI has made so many things more employee self-sufficient, your benefits, maybe even first level employee relations, you're talking to a bot. "I don't like how my co-worker smells. What do I do?" Well, maybe it's a bot response, "Here are three or four things you can try." When we have this erosion of middle management, we need to make sure that we have systems that are really capable of supporting the kind of productivity we want and keeping people aligned with the mission of the organization. Because when people feel connected to something, they give more.

It's the production of discretionary effort. We know that from employee engagement, all of this anti-diversity stuff today rubs me the wrong way. I mean, because I also think that we have tons of studies that say when you have a lot of diversity, it increases profitability. I'm going to go with that. I don't care so much about the words, I do, but we are talking about differences. Middle managers often served a function of helping people to manage those differences. We need to think about ways, particularly if employee resource groups (ERGs) are going away and other support systems, we need to think about ways that people feel supported and treated with respect.

Jessi Guenther: It's so important. Yeah, again, we talk about these pivotal moments in time, and I think we're at that point, and my conversation with my teams right now is to read beyond the headlines.

Dr. Mike Horne: Yeah, right.

Jessi Guenther: Very important.

Dr. Mike Horne: Right. I think what's important for leaders at the vice president level and up is to be consistent and stay on their message, to show this kind of empathy, to use the words that are important in the organization. Because if I see it and hear it often enough, likely it's true, and I'll believe it, and now it'll generate the mission of the organization. That's what I would encourage our leaders to do today is speak from the heart, speak rationally always, of course, but speak from the heart. Let people know a little bit about you and what you care about so that you remain approachable, and you remain accessible.

I always think about AGS, I guess we talked about this earlier, is [that] people think about it as a staffing company, but you gave us so much to think about in terms of thinking about AGS as a leadership company that happens to be in the staffing talent, recruitment, choose your word there, business. I was thinking you said that to me as we were preparing for this, and I think it's a pretty meaningful thought. Certainly, as a recruiting director or somebody who led talent acquisition teams around the world, I didn't often think about that, but it's a real active leadership to work in this talent acquisition, recruitment, staffing business, it's so important for all of your clients.

Jessi Guenther: Yeah, I couldn't agree more, and thank you for saying that. There isn't anything more human than leadership, and it transcends regional lines, countries. It has nothing to do with where we're located. I think there is a success recipe, to some degree, for AGS having stood the test of time for forty plus years so far. I think that's a big part of it, but we cannot be stagnant. This conversation and a lot of the words you put to paper in the two books that you've published, I think have encapsulated a lot of the ethos that we've stood for a really long time. We are a global company, and the beautiful thing about leadership is that we can speak that language without worrying about whether or not it translates.

Dr. Mike Horne: Yeah, certainly. That was my experience. I met AGS, I was working in the US. I had global responsibilities. Certainly, the colleague that introduced us to AGS was from the UK and had a lot of experience there. I was in an American based company, a US based company at that time, and I think it was a global connection that led us to that path.

Jessi Guenther: Yeah, that's fantastic. When you're working with leaders within your clientele, how do you help them to build productive and innovative communities in their work?

Dr. Mike Horne: Well, you said something that's so important, Jessi Guenther, and I think that is the word community. A lot of people talk about culture. Certainly, I've done that for a good part of my career. But certainly I think what's more important to talk about today is community and how do we create community at work. Maybe that's more important than culture, that communities are places where people feel heard, they feel valued, they stand up, they say their name. It's, “how do we begin to create these kinds of communities and organizations, particularly when people aren't at the office and there's a lot of remote work going on in the world?” Hey, in some organizations you have people coming in every day, hospitality, certain aspects of research and development where people are needed every day, healthcare. Anything we can do to help people create community, whether it's an organization design problem – I just finished us some work with a large medical device company, and it was the redesign of their research and development department. But much of that work was about getting people in small groups and teams to talk about what worked, what didn't work, how we could improve process flows, and handoffs and accountability. It's by creating that community that people buy in to what otherwise, "Oh, here's our new organization design. Management isn't so good." By creating community, you get people involved in solving problems that are important to them.

Jessi Guenther: Absolutely. Certainly, in our industry, serving our clients is the top priority, and that is sometimes a tough balance when we are serving our clients on one hand, while also needing to invest in our internal teams, balancing those two things. How are you helping the leaders of the organizations you're working with achieve that balance?

Dr. Mike Horne: Well, I think that challenge, bringing more of who you are to what you do and building results, outcomes, profitably oriented teams is a challenge that most business leaders face. Those who seem to do it successfully, those who seem to lead successfully are those people who have this alignment, this integrity, this authenticity that are committed to their values. What they do is they bring the right people along with them. They get, it was Jim Collins, "Get the right people on the bus." What I learned from Art Levinson when I led an organization development at Genentech – Art was chairman of the board at Apple and on the board at Google and I ran a lot of the employee engagement stuff there – what I learned is that A players hire A players, B players hire B players. I'm not talking about the large staffing events where you need 2000 people for an event or something, but I'm talking about the kinds of teams that are really working on this talent acquisition problem, this talent attraction problem, and then the talent development problem. I think that's how we create winning teams and winning organizations.

I think it's how leaders help to express the best of who they are. Because hiring someone, developing them, bringing them along, even though you're too busy, there's no greater joy in organizational life to see your colleagues or the people that you hire do their best. That's what creates high performing teams. It's not just necessarily that they're committed to similar goals and visions, and they have processes to which they agree, but it's also because they invest in their personal/professional development.

Jessi Guenther: I love it. I love to bring more of who you are to what you do.

Dr. Mike Horne: Yeah.

Jessi Guenther: It reminds me, we're big fans of Jim Collins over here, as most organizations are, but I do love Jim Collins. But I heard a quote, and this is not my own, but it's one of my favorites, "If you can't be who you are, where you are, change where you are, not who you are."

Dr. Mike Horne: Oh, wow. That's great.

Jessi Guenther: Yeah. It reminded me when you talked about bringing more of who you are to what you do. I couldn't agree more.

Dr. Mike Horne: Yeah, so important.

Jessi Guenther: Mike, we like to end our episodes with a bit of a look to the future, our crystal ball, if you will. How do you see organizational leadership evolving over the next five years or so?

Dr. Mike Horne: Well, certain things will remain the same. The need to drive profitable enterprises, the need to help your organization to grow and to prosper, that will remain unchanged. What may change is the tone in which we do it and how we see success. I think what's going to need to happen is organizations and leaders in organizations and sectors are going to need to continue to define success in ways that make sense for their environment that they work in. In five years, I certainly see more people coming into the workforce that have technological fluency, that have global awareness, that want to see innovation. I think we need leaders who are going to be able to, to your earlier points, figure out what technological fluency means in AI, and also leaders who can promote connectivity and innovation. I think these are all going to be the key source of things, is really making sure that we have leaders who are adaptable, who prioritize, who understand what's going on with AI and technology, but really have the connectivity with people that promotes organizational wellness and well-being.

Jessi Guenther: Love it. Love it. Thanks for sharing. What should listeners do if they want to learn more about you, your books and the work they do?

Dr. Mike Horne: Well, thank you so much, Jessi. That's the easiest way to get in touch with me is Mike-Horne.com, H-O-R-N-E.com. That'll take you to my website. If you're really interested, you can also look on LinkedIn. I have a weekly newsletter, the Mike Horne newsletter on LinkedIn. Lots of ways to get in touch with me but Mike-Horne.com, easiest way and welcome everyone's participation helps me to understand and what's going on in terms of people and culture today.

Jessi Guenther: Wonderful. Well, I appreciate you joining me today. I would love to continue this conversation on Mike Horne's People Dividend podcast.

Dr. Mike Horne: That's great. I'm looking forward to having you as a guest.

Jessi Guenther: It will be wonderful. Thank you so much.

Dr. Mike Horne: Thank you so much, Jessi, really appreciate it. Thank you.

Jessi Guenther: Absolutely.

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you have questions, send them to SubjectToTalent@AllegisGlobalSolutions.com. Follow us on LinkedIn with the #SubjectToTalent and learn more about AGS at AllegisGlobalSolutions.com, where you can find additional workforce insights and past episodes. Until next time, cheers.