When
Suzanne Zoumaras describes her role as an HR leader, she talks about other
people—and about her teams.
There’s
the senior management team, where, as executive vice president and chief human capital
officer at Arena Pharmaceuticals in San Diego, Zoumaras serves as a trusted
adviser to the CEO and the rest of the C-suite. There’s the human capital team,
where she sets the organization’s HR vision and priorities and mentors her
reports. And there’s the companywide employee team, where she “experiences the
company as any other employee does,” she says.
Her
focus on teams is intentional. “The 2020s will be the decade of the team,” she
says. “More and more, we’re required to work as members of teams and it’s less
about our individual success.”
Zoumaras
knows that this idea goes against the grain of the highly individualistic culture
of the U.S., where people are taught to concentrate on advancing their own
careers. But she feels it’s an invaluable lesson for the HR leaders of today
and tomorrow. As an increasingly mobile workforce changes jobs more frequently
and without stigma, she says, companies and their HR professionals will need to
look for people who do well collaboratively, not just individually.
“The
more effective your teams are, the more successful your company is,” Zoumaras
says. “If you look at the NBA, the best teams are the ones that pass the most.”
‘Coaches have a good sense of when someone needs a big hug and when they need a little bit of a kick in the pants.’
Zoumaras
speaks in sports and music analogies that emphasize team dynamics. She says
she’s less of a manager who oversees a team’s day-to-day transactions and more
of a coach—someone who drives the entire team toward better performance.
“Coaches have a good sense of when someone needs a big hug and when they need a
little bit of a kick in the pants,” she says. And like many of the best
coaches, she takes an active interest in her team members and their lives.
She
also thinks of herself as a musical conductor. “You’re ultimately responsible
for shaping the sound of the music, but it’s so much more than that,” she says.
“You have to select the right team members and listen to each of them to make
sure the whole thing is harmonious. If you don’t, even great musicians can
sound like a rackety band.”
High
Expectations
Zoumaras
herself comes from a sizable team: a family with six kids in which she was the
only daughter. She describes her real estate broker father and attorney mother as
“very analytical people.” She learned from them to think critically and to ask the
right questions. After her parents divorced, her mother—in her early 30s and with
six children in tow—earned her law degree. Zoumaras considers her mother her
most significant career influence. “She was a powerful individual and a force
of nature,” she says. “I saw what a strong woman can look like.”
In
retrospect, Zoumaras thinks her mother had higher expectations of her as the
family’s only girl. “She expected more of me because she expected a lot of
herself,” she says. “And she lived a little vicariously through me in my late
teens and early 20s because she was having children at that age—which is the
thing you did then—and I wasn’t.”
As
the sensitive sister to her rough-and-tumble brothers, Zoumaras developed an
interest in people’s behavior and motivations. She initially planned to become
a psychologist. But after a “wacko” college professor made the psychology
profession seem less than appealing, her mother suggested she go into finance
for two reasons: She was an analytical thinker, and every company needs finance
people.
After
getting her undergraduate degree in finance at San Diego State University,
Zoumaras worked at a boutique investment banking and venture capital firm. The
company wasn’t big enough to have its own HR department so, as the firm’s most
junior person, Zoumaras was tasked with working on human resources issues with an
external HR consultant.
That
experience rekindled her interest in psychology, and she found herself drawn to
HR. She came to a realization: “I was good at finance but not great, and I
wanted to be great at what I did.”
So
Zoumaras shifted career gears. She went back to school and earned her HR
certificate from the University of California at San Diego.
More
Than a Job
When
she first got into HR over two decades ago, Zoumaras found the profession had
not yet fully matured. “People didn’t come into it as a profession; they came
into it as a job,” she says. “And because it wasn’t perceived as a profession,
it wasn’t attracting the best and brightest.”
HR
was seen then as an administrative function, but she knew HR professionals
should also serve as business partners. “I didn’t realize at the time that this
was a radical approach,” she says.
Fortunately,
times have changed. “Gone are the days when we show up just to hire people, pay
them and complete transactions,” she says. “Now, HR is a reputable profession that’s
expected to drive real business value and impact.”
It’s
her appreciation for HR’s strategic value that sets Zoumaras apart, according
to David Lyle, CFO, Airgain, an antenna technologies company in San Diego.
“Finding a good HR leader who’s not just focused on the tactical but [who] also
can think about the strategic side of the job is very rare, and she’s one of
the few I’ve found who can do that,” says Lyle, who was CFO at Entropic
Communications, a San Diego semiconductor developer, when Zoumaras served as that
company’s senior vice president of global human resources.
Zoumaras
has taken a strategic approach to elevating the HR functions at all of the
companies where she’s worked. At Arena—a biopharmaceutical company she
describes as a “small but mighty company in an industry that has been dominated
by big pharma”—she’s leading the effort to shape a culture that operates on
principles, not policies. “We want to build into the fabric of the company an
expectation that we don’t simply follow rules, but we use good judgment and
consider the facts and circumstances to make the right decisions,” she says.
“I’ve
always believed that innovation, creativity and best-in-class aren’t limited to
our colleagues in R&D or marketing, but should be the standard across all
disciplines. We in HR need to bring original thinking, inspired solutions and
imaginative approaches to our domain.”
Prior
to Arena, Zoumaras led an 18-month overhaul of the HR department at the San
Diego-based software company Teradata as part of a larger business
transformation, spearheading an array of initiatives. For example, under
Zoumaras, Teradata changed how it acquired and rewarded talent and created an
employee experience that was consistent with the candidate experience. “So
employees didn’t feel the organization was better on the front end than when
they got inside it,” she says.
The
department streamlined the interview and offer processes and extended highly
competitive offers, which hadn’t been the practice in the past. Acceptance
rates improved significantly (up by 12 percent), and the quality of hires
improved as well.
For
new hires at Teradata, “We knew we needed to maintain the positive,
professional experience they had during the selection process,” Zoumaras says.
Her team launched a new-hire portal, developed manager toolkits, a buddy system,
and a two-day introduction to the company’s strategy, goals and rewards. “It
was so impactful we developed a modified version for current employees,” she
says. As a result, Teradata’s HR transitioned from a tactical, “tired and
traditional” department, she says, to one that drove business value and
influenced the evolution of the company.
“It’s
like watching a child learn how to walk,” Zoumaras says of helping a company’s
HR department to mature. “It’s very difficult when you see them struggling, but
then all of a sudden they get it and they never look back.”
Balancing
Act
Alice
Carrillo has worked for Zoumaras at two companies, including Teradata. “Suzie
is laser focused and has the courage to say what a business needs to do,” says
Carrillo, director, global talent business partner, for ServiceNow, a cloud
computing company based in Santa Clara, Calif.
Yet
as an HR leader, Zoumaras knows she has to strike a delicate balance between
doing what’s best for the business and what’s right for its people. “I’ve
always seen my role as being able to flex between being pragmatic and being
compassionate,” she says. That means focusing not so much on HR policies as on the
principles behind them. For instance, when looking at employees’ promotion
paths and timelines, HR leaders have to consider what makes both business sense
and people sense.
“She’s
a good human being with a good heart,” Lyle says. “She really cares for
employees and their lives.”
Others
have seen that in Zoumaras, too. “While she’s hard-charging and fast-paced,
there’s a very caring, soft side to her as well. She’s genuinely interested in
you as a person,” Carrillo says.
Zoumaras
both imparts and hones her leadership skills at her alma mater, San Diego
State, where she’s been an adjunct faculty member for 17 years. In the
department of management at the Fowler College of Business, she teaches
compensation and benefits to aspiring HR professionals. “It’s my way to give
back and invest in the next generation,” she says.
She
also gives back by serving on nonprofit boards, including one that focuses on
caregiving for elderly people with Alzheimer’s (which her mother had). “It’s
very important to use our expertise to benefit our communities,” she says.
For
Zoumaras, compassion isn’t just nice to have for an HR leader—it’s an essential
quality. For example, in 2014, Entropic, where Zoumaras worked for eight years,
fired its its CEO months after he was accused and found guilty of assaulting a
woman he was dating. The situation had legal, ethical, business and personal
implications for the company and its people. There was no textbook for Zoumaras
to consult. “It fell on my shoulders to navigate not only the executive team
and the board but also our employees through that at a time when the business
was also struggling.”
Balancing
the need for confidentiality with the need for transparency, Zoumaras
sensitively and confidently shepherded Entropic through that crisis. “The
organization needed someone who had its back and who was going to represent the
truth without sugarcoating it,” she says.
“In
times of turbulence, you have to be both strong and compassionate,” Zoumaras
says. “I pride myself on having the ability to toggle between the two.” That ability
reflects her approach to being both a servant leader and a situational leader,
modifying her style to fit the situation at hand. In some instances, she might
need to delegate more; in others, she might need to push people out of their comfort
zones. “I’m a good reader of people and what they need when,” she says.
For
Zoumaras, the hard and soft skills of HR all support a greater purpose: “My job
is to be a leader worth following and to build a culture that folks want to
belong to.”
Novid
Parsi is a freelance writer based in Chicago.
Photography by Rob Andrew.