Making Smarter Hiring Decisions that Support the Business

[00:00:00] Mo Fathelbab: Welcome to today's episode of People and Strategy. I'm your host, Mo Fathelbab, president of International Facilitators Organization. People and Strategy is a podcast from the SHRM Executive Network, the premier network of executives in the field of human resources. Each week we bring you in depth conversations with the country's top HR executives and thought leaders.

For today's conversation, I'm excited to be joined by Susan Schmidt Winchester, a former HR leader at the Kellogg Company and CHRO at Rockwell Automation and Applied Material. She's also founder of Susan Jay Schmidt, Winchester and Associates, LLC, and she has recently published a book called Healing at Work.

Welcome, Susan.

[00:00:49] Susan Winchester: Thank you, Mo. It's great to be here. Thank you so much.

[00:00:52] Mo Fathelbab: Great to have you with us. Susan, tell us about your career journey and what brought you to the field of HR.

[00:00:58] Susan Winchester: I'm very, very blessed that HR was the path that I pursued, and it was purely by, you know, sort of an accident, right? I was in college, I was gonna get my degree.

I had a double major in psychology and French. And I remember standing in the psychology department one morning thinking, what in the heck am I gonna do after I graduate? And I found a posting for a master's degree program in industrial organizational psychology on the bulletin board, and I thought. I think that's where I'm supposed to go.

After college, I did a, you know, basically a master's degree, and the program was obviously very geared towards people in the workplace and had a heavy quantitative side of it as well. So my very first job out of graduate school was working as a compensation analyst in Chicago, or at that time was a small family owned company called Helene Curtis that was eventually bought by Unilever.

And that began my whole journey.

[00:01:57] Mo Fathelbab: Love it. Well, we're lucky to have you with us because we're gonna talk about hiring and obviously it is one of the big challenges for HR leaders. It's costly, both in terms of time and money. So how can HR leaders make smarter talent decisions during the hiring process?

[00:02:14] Susan Winchester: This is such an important question and you know, I think the benefit of all the years of experience that I've had, 36 years in corporate HR has enabled me to see. And reflect on some of the practices that we brought to our companies to really challenge myself. Are these practices really making a difference or are there other ways that we could be doing things to create more value?

I think most HR people, care deeply about being, meaningful and providing meaningful direction to our leaders. And when I moved from Kellogg's to Rockwell. I had an opportunity to really think back about all the things that we did at Kellogg, and, you know, every company's doing its very best with the best of intentions to serve the people and the company and, the stakeholders.

But I, I remember when I was working there that I, would really be frustrated, by lots of things related to people being matched to jobs or. Not getting an opportunity that they thought they deserved. And of course we, like many companies, relied on what I would describe as the leadership competency model.

But I found that the competency models, while certainly better than not having something to use as a basis, I felt that they were sometimes too vague. You know, they talk about need to be a strategic leader, which in my head I'm thinking, okay, a strategic leader in terms of doing a 12 month strategy or a 20 year strategy.

That's a very different proposition, and I also felt like sometimes leaders got promoted that didn't necessarily demonstrate all the competencies, you know, so somebody who created huge value but had an aggressive approach to how they did it. Still was selected to move into the role. And of course I think many of us as managers, ourselves in HR as well as working with the people we work with, hire people into jobs thinking it's gonna be a great match and it ends up being bust.

You know, we, end up. Unfortunately, firing too many people that we thought through our interview and selection process was gonna result in a great match, and it doesn't. So I think that this, you know, kind of reflecting back on my own experience, recognizing that the number one reason people leave their job is because they've perceived their career advancement is not going at the pace that they want it to.

I think most HR leaders are familiar with people. Coming to them saying, Hey, what? Why am I not getting promoted? And it's very difficult sometimes to be able to articulate that. And so the way that HR leaders can really start to raise the game on not only their own ability, but also the leaders that we're supporting when they're going through selection processes, by understanding the framework that I call the suitability model, which is really all about how do you match the best suited people into the roles that you have available.

Whether it's through the selection process, which we can talk more about, whether it's promotion processes that you have in your company, succession planning, how do you really know where to focus someone's development? Sometimes that's not always really clear. What's gonna really make a difference? As well as being able to explain to any employee what's going on in their career, what's working, what's not, and what do they need to do differently.

And the framework around, suitability. Enables all of this and it, it was such a game changer.

[00:05:37] Mo Fathelbab: Please tell us. Yes, I understand. There are four pillars to the suitability model. Let's hear them.

[00:05:43] Susan Winchester: The first one's a really obvious one. In fact, many of us overfocus on the first one. The first pillar is a combination of skills, knowledge, experience, and education.

So skills is learning how to do specific things. the knowledge is knowing how to apply it. The experience is knowing what really works. We often spend a lot of time assessing someone's ski skills, knowledge, experience, and education for the role. 'cause we can see it in the resume. We can ask people about their different skills and experiences.

However, I, am sure that all of us can describe examples of where somebody had all of the ski required for a role and still failed. Sure. And just a quick story, I won't say which company, but years ago I had a head of HR who had all the skills, knowledge, experience, and education you would expect a chief HR officer to have.

If I had any technical questions, I could go to him and he would be able to answer those questions with a great deal of confidence. However, he was fired after only 14 months. So even though he had all the skills, knowledge, experience, and education to do the job. There were some gaps on some of these other three elements I'm gonna talk to you about.

So ski is important, but it's not the only thing that matters. The second pillar of the suitability model, I call it capacity for complexity. I. And it recognizes that work varies in complexity and people's ability to handle complexity also varies. So for example, I often when I'm speaking to audiences, like we are today, I say, I want you to imagine, and remember the very first job you ever got paid for, and tell me how complex it was.

So people will say, well, as a paper boy, I, you know, I deliver papers for people throwing the paper on the front porch, whatever. My first job was working at a fast food restaurant, and so the complexity was very basic. Pack the food, take the money, get the orders, clean the restaurant. And the only decision we had to make, but it was all prescribed on the wall, was how many salads would we make tomorrow?

If it was during the week, it was a certain number. If it was a weekend, it was a bigger number. That was it. Any issues that came up in the store got escalated, and then I had people imagine, well, what's the job you're doing today? Can you tell me the difference in the complexity you're handling? Versus that original job.

So it gets people thinking about work complexity and it's really key. This often gets overlooked in selection practices, is really understanding what are the factors of complexity of this job. What are the factors of complexity around how far out in the future does someone have to plan? What are the risks they have to manage?

What's the, complexity of the stakeholder group, they're, managing. What's the impact of their decisions? You can define factors of complexity in a lot of different ways, but if you end up putting somebody in a job and they're too small for the job, it's a mismatch. They're not the best suited person because if they're too small for the job, they're gonna get overwhelmed by the complexity.

[00:08:46] Mo Fathelbab: That makes sense. Also, one second. So how do you best, how do you test for somebody's ability to handle complexity?

[00:08:54] Susan Winchester: Well, the first step is really defining the role and what are the, factors of complexity and the role that you wanna put them into? And a lot of times we don't take enough time and due diligence to really define.

Well, what are the factors of complexity? You know, what's the level of innovation? Do they need to innovate new processes, or do they need to innovate new business models? So really spending time defining the complexity of the work before you start to assess someone's capability to do it. When you're assessing someone's capability, if it's somebody you don't know, it's, it just takes a little bit more diligence.

There are different questions that you can ask in a selection process to get at understanding the work that they were doing and the complexity of that work. So, for example. Asking questions like, tell me your top three career accomplishments of your entire life in terms of the work that you were doing.

People will typically describe things that were really hard, that they overcame, and so the person that's doing the interviewing. Obviously it has to demonstrate some judgment and discretion about listening for the level of work. And by the way, there's a whole model behind this, so we don't have time to go into all the, details behind the different levels of work complexity.

This is part of Dr. Jackson's brilliance, was defining seven different levels of differentiated value that are being created by different levels of work. But to understand the person's capability, you, first of all, as a team, you understand what's this complexity of this job. So at one of my companies, we had a CFO opening.

We had internal candidates and external candidates. We really described the complexity that needed to be managed. And then when we did the interview process, we would ask questions to understand the depth and breadth of the problems they've solved before to get a sense about their capability around complexity.

And then of course, there are always external assessments that can help validate the internal data. So I like using, Tools around the suitability model, which, you know, I've got a whole selection guide of questions developed over the years to help get at all these core elements of suitability.

The issues around complexity are understanding what's the most difficult problem you've ever had to solve. Tell me about the most complex issue you've ever had to resolve, and you learn how to listen to the different levels of complexity. because we have, each one of us has. Like binoculars of the world.

Some people are seeing into the future, the conceptual, intuitive, forward thinking people, many of us are thinking at a more operational, concrete, tangible level. You can teach people how to listen for these different levels of work capability based on the suitability model. So that's how you do it. thank you.

It's, Actually not that hard, but it just takes time and training to understand how to do it.

[00:11:42] Mo Fathelbab: Of course,

[00:11:44] Susan Winchester: the third element, the third pillar, which is my personal favorite, is called temperament. And it acknowledges that every one of us has a nature in terms of how we show up in the world and how we show up at work.

And we all have pluses and we all have minuses. And we all have good days and we all have bad days, and the whole point of looking at a person's temperament as an interviewer is understanding both pluses and minuses and then making a decision about what are the minuses that we can live with. There's never a perfect candidate ever, ever, but it's really important to understand and be aware of what are some of the downsides if we bring this person in relative to their temperament?

So, for example, I taught the suitability model to, the church that I belong to years ago. When we were doing a pastor search, you know, so it was a fairly complex church, but one of the elements of temperament of the candidate that we were interviewing was this particular leader. This pastor was very affiliative.

He obviously cared deeply about people. And so that's a very positive element of temperament, but sometimes our strengths over play can be our biggest weaknesses. And so one of the potential downsides is someone who's really strong on. Wanting people to be very affiliative, very empathetic, is that they can be too nice.

And so sometimes they have a harder decision stepping into difficult situations and you know, so we wanted to really make sure, 'cause we had some complex issues happening in the church, that whoever came in could hold his or her ground relative to managing some of the tension that was happening and not try to facilitate it to try to make everybody happy.

'cause that's not always able to do that. And actually it's the same thing with, CEO succession, having been a part of CEO succession on a number of occasions. There are a lot of people in the organization who feel that they should be the future CEO, and maybe they have the ski to do it, and let's just say they have the capacity for complexity.

I could list off five or six names right off the top of my head. Of leaders who didn't get that CEO job because they were too nice. They had a hard time making tough decisions about people. So that temperament piece is really understanding and looking at how, you know, how, what is this person's, what are their pluses and minuses, and can we live with the minuses?

And then the fourth category. Is accepts role requirements and it really just acknowledges that every job has a set of obligations and demands, and it's important to articulate those for the candidate that's being considered so that they, know full on going into the role, what they're expected to do.

Those obligations and demands could be being available 24 hours a day. Working on weekends, lots of travel, maybe an expat assignment in a different country, maybe working, in an isolated area. You know, there. It doesn't matter what it is. What matters is the person that you are interviewing, interested and willing to take on those obligations and demands.

So those four things together make the suitability model, and I love it because it is simple to teach. I. I can easily teach the work levels model behind the factors of complexity. There's a whole model behind that and as, leaders and HR people become more aware of these four key elements, they're better able to identify where there may be some gaps, but they're more aware of what they're going to get so that they can plan for it.

[00:15:12] Mo Fathelbab: So Susan, how did you measure the success of applying this wonderful model?

[00:15:17] Susan Winchester: Well, a lot of it was based on the, leaders and executives response to the model, you know, so for example, at one of my companies, when we were implementing a suitability model, we had a three year rollout planned. We were gonna start with development start easy, you know, how do you teach people?

What they need to focus on from a development standpoint. So we rolled out, a, you know, a piece around employees understanding suitability model, how they could use that to understand their development areas. And we taught managers how to have conversations with employees. And I remember presenting to a group of vice presidents what our plan was, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do this.

We had selection. Planned for three years down the road. 'cause I didn't wanna rush it. I wanted people to get comfortable with the model. I needed HR to get comfortable. It was very different than competencies. And I'll never forget one of the vice presidents standing up in the audience saying, we need selection now.

Can you accelerate your schedule? So how I, how I gauge the success of the model and its impact was really through the eyes of the leaders that I was working with. And so, for example, the CEOs, both the CEOs, three CEOs that I've worked with, who would use the suitability model for succession planning and thinking about who's got capability for complexity here.

What do we project their capability is in the future. And Dr. Jacks created some amazing models of how you can predict that out based on where someone's operating today, based on how many years they've been in their career. And it's really, it's just, it's really elegant how you can take some of these tools.

And it was really through the leaders saying, this has changed our discussion on how we communicate with people about a, what they need to focus on for development. B, whether or not we think they're gonna be a viable candidate to go up higher in the organization. Sometimes the conversation was about, this is a, mismatch of suitability, so we had to transition people out.

But using that framework of those four pillars that we just talked about, you could very easily diagnosed what was working or not working and be able to support leaders and having very difficult conversations if something wasn't working. But it became less personal. More clear why something wasn't working.

not everybody liked it because if, the leadership, the manager or the manager once removed, believed that that person was really at their maximal level of capability, they may opt out on their own and go find something that they perceive to be better. Some people, seek titles, bigger titles, more money, more perceived power, whatever.

but we all know that a lot of people get over promoted. Up into those ranks. They're being paid to deliver value at a different level than they were at a lower. But if they're not able to make that jump up in complexity, then the company's spending money that's, actually, not a good use of the cost for the managerial structure.

[00:18:18] Mo Fathelbab: Yeah. Great, great, great model. Thank you. I, hope, that many of our audience members can use it and benefit from it. It just makes all the sense in the world. I wanna shift the conversation and talk about your book, and specifically the title was very much of interest to me, emotional healing in the workplace.

So let's start with kind of your thesis as to how it is that there's emotional healing in the workplace.

[00:18:47] Susan Winchester: Right. So the book is, my co-author Martha and I call it Healing at Work, A Guide, to using career conflicts to overcome your past and build the future you deserve. And it's really based on my own journey in the corporate world for so many years.

And what's hard for me to admit, but I, willingly admit it 'cause it's key to, helping people on this journey also, is that 30 years of my 36 year career, my successes were fueled. By my underlying belief that I wasn't good enough. And I went into work every single day believing that I had to prove myself over and over and over and over.

I had a belief that it was everybody else's job to determine my worth and value, and my job was to be as perfect and as people pleasing as possible. And I would say that while I had some amazing experiences in my career, I had a lot of. Really self-induced stress and anxiety and worry. That was, culminating because of things that I experienced when I was little.

And so, Martha and I wrote the book. We did a ton of research and discovered a really interesting statistic. a study was done in the late nineties by Kaiser Permanente and the CDC, and they worked with two doctors, Felipe and Anda. And they were interested in asking adults, asked adults in the US. To answer a survey, and on the survey they listed 10.

Traumatic events that can happen to kids before the age of 18, that call them the adverse childhood events, ACEs. And they were shocked when they got back the results that of the 17,000 people, they asked, did you experience any of these, traumas? 67%, nearly 67% said they had experienced at least one of those.

40% had experienced two or more. And then there's a group of us, me included, that experienced four or more. And I will tell you in my own mind, I never thought of my childhood as dysfunctional. You know, I mean, there's a lot of hype around that. and I knew people had it far worse than I did, but the dynamic in my childhood.

No blame towards either of my parents. I think our parents do the very best that they can. but my dad had a tendency for unpredictable rage, which could be very scary. He was a big man. I was quite little, and I came to believe that I was the cause of his anger. And so unconsciously I came into my career thinking, oh, I'm an adult now.

I have a master's degree. I should be just fine. For, you know, like I said, the 30 years, for three years of my career, I was living in this unconscious state of understanding how much my past. Relationship with my dad and the beliefs that took away about myself and other people influenced every single thing that was happening to me at work.

It influenced how I felt about myself. You're not good enough. It influenced how I thought about other people and how I interpreted them. I. which led to a lot of anxiety and fear, but then my coping strategies were all around trying to be as perfect as possible. 'cause if I could be just perfect, you know, those sort of, that walking on eggshells, hypervigilant, always anticipating what could go wrong, then I could create a sense of predictability and safety in my environment and with Martha's help on this journey.

I started to realize that so many of people's experiences at work are literally being fueled from things that happened to them when they were younger. When I see myself or when I would see leaders overreacting, like the reaction was way out of base with what had happened. It began to culminate into this work that Martha and I did in all the research on neuroplasticity.

Understanding how we can reshape the brain and the neural networks in our brain, and bringing in positive psychology and focusing on positive things. We could leverage these things to help people. I. Start to heal from their own dysfunctional past, particularly in moments when we collide with one another at work, which is when that happens.

You know, we all know that feeling. We've just crashed into somebody. and we become emotionally upset or activated or wound up or triggered, whatever word you wanna use. And my experience of it was this feeling of if somebody was angry at me. Or I was being judged or rejected or left out, I would go into a quick unconscious spiral into a state of, rumination.

What did I do? What should I have done? Oh my gosh, I can't believe I said that in a meeting. I can't believe I didn't say this in a meeting. What's wrong with me? And that would lead to. My nervous system being on high alert and the way I managed it was not healthy, was to drink. And what I've found in this work is how many of us overachieving perfectionists in, especially in HR, wanting to take care of everybody, but also the leaders we're working with, were experiencing some of these same dynamics of the spiral down and.

I in, work, the work with Martha, as we wrote the book, began to realize so we can actually use those moments of conflict. You know, on, on the book that we have, we have two bumper cars facing off and unfortunately that's what conflict feels like at work sometimes is that we're bumping into, crashing into one another and, it's easy to go into that pit of suffering.

And what I realized was if we could turn this around or if we could spend less time in that pit of painful emotion. Worry, stress, fear. I'm gonna get fired, whatever, and teach people how to move off that unconscious wounded career path where I was completely unaware of how much that pass was influencing everything.

Teach people how to take back control. What I have a really simple three step method, which I can explain in a minute. To help them step back onto the conscious healing career path where we're not constantly beating ourselves up, where we learn how to sell, set healthy boundaries around working and not overworking, where we learn how to make choices that we are focused on taking care of ourselves.

And so what Martha and I coined was this concept of you can use workplace conflict is real laboratory for emotional healing. It's like a clue, you know, if you and I have a crash. And I perceive that you're angry at me or think I've disappointed you, whatever it is, is to say, okay, wait. You know, my three step process is first of all, step back and say, I've gotta create some choice.

Our brains are in, you know, it's in that fight, flight or freeze mode where we feel threatened. The amygdala, that little almond shake part of our brain, the reptilian brain that people call it. I think most people are in their reptilian brain at work and you see the fight, flight, freeze please.

Behavior all the time. Fight are the bullies. Freeze are the people that are trying to stay off the radar. Not wanting to be seen. Flight are the people that are get, you know, leaving the company 'cause they're too frustrated with their boss. And then those of us who are pleasers, spending all of our energy trying to get somebody else to validate us.

It's like an unbelievable, unproductive, painful place to be. We don't have to be. And that's what Martha and I unwind in the book is how do you actually take those moments and use them for your good and to move out of that state of suffering into a state of not suffering and actually finding joy. But I'm very passionate about teaching people they can totally change the game of their work experience.

[00:26:24] Mo Fathelbab: Well, Susan, that was incredibly, generous and vulnerable of you to share that with our audience. So Susan, what's one piece of advice you would have for the readers of your wonderful book?

[00:26:37] Susan Winchester: Sure. One piece of advice is, when you're feeling stressed out or in that moment of a bumper car crash yourself, ask yourself one simple question.

Am I Sure. So for example, if you see your boss looking at you in a way that you think is negative and that you conclude that he's gonna fire you, say to yourself, am I sure maybe my boss is just having a bad day? It's a very powerful, simple question that helps you check your own internal story against reality.

So that's one small piece of advice. And I would also highlight, I've got a very short nine minute TEDx talk where it's called Tackling Perfectionism, and it's a super quick, watch and I also go into a couple other ideas of things people can do.

[00:27:25] Mo Fathelbab: Wonderful. And last question, Susan, what is one piece of advice that you received that has shaped your work or personal life?

[00:27:33] Susan Winchester: One piece of advice that I received, which was hard at first to really integrate, is the idea that every single person we come into contact with that causes us, to, get, have that emotional reaction, to be upset by or triggered by. the advice I got was to recognize that that person is really just an avatar.

Helping you to learn a lesson that you need to learn. And so if you are confronted with somebody that's very angry, so angry authority people was a huge trigger for me that rather than, you know, blaming them, judging them, you know, staying at a state of victim, when we judge or blame others, we are completely giving away our control and power is to think to ourselves.

What is a gift that this person's giving me? You know, sometimes this avatar ideas, you know, they're here to teach me something about myself and also remembering that their behavior is about them. I'm responsible for my response.

[00:28:28] Mo Fathelbab: Thank you, and that's where we'll wrap it up for this episode of People and Strategy.

Again, a huge thanks to Susan for your valuable insights. You can follow the People and Strategy podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Also, podcast reviews have a real impact on podcast visibility. So if you enjoyed today's episode, leave a review to help others find the show. Finally, you could find all our episodes on our website at SHRM dot org slash podcast.

Thank you for listening and have a great day.