Summary: Rob Hall shares his journey from sales to HR and how his early career in sales prepared him for building a highly engaged culture. He emphasizes the importance of finding a greater cause that motivates employees and aligning the executive team to drive the mission. Rob also discusses the impact of leadership on culture and the need to maintain consistency in messaging and engagement initiatives

Key Takeaways:

Find a greater cause that motivates employees and aligns them with the mission.

Get executive leadership buy-in to drive the mission throughout the organization.

Connect employees to the impact of their work through customer stories and testimonials.

Maintain consistency in engagement initiatives and avoid letting them run on autopilot.

Chapters:

[0:01:31] Rob Hall shares important details about his career trajectory

[0:07:46] Focusing on the large middle of the organization for improvement

[0:09:04] Finding a greater cause to motivate employees

[0:11:05] Change in culture at Advanced Bionics after Sonova's acquisition

[0:12:44] Connecting employees to the mission of changing lives

[0:14:33] Balancing compensation, benefits, and mission for employee buy-in

[0:16:44] Pitfalls of losing focus and lack of leadership buy-in

[0:20:13] Using patient stories and quotes to keep mission alive

[0:24:58] Leaders must connect to the impact and paint a vision for success.

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Is currently the senior VP of HR at a Vita medical, and he's been in that role since 2019. And then from 20, 2007 to 2019, he was a director of HR at advanced bionics and then became director of HR for Asia Pacific. Based in Singapore and then ultimately becoming head of HR for North America for a company called Sonova, as I mentioned earlier, he started out his career in sales, and I think that's going to have a lot of impact in terms of some of the perspectives and lessons that we're going to learn in today's conversation, Rob Hall.

Welcome to the show.

Rob Hall: Thanks. Thanks for having me. I find these sessions are fabulous for people to see different perspectives.

But before we dive into the meat of the conversation, I'd like you to share with the audience and the listeners. Anything that you feel is important, but specifically related to the work that you're doing your role at Evita and just generally about your career trajectory, that's going to inform this conversation that we're going to have today.

And I said, I've never done that before. I really do this. And to be quite frank, he overpaid me. And I fell into HR. [00:02:00] I'll be quite frank about it. And I saw recruiting though, as a sales role. So to me, then you could make the transition mentally to make this step. And three months into that role the head of HR decided to go back to a different role.

And they said, ah, anybody can do H. R. Go ahead and take it. And it's that mentality that H. R. Is anybody could take it. It's just get papers process. Get it done. It was that kind of a mentality of a company like a lot of small companies as they get started. Company was about 200. We built it to about 600 when I left and went back into an operation sales role with a different company and then was recruited back to advance bionics when they separated from Boston Scientific.

Sanova then determined that we're going to let HR be run by two people. So I had a counterpart. And I will tell you right now, right off the bat, it's the dumbest thing you can do. Two people trying to run a department doesn't make sense. Two people reporting to two different people also is very difficult to manage.

However, in our case. The lady that was my counterpart, her name is Robin Stewart and I'll use her name because she's fantastic. She had a skill set that absolutely complimented mine. And we allowed each other to have that. I like being with the people, I like going out and talking to everybody, and she loved the policy and procedure and the transactional part of HR.

S. in some of those regards. The, so that opens your eyes to the fact of what people, a lot about what people are. That led to being the head of North America ultimately having Canada and the U. S. And about 3, 500 employees under that and a team of about 30. buT my, with that said, we moved to Chicago.

My wife loves to be around our kids who are adult, full of adults, but she loves being around them. And she says, okay, I'm done with Chicago. You can stay if you want. That's up to you. But I'm going back to LA. I left Sonoma because they would not let me work from LA. And then joined got an opportunity here to work at Aveda and get back into medical device strict medical device.

It's passionate about that. And, from a very simple HR thing that I have discovered, and this has been through my life, what no matter what I did, I've never found HR to change a company with a new policy or a new procedure. They change companies with people. And whether it's recruiting, whether it's engagement, whether it's development, that's how you change a company from an HR perspective.

And that's what drives me in HR.

Rob Hall: It's a very simple answer. And from a sales perspective, when you start with a company like Kodak, In the day, not today. Kodak is obviously not the company. It was when I joined. They were on the tail end of success at that point. But what I learned from a sales perspective, they taught you a sales skill and it was called spin.

And there's all kinds of versions of this. And all it is listening to the employee, listening to the person and then repeating back and giving them exactly what they asked for. Don't mix it up, and just turn your products into what their needs are, by asking questions and understanding that the same goes for recruiting.

The same goes for employee engagement, talk to people, hear what they have to say, find out what their motivators are, and then see what you can do, whether it's an individual issue that's really easy because you are very specific to them. But how do you take that message and bring it across a broad spectrum of people understanding that three of the people.

Dr. Jim: I love that you brought out that point because it reminded me of a conversation that we recently had with Tim Sackett, who is well known in talent acquisition spaces . He said, whenever you're designing policy or doing anything, you shouldn't really do it with the intention of modeling it after the extremes of your organization.

You want to model it after that design towards the large middle. And improving that group in whatever aspect or dimension that you want to improve, because to your point, there's always going to be some folks that are going to be extremely happy there's going to be other people that are going to be constantly complaining.

Rob Hall: I and I'm just going to add a twist to this. It, because it frustrates me so bad is, and it gets to be a macro level and it gets into politics a little bit, but we've allowed the extremes to dictate our policies. And I don't care what side you're on. It doesn't matter. We're allowing the extremes to determine the future of our country when the bulk of the people in the middle pretty much agree.

They, hedging back and forth a little bit, but we're fighting over the 8 percent of the people for on each side that we're upset about and we're reading about narrative and that's all that drives press. So it goes to that factor too. It's it's exactly the same,

Dr. Jim: I can't disagree with anything that you've said. I want to set a little bit of context before I ask this question. You've worked at organizations that were small with a couple hundred people, and you've worked at organizations that had international scope and had thousands of people that.

Rob Hall: As I thought about that question and I go back immediately, I react to what motivates people to do their job, what really gets people excited and, okay. People will say it's money and I'll tell them, no, it's not because I probably have 100 people that we did. Somebody was deciding to leave.

We convinced him to stay. We gave him more money. So they'd stay in six months. They left anyways, because that usually isn't the reason that motivates people. It's some greater cause. And if you can find that great cause and make that the the flag that you want to hold it.

Everybody's willing to put their hand on it. That will people. Motivate people to do more and create a value of your company that isn't going to change with a change in salary. And I'll just share an example. Advanced Bionics when I was with them and started with them they create a product called a cochlear implant is the name of the product, but it is a device that allows the deaf to hear.

Things that didn't go well, the doctors that say our device fails and stuff like that. And you could see this visceral change in our employees when they started hearing the stories and hearing what it was about and how a little girl that couldn't hear now heard her mom for the first time and they're telling the story and they're showing the video.

You can see these on YouTube all over the place. You start to buy into that story. Now you add more around that to round out. But there was a time I truly believed that there was a 30 percent premium to work in advance of bionics over your pay and is, and so you would need, if you were making, for argument's sake, 100, you needed 130.

Then it became not about the patient anymore. All of a sudden. The equation, you could just see it going from 30% to even less that you're making. This, the pain of change now is easier than the pain of staying the same. So I wanna leave, so if you can find that hook at a Vita Medical, I didn't even share what a Vita Medical does.

We have created a new standard of care for burn victims that we regenerate skin and very simply put, instead of inch for inch covering of a burn as is skin grafting, we can take a very small piece of your skin in 30 minutes. And just to give you an example, a credit card size piece of your skin in our system, 30 minutes later, I can spray your entire back with your skin cells for recovery.

We had pictures film. We created memories. Okay, that's a great cause. There's nothing wrong with that. But when you change a person's life and really can alter that they hear their mom say I love you for the first time or a person gets out of the hospital sooner after a bad burn, whether it's fireworks, you can think of all the reasons that happens.

Us delivering free devices to Maui. For the burn victims there. That's a special mission to share with people and it's exciting.

I think everybody can agree with that. There are going to be people that are listening to this and say yeah, we've heard that mission, vision, values, alignment stuff all the time, the aligning purpose with the job stuff all the time, but here's a reality, Rob. I'm a line level manager and I have a team of 15 people and everybody's so busy and running thin.

Like what do I need to be doing so that I'm building that connection to the broader purpose so that people are connected?

Rob Hall: That's a great question. And how do you do that? I shared with you this connect to patient idea. So let me notch that up a level. We actually in medical device, you keep track of who touches the device. It's part of our process. You everybody knows who did what, when and where, when you make these devices.

You didn't have to that didn't go to the event would go back and tell these stories and it would add just groundswell of support as a line level manager. What we ask is that they you can. Remind people throughout the day what they're doing, how it will make a difference. Now, does that mean 100 percent of the people buy in?

Absolutely not. Does that mean that money isn't part of the equation too? So don't get me wrong. It's all balanced. You've got to have the balance of the compensation, the benefits and the story. So it's not one thing that, you can underpay everybody and say it's all about the mission and people get all excited.

But the reality is you got to have all the other pieces there to

Dr. Jim: I really like how you flush that out because it's important to say that, you can have a great mission, but if you're not meeting the basic requirements of the average person in the job, the greatest mission in the world, isn't going to get that person over the hump.

From an alignment perspective. So that's an important distinction or nuance to bring out. But what I found really interesting about what you said, and I'm going to say this in some people that know the stuff that I regularly talk about are going to chuckle, but it's really interesting to me that you're drawing this really strong connection between

customers and impact to the mission and in sales we often talk about

how you have to be buyer or customer centric

Let's talk about that game changing impact where, you want to make sure that everybody is deeply engaged into the goal. And we talked a little bit about how you uncovered this and when people are trying to connect those dots. And execute at that level. What were some of the pitfalls that you ran into where it got out of line?

You're trying to deeply connect with the customer. You're trying to deeply connect people to the mission. What were the mistakes that you made that others who want to do the same thing need to be watching out for?

That is important. The other thing I learned too, is the executive leadership has to buy into this too. I'm a believer HR can absolutely. Develop culture. But leadership creates the culture and people look to the leaders. There was a period of time where our previous president here didn't care.

You could just see he lost track of that. And when I got the new president came in, we started to implement these things. He goes, I want these every month. I want this part of our message because that I believe in this. And it's one of those things that you have to have leadership to be part of it.

HR can do so much can say we're going to do this, and if you have a leadership that says, we don't have time for that at town hall, we really need to tell them to cut costs or we need to get the budget done or we need to do this. You will lose, you will start to lose that consistency and momentum.

Dr. Jim: We can see a lot of this in action and even in a lot of different industries currently, you're either defined in terms of your business operations and some of this might not even be in your control, you can take one camp. Our number one responsibility is to maximize shareholder value in any way possible. Or we want to be profitable, but we also want to do something that's going to have an impact in the world around us beyond just getting our executives paid. So it's an interesting distinction on how that shows up in. The individuals maintaining commitment to the organization and mission.

Rob Hall: In all cases with this is part of my team was assigned to this. That it was part of their job, part of their goals, that this was something that we would, they would not allow me to get too busy. So we as a team took ownership of this. I would say the other thing we did especially advanced by we haven't done it yet because we're been moving around with offices.

But we got pictures of patients and on every conference room or every major wall. We did the what are they called wraps? That we were able to put on these walls of these incredible pictures of our patients one surfing because we got an underwater or a water device and in everywhere you walked, you saw patients, you saw stories.

And you could tell that whoever wrote it was crying at the end. You could just sense the emotion that they had of how these things have changed their lives. And so we take different tactics. Not everybody can come to the connect to patients is what we called it. Not everybody can do that, but they can read emails.

They can do that on their time. I always joke that they always use HR. They put delete filters on HR messages, but that this is a type of stuff that grasps them that they go, Oh, that's so cool. What a great story. Thanks for sharing. Those are different ways and they're easy. They're easy.

Half the time you cut and paste, put it in an email, send it to everybody. It's 30 seconds of your time to do it.

Say, talk about the impact on a regular basis, bring out those stories and make it visible and make it come alive. And that's how you get everybody realigned to the mission. So it's a it's a real simple lesson, but it's really difficult to like, keep in mind when we know what our days look like, everybody's running thin.

Everybody's running lean. Everybody's got. Endless task wheel. So I really like how you call that out. Rob, this conversation has flown by and I think if we were in a different format, we could probably talk about this for about two hours because

Rob Hall: Two things. Become very clear. Number one, find what that is. Do the work to figure out what is going to drive your organization and get them excited about what they're doing. Whatever that is, obviously medical device. It's very simple, but there are every company has something. Find out what it is and then build on that.

The other piece is get aligned with the executive team to be sure that is what you're doing. A message that can be driven throughout the company. If you're doing it on your own from an HR perspective, it will not take because everybody's going on. Nobody else cares. Why am I listening to them? Like you were talking about a line leader.

Dr. Jim: I think those are really critical things that you've brought to the table. If people want to continue the conversation and have. More detailed discussion with you. Where can people find you?

Rob Hall: The best place to find me is on LinkedIn. And Robert Hall, which I guarantee there's probably 10 million of them. But if you look at Vita Medical Robert Halton, it's A B I T A and it's skin regeneration. Those kind of things will bring it up, or Advanced Bionics, if that is an easier name to remember.

On LinkedIn, it's a simple way to find me, and I respond to everybody.

The things that stood out to me when I was listening to your conversation is This overall theme that as a leader, even though you were specifically in sales, I think as a leader in general, you need to capture some of those core things that the best sellers in the world do, which is connect to the impact.

If you as a leader aren't connecting to the impact of the mission and connecting it for your people, if you aren't connecting it to the impact that it has on your customers, you're not going to have an aligned team. That's really looking at the big picture. They're going to go through the motions and that's going to lead to an environment where.

Sounds simple. But you can't take the position that I'm too busy. There's nothing that you have. That's more important than connecting your people. To the impact that the work is having in the world around you.

For those who have listened to the conversation, if I hope you enjoyed it, you can find this episode on all your major podcast platforms. Leave us a review. And tune in next time where we will have another great leader joining us to tell us about the game changing realizations that they had that helped them build high performance teams.