Summary:

Matt Anderson shares his journey from art school to HR and how his background in the arts has shaped his approach to building elite teams. He emphasizes the importance of disciplined focus on a few simple things to drive impactful change. Matt discusses the need to involve stakeholders, gather feedback, and iterate on initiatives. He also highlights the significance of effective onboarding and the role it plays in employee retention. Matt's goal is to influence HR practices at the parent company, Berkshire Hathaway, and drive a people-centric approach.

Key Takeaways:

Disciplined focus on a few simple things is key to building elite teams.

Involving stakeholders and gathering feedback leads to successful initiatives.

Effective onboarding improves employee retention.

Start small, iterate, and involve others in the change process.

Chapters:

0:04:51 The impact of working in retail and juggling multiple jobs on Matt's people leadership skills

0:07:29 How Matt's experience in operations helps him create HR policies that serve the people

0:10:11 The importance of disciplined focus on a few key areas to build elite teams

0:13:10 Focusing on recruiting and onboarding for improvement

0:16:23 Impact of onboarding on retention and career progression

0:21:05 Starting with small, manageable pieces and iterating

0:24:14 Getting customer perception, involving process owners, and having a touchstone

0:25:58 Four things for executing successful initiatives: keep it simple.

Connect with Dr. Jim: linkedin.com/in/drjimk

Connect with CT: linkedin.com/in/cheetung

Connect with Matt Anderson: linkedin.com/in/matthew-anderson-9828392b

Music Credit: winning elevation - Hot_Dope



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So let me give you a little bit of background on Matt. He's been at Rio Grande as a business coach, director of manufacturing and now director of HR, spanning a career of 25 years in that organization. He was originally born across the cheddar curtain. So that is in Wisconsin, in Milwaukee, for those who are not familiar with that reference but moved very young to New Mexico, where he eventually graduated from the university of New Mexico with a bachelor of arts.

he's a current member of SHRM, and he's also serving on the boards of a couple organizations. That's just the highlights of what Matt has done throughout his career. Matt Anderson, welcome to the show.

Matt Anderson: Thanks for having me, Jim.

Really nice to be here.

Dr. Jim: Super excited to get into this conversation. And I think we have a lot of ground that we're going to cover. And certainly your trajectory and career path isn't the traditional HR path. So I'm sure we'll spend some time talking about that. But before we dive in. I'd like you to share with us, and especially for the listeners, some of the things that I might not have included in your bio that you feel is important to mention that's going to give the appropriate context for the conversation that we're about to have.

My leadership came from art school.

Dr. Jim: It's pretty interesting that you started on the arts side from an education perspective. And then what's the story behind you going into bakery and how did you end up shifting from that to being a business coach,

Matt Anderson: yeah. I had this very romantic vision of what it was to be a baker. My family being, from the upper Midwest had this idea of working in a German bakery, doing all that kind of stuff. And I had this. Really cool idea of what that would be. And my mom actually found an apprenticeship at a baker, a German baker here in Albuquerque that was looking for an apprentice.

Always been interested in drawing and painting and other artists, but decided, hey, that's something I could actually explore. And so got into that, although art wasn't the only thing I was still very interested in, like literature did some of that, but. Really concentrated on the art. So from there, went through, probably got through my junior year of college and realized I was tired of being a poor student and started getting some part time jobs, some full time jobs, working a couple of jobs at a time, again, running myself ragged by doing that.

Dr. Jim: So there's a couple of things in what you said that I think is worth expanding on. So you started out in what I would consider high volume retail on the bakery side. And then as a student, you started working a number of part time jobs to You know, make ends meet and whatnot. So that's hashtag relatable.

I went through the same stuff when I was going through school too. One of the things that I'm curious about is how did that experience working in that retail setting and also that experience of being a full time student and also juggling a bunch of jobs inform your people leadership when you were moving through your career,

And helping connect with them to understand exactly what they need.

Dr. Jim: Great stuff, Matt. And I appreciate you adding all of that texture. I think it's going to be helpful in this overall conversation. So when you think about your time. At Rio Grande, and you've been there for 25 some odd years. What's the accomplishment that you're most proud of during your time there?

Matt Anderson: It sounds a little like I'm saying this because I'm on the HR Impact Show, but really it was getting into HR.

I was the one that they came to get these things implemented to get people to have buy in. A couple of years ago, when I was approached to be in HR, it wasn't something I was actually pursuing. I was still, I really do love operations and I love those projects. And honestly, there's something very satisfying about, you take this material and you make this other thing very satisfying.

Dr. Jim: 1 of the common complaints that exists on the business side of an organization is that H.

R. doesn't really know what we're going through or what we're doing on a day to day basis. They just make a bunch of policies that we have to figure out how to get done. If that's broadly accurate, how did your time as a business coach, as the director of manufacturing, as all that time that you spent on the operations side, how has that smoothed the transition for some of the policies and programs that you've put into place?

Matt Anderson: In the past year, for the longest time, we had a bereavement pay policy and in the policy, it stipulated that your time off for bereavement had to be three consecutive days.

So we were able to rework that policy to where it made sense in the real world. It wasn't just an administrative. Benefit to keeping them together, but we were able I was able to work with payroll and HR and the business leaders to say, hey, can we just split these apart?

Dr. Jim: I really like how you wrap that up at the end where you're talking about, it's not about what's the easiest administrative solution.

What are the big moonshots that you have on your radar that you want to get accomplished in the next year or two?

Actually get to be part of developing our parent companies approach to HR. And how to balance the people centric with the business centric because say the a lot of HR works directly say under A CFO, and a lot of things are driven that way. And I understand why. And, HR is your largest expense for most businesses.

So how can we influence, like I said, upward? So that's my big moonshot, is to be able to have a seat at the table. We're at Rio now. HR is becoming much more than the problem solvers. When something goes wrong, we're actually driving engagement and implementing engagement tools and engagement activities, which is key to our future growth.

Matt Anderson: I think I shared a story when we talked earlier about being an art school and I had a professor. He is fantastic. And at the beginning of the semester, he says, you get to pick 2 colors. And 1 theme, and you're going to work that for the whole semester. And I remember seeing, like, all these crest all in faces in my class going, oh, my God, how can we do that?

There's only so much we can do and that was his point. Is that when we limited our options, we got really creative and we were really able to focus because we weren't thinking about our color choices, what formats, what's, themes, all that kind of stuff. In the back of my mind, that was influencing how I was leading throughout my career.

Or are keeping us from moving things forward, address those couple of things. Now, we don't get to choose when not to deal with stuff in HR. We still have to deal with things, but we start narrowing down our focus to work on a couple of things and let, keep those other things, maintain what you need to maintain.

But start focusing on things that will really have an impact, because usually if you're hitting that top 10, 20 percent of the work and the issues that you need to resolve, then the other things below that start resolving themselves.

Matt Anderson: So we started with a survey, and we had our 16 areas of HR responsibility, and this is everything from culture, benchmarking, compensation, benefits, all those things, and we actually surveyed our leaders in the company, so this is executive directors, business directors, team leaders, everybody, and we had them rate their satisfaction and satisfaction.

And so we started there. We said, all right, if there's two things, my first year in HR, there were two things that we really worked on. One was recruiting, the other was onboarding, because during the pandemic and before, those were things that we had struggled with. We had, our onboarding was honestly, there was this very Simple, two day orientation.

And then we were like, good luck. We really put together a whole program. And when we did that survey the second time, just a couple of months ago, that onboarding had really moved up, our retention had grown, which we didn't focus on, we didn't focus on retention, but by focusing on the onboarding, retention actually came up.

Dr. Jim: You started this process by surveying and getting the pulse of leadership and executives on where they see is the disconnect. I think one of the common things that happens within a lot of organizations is that you lose steam, the closer you get to the front lines of an organization in terms of momentum to make change.

So oftentimes, you ask executives and senior leaders. How do you think we're doing? What do you think about our mission vision values? Everybody else say that's great. You get down to the line and you'll ask an employee or even a line manager. What do you think about the work that you're doing and how it all fits in?

Matt Anderson: Sure, and some of that was very intentional in what we did with that onboarding. And with our mentorship program, so we have a peer mentoring program, and we set up in the surveys. We also do at 30, 60, 90 and 120 days. We actually have questions that ask people about those different aspects. Are do you know how your tasks.

Relate to the overall goals of the company. Are you getting the answers you need? Are you meeting the people you need to meet so that we had some kind of sense? Are we if we're doing all this again? And we're getting that perception of leadership. Are we also getting those results? And are people feeling.

That they're getting that support at the on the front line on the floor.

Dr. Jim: The other thing that stood out about what you had mentioned earlier in terms of how you had impacted some changes, you focused on recruitment, but specifically within recruitment, you focused on onboarding and you saw the impact.

Matt Anderson: Within those art and learning classes, because maybe we'd have two or three people a week, coming into the organization and what we do is we'd open up those classes if there were, of course, we're not going to invite them to say the first day paperwork stuff.

We're going over the handbook type of stuff, but when we were going over things like values, what we call our three or three R's of respect, responsibility and results, we invite people from the environment in. And we started doing those classes where we had suspended a lot of classes during the pandemic.

Dr. Jim: So there's a lot that you've been able to accomplish in a relatively short amount of time. When you have these sort of high ticket or high value initiatives that you want to impact.

You can almost get into a phase where you're trying to come up with a perfect solution. How did you avoid falling into that sort of trap?

Matt Anderson: One of my mentors said, let's start at 80 percent there and figure out the last little pieces. Cause even when you think you have the perfect plan, there's usually things that go wrong at the end.

So if you involve people in saying, Hey, I think we're just about there, but I need your help. And, figuring out what we need to change. Adjust. Please give us feedback. I think when you give yourself that freedom and remove that pressure from yourself from having to have the perfect solution and knowing that you're mostly there, but you need some help tweaking, dialing it in.

Dr. Jim: I like your your emphasis on not getting too worried on about having the perfect plan. I think it's a Tyson quote. Everybody's got a plan until you get punched in the face. How did you build in that iterative improvement, the continuous improvement process into that initiative once it got rolling?

Matt Anderson: Part of it comes from that lean training that I've had and working with teams and helping them develop. We have a lot of, we have a high percentage of white, yellow, green, and even a couple of black belts at Rio Grande. I think we also have a continuous improvement. Incentive program here at Rio.

Airtight solution, so it was a combination of all of those.

Another important piece is the discipline around that. And so I've built with my team and link teams, a project plan and that project plan has a due dates. It has people responsible. It has notes and documents attached to it, and we review that plan on a regular basis. Not saying that every plan is going to go exactly how you put it, but at least everybody's on the same page.

Everybody's aware of what's going on. We're making the changes advising each other as we're making those changes. Finding those points of collaboration along the way. So again, everybody's involved and it keeps it moving forward. And once you've built that expectation that everything's going to keep moving forward, and you're going to review this again next week, or in a couple of days.

People get used to that cadence and they're ready for it. They're prepared for

I think if you take that same concept and drill that down to a manager and team level. That could be a great basis for your 1 on 1s as well. So if you're regularly having conversations about where do you want to be? And what do you want to do in your next role? This is your opportunity to build a plan and also execute against that plan on a regular basis.

What do you know now that you wish you had known then

Matt Anderson: yeah, I think there's a few things. So 1st is to plant the seed.

Let people know why you're doing something, how, what the benefits are, paint that picture, share the vision of where you're trying to go and why this is an important effort. And then also, because you're trying to win over the hearts and minds of folks. Start small, get them engaged, when I started a process of measurements in our manufacturing area, at first, we started with 2 or 3 measurements, and we didn't talk about whether they were good or bad, we just got in the habit of doing it, and reviewing it, and just in starting to watch it, things started to improve.

In that change process so that once it really does get into the tough stuff or gets into the stuff that's going to need a lot more effort, they're ready for it. They already know where you're going. You built a rhythm into your daily practice. And interaction with books

Dr. Jim: This actually came up in in a number of different conversations in different ways. I think when you're thinking about, how should you get the process started and also put in the framework necessary for. A reasonable frame framework that's going to put you in a position for success.

The things that you're talking about, you need to make sure that people are aligned like the right people are aligned to what you're trying to do. You need to make sure that the messaging is sound like who's getting the message. Are they understanding what the message is about? Then you're talking about how the pacing and also the sequencing, how fast do you want to go?

Matt Anderson: I think, first, you have to get a temperature or an insight into your customers and what their perceptions are, because again, you can be doing everything very well, but if no one knows that, or there's a gap in that understanding, you need to address that.

It doesn't need to be perfect out of the gate. We're going to learn as we go, and we're going to gain a lot of credibility and respect by letting people know that we're figuring this out as we go. Because we're going to get some open, honest, frank feedback, but people aren't going to be mad at us.

They're going to know that we're not all the way there, that we're pretty sure this is going to work and we need their help. So it just, it's this almost this bifurcation of support and resources to help you make the process. Tighter and tighter as you iterate and one other thing is, having some kind of tool or touchstone for everybody to review so that everybody knows what the plan is, how we're doing and we.

And revisit that plan on a regular basis.

Dr. Jim: Great stuff, Matt. If people want to continue the conversation, where, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

And yeah, glad to talk to anybody. One of the great things about Rio is we're pretty open. We love to have visitors and, partner with other people. To help everyone find more effective ways and I honestly, most of the times when I'm sharing with somebody else, I get a lot more from that person that has the issue and telling me what they've done.

I'm getting a lot more information than I'm giving.

Dr. Jim: I appreciate you hanging out with us and sharing with us your experience and what you've learned through your career, and especially when it comes to executing some of these large initiatives when I think about this conversation and in keeping with the theme that we've been talking about, which is simplicity, if you're looking at executing and making an impact, On any initiative that you want to take out here are the four things that stood out that you mentioned.

So I appreciate you sharing that with us. For those of you who have listened to this conversation appreciate if you leave us a review and tell us what you thought of the discussion tune in next time, where we will bring on another great leader to share with us the game changing insights that they had that helped them build a high performing team