Summary:

A newly promoted HR leader in a struggling distribution center “rubber-stamps” a disciplinary action and then discovers HR got it wrong. Regina walks through how she owned the mistake, repaired the harm, and used it to overhaul investigations, re-balance the safety committee, rebuild trust, and turn a fear-based culture into a commitment-based one.

Regina Ross is EVP, Chief People & Operations Officer at Opportunity Finance Network. A transformational leader with 30+ years across Target, Amazon, Pitney Bowes, and Khan Academy, she bridges operations, HR, and change management to scale impact through people-centered strategy.

Chapters:

00:00 – “We don’t trust leadership”: the hidden safety problem

03:45 – Promotion + turnaround + a ‘problem employee’

07:10 – Bias for action vs. engineer’s rigor

10:05 – The appeal that flipped the case

13:00 – Make it right

16:20 – Guardrails against bias

19:10 – Rebuilding the safety committee

21:00 – Listening tours & confidential channels

23:15 – Fix the manager layer first

26:30 – Grassroots growth engine

29:10 – KPIs + culture: the both/and

32:00 – Leadership playbook

Host Dr. Jim Kanichirayil: linkedin.com/in/drjimk

Guest Regina Ross: linkedin.com/in/reginaross

Executive Producer Jim Kanichirayil: linkedin.com/in/drjimk

Music Credit: "Lost in Dreams" by Kulakovka

Here's how we're trying to do it. We went back into, doing more. It wasn't an employee engagement survey, but it was more of a suggestion box where people could put their private, suggestions in, and they knew that there was going to be confidentiality and they, and so if they brought up a, an issue or a concern, there was not gonna be retribution.

And so it shifted and it did shift. It take, it took a while. But from year over year while I was there, the employee engagement survey stats improved our safety performance, improved our productivity because then you don't have a culture of fear. You have a culture of commitment where people like we're all working on one team towards the same goal.

It was difficult though. I will tell you.

Dr. Jim: You've just earned your first big promotion, and it's not just a promotion. It's a complete move from one group to another, and you're leading HR . Here's the kicker.

You're dropped into a turnaround effort. You've gotten this promotion and you are leading a group that has been underperforming and has been historically underperforming for quite a while. You're just getting your legs underneath you and you're confronted with a scenario where you have a quote unquote problem employee that you need to deal with.

So not only did you make a mistake, you made a mistake that has career implications on somebody else. So how do you recover from that? How do you make it right?

This is a situation that Regina Ross actually encountered earlier in her career. She's a transformational leader and dynamic communicator with over 30 years of experience driving organizational change and unlocking human potential. She's the executive vice president, chief people and operations officer at Opportunity Finance Network, and regina leads enterprise wide strategy and transformation initiatives that empower mission-driven organizations to scale impact. Prior to joining OFN, Regina served as a Chief people officer at Khan Academy and held senior leadership roles at Target, Amazon, Pitney Bowes, and she's consistently bridge operations, HR, and change management.

Regina. Welcome to the show.

Regina Ross: Thank you, Dr. Jim. Glad to be here.

Dr. Jim: Nice having you. And this is the second time that you've done a show with me, but this time we get to do a little bit longer form conversation versus a 10 minute chat on the on a convention floor. We're gonna, we're gonna get into some interesting spaces that we wouldn't have had time for at a conference.

So you ready to tear the bandaid off?

Regina Ross: I'm ready. Let's do it.

Dr. Jim: So tell us about the time in your career where you did something and in the moment, once you got a full view of what happened, you thought, oh crap, I'm gonna get fired.

And so let me just tell you a little bit more. This was after crossing from Ops leadership into my first HR role. At Target, our senior team was focused on improving the performance of our distribution center. We were ranked bottom in many categories, including safety. So we formed a safety committee.

That could help us evaluate accidents and injuries. And after that, they recommended remedies including employee disciplinary action if warranted. So my HR team presented to me the recommendation for a safety related final written warning for a known problem employee who worked in the department that I had previously managed.

And when the employee appealed her case to me, I investigated her case more thoroughly and I realized that the corrective action was not warranted.

So walk me through your head space when you're making those transitions into this environment, what's going through your mind as far as the first 90 days or so in that role?

Regina Ross: Yeah. For me, Dr. Jim, it was like I didn't grow up in HR and I wasn't trained as h an HR person. And so I am coming to it from a, an analytical mindset. I'm an engineer by training and strategic planning and looking at this senior leadership team. Where we were not performing. And so how do I now in this enterprise wide, HR role, help us drive performance, not just in my department, but across the entire organization.

I know these team members. I know this person. And so all of that was just this confluence. And I'll tell you another thing too. When I stepped into the role, my regional HR leader said, Hey, Regina, even though you didn't grow up in hr, your transition has been the smoothest and the best that I've seen.

So there was no pressure, right? But I felt a little bit of that pressure to like lead the HR function in a, a good way and then also drive the performance of our distribution center so that we could start improving in our productivity, our safety, financial performance, and all of those things.

Dr. Jim: So that's interesting. A smooth transition from function to function, and you get that feedback.

Regina Ross: Yes.

Regina Ross: I think so, and this is where I did not take the due diligence of really investigating, because I'm an engineer, so I know, how to investigate something thoroughly, ask the questions, the five why's. I didn't do that in this case Dr. Jim. And but I believe that my bias for action and my desire to.

Like show improvement. And the feedback like, Hey Regina, this has been a great transition into the HR space. I was too confident. And so I did not do the thorough analysis that I would normally do in other roles and other functions, and that was my mistake.

Regina Ross: And so this is me, I believe Dr. Jim, trying to overcompensate for my tendency to overanalyze. And so I've gotten feedback, from my early days as an engineer that Regina, you don't have to have a 99.5% confidence level like you've gotta. Good, good enough is good enough, and you've gotta know when to move.

So I would tend to push myself to action without getting tripped up in my own tendencies to overanalyze. And so in this instance, I think that tendency or my effort to compensate for this trait of mine, of analysis. Worked against my benefit because I just moved too fast. Typically, I would want to deconstruct, I would want to analyze, I would want to do the thorough, but I believe also I felt the pressure like we were not performing.

And we need to make an action make a decision and take action.

And what you're describing reminds me of that assessment. It sounds like you might have been in like your stress behavior because of the urgency to prove things. That's my cereal box. Organ organizational psychology coming up. One of the other things that, that I wanna circle back to is that because you were familiar with the group that you were transferring into,

Mentioned that you might bring in, you might have brought in some of your biases. And this particular situation included a quote unquote known.

Problem employee. So tell us a little bit more about the, how the known problem employee bias set you up for some issues.

And so I did not ask the detailed questions. They did not present more details around the situation. And I went to a conclusion very quickly. Because of my history and because of most of the team's history with this particular individual. And it was not until the employee, thank goodness that she had the courage, they had the courage to come and speak with me, and it presented the situation and shared their perspective.

I'm like, oh my gosh. And I, of course I didn't immediately say, oh, we're wrong. But I took her information and then did the research and investigated the case, and she was absolutely right.

Regina Ross: So what's going through my head is how many other of these cases have we gotten wrong because we're on this, mission of improving our safety performance and how, how have we perhaps in the past jumped to conclusions that were not thoroughly investigated? And so that was one thing that I was thinking through.

The other thing is oh my gosh. So my regional HR leader has trusted me to make these decisions and has empowered me and given me a lot of autonomy. And I need to go back to her and say, I, I was wrong. And I need to acknowledge that. And not just to my regional HR leader, but then to the leadership team where we were, focused on making these improvements.

I'm not treating them just as a number but looking at them as human beings and putting the human back in human resources. So all of that was going through my head.

Dr. Jim: there's a lot there. You have the individual. Issue that needs to be solved. You have a potential systemic issue that needs to be looked at. And then third, you have a cultural component to look at too, because let's be real in a distribution center environment, largely with hourly employees, it's easy to fall into the mindset if you are on the operations side of it or the management side of it.

Oh, if somebody isn't working out, there's probably three or four other or 10 other people that are willing to take that job and we can tear the bandaid off very quickly. So when you look at a multifaceted set of problems like that, how did you start tackling those things? You have to rectify the thing that you screwed up. So let's start there.

That should have been reached had we done a thorough investigation. So I circled the wagons with them before going, because I wanted to, I want to invite them to challenge my thinking, they were the ones who came up with a recommendation and presented it to me, and I co-signed it and just went off to the races to, to implement a corrective action.

And so they're like, yeah. You're right, there was not a pushback, once I presented the case and presented the information, and so there was a, I wanted to make sure this was a coaching, a coachable, teachable moment for them and make sure that we were aligned so that we would shift our mindset and our approach.

That's the first step.

Regina Ross: For me it was about what is the right thing to do? And so I, maybe check my ego and it's not about me, it's about the culture. It's about this employee. It's about, am I going to set a trend and a precedent of just like [00:15:00] bulldozing over, team members. And so it really wasn't about me and I didn't think about necessarily okay, what are the, implications for me, I wanted to make it right because that was the right thing to do.

I also trusted and had a good relationship with my. Regional HR leader. She had given me a lot of autonomy. I made good decisions. I came was tapped on the shoulder by the regional team and asked to stay step into the HR leadership role because during a unionizing campaign they saw that me as a senior operations leader, I was leading my function and my department very well.

My team was very engaged, so they saw that and wanted me to bring that into a broader, impact across the entire organization. So I had a lot of I guess proof points and receipts that I'm a good leader, and so I didn't think about oh, okay, this is a major mistake. I'm a horrible leader.

No, I knew that I had a good track record and I believe that was going to count for me. My focus was like, I've gotta make this right.

And you made your recommendations the recommendations were received. Then what happened?

Regina Ross: Then I talked to the employee, so after the leadership team, the HR business partners, the safety committee yeah, Regina, we see this. I went to her one-on-one and I apologized and I said, we got this wrong. I am sorry for. Making this judgment and the implications.

And I told her, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to reach out to the regional, my regional leader in headquarters to let them know that this disciplinary action needs to be rescinded. And so I couldn't promise anything, but I told her I'm going to take accountability for this. And then the next step was to do just that.

I said, Hey, here's what I want to do. I want to make sure that going forward I am going to one, make sure that my HR team, when they present things to me. They present only the known facts without naming the employees involved. So I will not allow my halo bias or my horn bias to influence my decisions.

Productivity or numbers or safety. So those are a couple of things that I put in place because I know that the greater your authority as and the greater your influence is as a leader, the greater the necessity to acknowledge and to mitigate your biases.

Dr. Jim: So that's you're setting up some internal controls to make sure that this doesn't happen again. At. The individual level. But you hinted earlier that there might be some systemic issues along these lines.

If this was the SOP that led you to this point. So what were the things that you did from a systemic perspective to make sure that this doesn't happen again?

Stringent investigation process, like following the five why's. So we updated actually our safety incident form to, to dive into a bit more detail so that we can make sure that we were not just looking at things on the cursory perspective. And I believe even I know that we added, we looked at the composition of our safety committee and we needed to add a few more hourly representatives on that committee.

So that we can have just a more well-rounded, not just supervisors, not just team leads, but, forklift drivers and packers and, just to make sure that there was good representation like a jury of your peers, right? Who have different perspectives and backgrounds.

And we, so if you if you just pick. Who you like, the people who, the leadership team likes. Then you can have a safety committee that could be slanted towards making decisions that are for the company. And so we actually had to round it out a bit.

Regina Ross: It did have hourly represent, but they were like team leads or, so we, I think we just needed to spread it out a bit more. And we did have representation from each department, but we needed to look further and not just the favorite people.

Dr. Jim: The other thing that I'm thinking about when you describe this and we flagged this as a potential issue earlier where there might have been some cultural things in terms of how the distribution center operates that needed to be looked at or solved for as well. So what were some of those cultural things that you discovered in the process of this mini transformation and how did you actually like, mitigate and solve for those those embedded issues?

Here's how we're trying to do it. We went back into, doing more. It wasn't an employee engagement survey, but it was more of a suggestion box where people could put their private, suggestions in, and they knew that there was going to be confidentiality and they, and so if they brought up a, an issue or a concern, there was not gonna be retribution.

And so there was a fear of retaliation. They're at the distribution center. So those things begin to come out. We actually begin to engage more of the supervisors and do more leadership training so that they could understand, how to engage their team in a developmental and a coaching way, rather than just bringing bad news or being, bringing punitive in their engagement with them.

It was difficult though. I will tell you.

Dr. Jim: The thing that I find interesting is that you start to discover that the environment is high fear, low trust, and then you start doing all of these things that is designed to generate feedback that and later on you implement some.

Coaching elements in it too. And when I hear all of that, those are all the right things. How did you bridge the gap in a way that met people where they are so that you could actually bring them along to those things? Because if I am an individual contributor and hourly in a distribution center and I don't trust management and I fear for retaliation, I'm not gonna share anything.

Regina Ross: A lot of it was engaging the frontline supervisors. Because they are the ones that are really the face of the employee to the face of the company to the employees. And but we, what I realized too is that our supervisors felt disengaged. Disempowered. There was a fear, a cultural fear with them, and we could not get down to the the hourly staff level without addressing what the supervisors were feeling.

So that was the key focus.

Dr. Jim: So that makes sense. If you wanna make an impact at the line level. Frontline managers are usually your first line of defense, but your frontline managers or. Advisor, they were disengaged. They weren't feeling that they were invested in this. So how did you fix that?

It really started with, there was a campaign that I led. Was owning your own development. And we like we built a leadership development library. We had these lunch and learns there was a group it was a grassroots effort too, where there were people who were really vested in development and growth.

And I leveraged them and we came together like, how can we tap into each people's, each person's strengths, how can we show that we're invested? And so it was that. That effort, and again, it wasn't anything that was a formal, top down from headquarters, but it was showing the supervisors and the frontline leaders we care about you, about your development, about your growth, about your career at our organization.

And that was exciting. And so the feedback and the engagement and the level of the commitment from our supervisor staff, like really went up. And then you saw the impact on the hourly staff, the frontline staff when they had supervisors who showed that they cared. Who were engaged with them and not just developing themselves, but then they began to reach down and develop the frontline staff into team leads.

And there were promotions, so our internal mobility rates went up. It was just it was the supervisors made such a big difference.

Were there any other root causes that you identified that you triaged to help solve that?

Regina Ross: One was not having a clear strategic vision, and so this was. Some work that I started when I was a senior operations leader, and then can carried that through when I stepped into the HR leader role. What are our goals? What are, what's our strategy, what's our objectives? And then aligning around that.

And so we had, we had three major goals and as a senior leadership team, we began to rally around those goals. We involved the the, our group leaders and our supervisors and our team members, and so now seeing a clear vision of where we're trying to get to as an organization. Where we're not just being, the ones who are always at the bottom, like when you're always at the bottom, that sucks.

And so I think that was one of the thing too, it wasn't just the supervisors, but it was also now having a compelling vision of, oh, we, we can actually be better. We can actually compete and now we can be a place where people come and train because we're proud of the work that we do and the way that we do it.

I think that was something that spread throughout the entire facility and gave people more of a sense of pride in what they did.

Focus on the activity side, and it sounds like what you uncovered is there were all these higher order things that needed to be fixed that would have downstream impacts on the KPIs. And it's difficult to focus on the higher order things because they don't have immediate payoff. And what I'm wondering is that if you were making the case.

To focus on these higher order things that don't have immediate payoff. How would you make that case for somebody else to make that to their senior leadership? Hey, I know that these things on our scoreboard or our dashboard are all like below requirements, but that's not actually what we need to focus on.

We need to focus on these other things. How do you have that conversation?

And it, there was just a lot of fear in the culture about, what that would mean for jobs and for the leadership and all of that, and just, losing that ability to engage with each other. And then one voice where we really wanted to make sure that there was a unified voice.

Across the leadership. And so the, so you, so those are, you're talking about all three of those. And let me give you an example. So when I was in I was a regional, senior, regional transportation leader with Target before moving into operations, before moving into HR and by facility my department was bottom ranked.

And so that was. You can do both. They're not mutually exclusive. You can focus on KPIs while still focusing on culture, a culture of empowerment, a culture of accountability, a culture of celebrating and recognizing achievements. And so I didn't have to make the case of, oh yeah, let's focus on culture and then let's forget about the KPIs.

Does that make sense?

Dr. Jim: Yeah, it does. Yeah, it's I like your call out that you can do both. Sometimes I tend to focus on one or the other. And my default is always the bigger order pictures and create the fence for other people to operate in. But it's a good point that you made, that you can do both and having a unifying vision allows you to do that.

And when you look at the playbook that you built, when you did that how did building that playbook. Position you for accelerating success in other roles that you took on after this one.

Regina Ross: That's a great question. When I was in this role, I was not yet an executive coach. I'm, I'm a certified and trained coach now. And the learning to become a coach. Was really important. And there's one thing that Michael Bunge Stanier says in his book, the Advice Trap. He says, we need to learn to stay curious a little bit longer and avoid rushing to judgment or advice giving.

How do you as leaders, how do we stay humble? How do we stay curious? How do we just ask questions and not rush to giving advice? Okay. And so for me, like I'm practicing asking those five why's to get to the root cause of an issue. Another thing for me is it's important for leaders to acknowledge that we make mistakes.

And that we can use those mistakes as teachable, coachable moments to help shape not just our professional development, but the development of the people that we lead. At Target there was, something that we had to read when we onboarded. Feedback is a gift, and so I've learned how to solicit and to value the gift of feedback.

Dr. Jim: that's really good in input. And I want you to expand on that a little bit. Imagine that you're speaking to somebody that just took on, just got their first big promotion, and they're now taking on a turnaround effort as their first big promotion. What's the advice that you have informed by the experience that you had on how they should approach that first 90 days, six months in getting a lay of the land and building their action plan?

Regina Ross: Great question because that's what I was doing, stepping into this role, a turnaround situation. So I think one thing is to strike the balance between standing in your confidence. That's one thing you wanna do, establish yourself as the leader and show the confidence. So strike that balance between standing in your confidence.

And the other one was, leaders are vocally self-critical. So we've gotta be like, look at myself, and just examine my own stuff and oh, okay, let me cri critique myself and invite others to, to critique me as well. The other thing. And this is what I mentioned I did at the end of this scenario, invite others to challenge your thinking.

So yes, you're in this role. Yes, you have every right to be there. Yes, you are a confident leader, but invite others to challenge your thinking, whether you get trusted colleagues or members of your team. And so if you surround yourself with yes people, and it can be easy to do, especially as you get into higher levels of leadership.

We're charging ahead, and we could be like on the edge of a cliff. And, but we're surrounded by yes people. No one's gonna tell us that we're about to fall off a cliff. Like we've gotta invite others to challenge our thinking and give us feedback.

Dr. Jim: That's great stuff. This has been a really good conversation and I'm sure that people are gonna want to pick your brain or reach out to you and continue the conversation online and offline. So what's the best way for them to get in touch with you if they want to do that?

Regina Ross: So LinkedIn is where I live. That's my jam. People can also connect with me on my website. I am a executive coach so walk on purpose.com. I do have a LinkedIn, a private LinkedIn group. So this is for C-Suite Sisters for women of Faith who desire to amplify their leadership impact. So if you, if that describes you, you can join there.

We're working, we're grinding, but we're also supposed to, we're also supposed to be rest. So that's where you can find me.

Dr. Jim: Speaking of Russ, when do you sleep with all that stuff going on?

Regina Ross: Yes. I, on Saturdays I actually do practice Sabbath rest, and I am pretty good about my bedtime. I'm usually in bed by nine o'clock in the evening because I get up early. So I have to have regular rhythms of rest and work.

Dr. Jim: Great stuff. Regina. I appreciate you hanging out. When I think about this conversation, there's sort of five principles that I drew from the conversation that we just had, and the first of which is when you're stepping into these sort of environments, first big promotion, turnaround effort, you need to internalize that you earned your spot there.

I'm hearing and seeing these things. What am I missing? You need to recognize that you don't know what you don't know. So you need to find people that are gonna tell you what you don't know so you're not running in the wrong direction. And all of that can be wrapped into one principle. Be disciplined about zooming out, and that'll keep you from getting into trouble.

And oftentimes that's probably the toughest thing to do because we get wrapped up in our own ego and our own sense of having to make an impact too quickly. We have tunnel vision about the thing that we're facing, and that's how you end up getting into trouble is because you're too myopic to recognize that you need, you're not getting the whole picture, you're only getting a piece of the picture.

If you like the discussion, make sure you leave us a review on your favorite podcast player. Make sure you tune in next time, where we'll have another leader hanging out with us and sharing with us the mistakes that they made that ultimately ended up helping them hit fast forward on their career.