Summary:

Kyle Roed joins Dr. Jim on the HR Impact show to discuss why obsessing over policy and process can hinder an organization's ability to innovate and take risks. Kyle shares his nontraditional career path, from being a musician and bartender to finding his way into HR. He emphasizes the importance of connection to strategy and driving change in a pragmatic and sustainable way. Kyle also highlights the need for leaders to focus on the competency of managing execution and getting things done, while avoiding over-engineering processes that can stifle innovation. He shares insights from his experience in the retail and manufacturing industries and offers practical advice for building high-performing teams.

Key Takeaways:

Focus on the competency of managing execution and getting things done.

Prioritize the most important objectives and communicate them clearly to the team.

Build trust and understanding with your team to ensure they feel comfortable asking questions and seeking clarification.

Avoid over-engineering processes and policies, as human behavior is often illogical and cannot be fully controlled.

Systemize where possible, using technology and automation to streamline processes and decision-making.

Balance the need for nimbleness and innovation with the need for structure and consistency.

Chapters:

[0:03:22] How musical background influenced HR tendencies

[0:05:17] Transition from retail to manufacturing in HR

[0:09:52] Creating space for others to get things done

[0:11:38] Importance of prioritization in achieving organizational objectives

[0:13:30] Building trust in a fast-paced environment

[0:16:07] Leadership's role in managing execution

[0:19:28] Systemizing where possible, allowing for independent decision making

[0:22:59] Focusing on daily incremental improvements

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He's the current VP of Human Resources at CPM Holdings. He leads the HR function. For an organization that spans 14 countries across 34 locations. He's got extensive experience within various fortune 500 organizations. That's equipped him with a deep understanding of industry best practices.

In addition to his day job, he's also the founder and CEO of human innovation, LLC, a firm that's dedicated to instigating transformative changes in the world of work. He's also the co founder of Disrupt HR in Cedar Valley. He's the past president of Cedar Valley SHRM, and he's also a podcaster, host of the Rebel HR podcast.

Kyle Rhoad, welcome to the show.

Dr. Jim: I think you got me beat on some of the nerd side of it because you're actually in the trenches as a practitioner and I'm just a megaphone that talks about stuff from more of a theoretical lens than anything else.

But with that being said, I know that we included a lot in your bio. I want you to share a little bit more about what did I leave out? That's going to be relevant to the folks listening to the show and that's going to help them get the appropriate lens. Of your background and your your insights.

Kyle Roed: It's a great question to start. First of all, like I hate those bios cause it's like super long and it's it's almost like borderline embarrassing and I'm a Midwestern guy, humility is one of the cornerstones of our culture. So I don't really like.

And and that really quickly turned into a musician slash bartender. And then just bartender. From there ended up going back to school for business and fell into HR eventually, but I still kept that kind of that rebel spirit. And and from my standpoint, as I have been in the HR realm, a lot of my work has really been focused on organizational change and change management, as well as.

Cultural development. And I think one of the things that's most fascinating about my work. And one of the things I love about it is it's all about connection and connection to strategy, and then, the topic we're going to talk about today is, but then how do you actually take that and drive change and execute and pragmatically make things happen that are actually innovative and sustainable.

Data and math oriented function. And I'm curious how your musical background informed a lot of the work or the tendencies that led you into first it and then later into, into HR.

Kyle Roed: A little bit of a non traditional path. So I started as an it project manager and I was like setting up computer hardware for a school district.

And I was doing that cause I could do it. In general the musician in me is driven towards patterns and evoking emotion through those patterns. That's really what music is. That's how music is interpreted in my mind. And so like to your point, yeah, that, that tends to lend itself to people who are drawn to math and.

And then there's all this crazy improv that happens in the middle. And one of the, one of the types of music that I played most heavily was jazz and then metal guitar but it was all driven around improv. And really what that means is you're given a structure, you're given a, a goal or a space of time to fill.

And then you fill it however you feel you should given the circumstances that you have, whether that's a certain feeling you have. Maybe you want to try something new. Maybe you've got a riff that you've been working on. I think HR is a lot of that's the same way because you're dealing with human behavior.

Sometimes you're just working with the scripts that you're given and you're trying to figure out a way to evoke the emotion. That's inside of you or evoke an emotion that is out in the audience. My argument is HR is basically the exact same thing. You're just doing it in a business context.

Dr. Jim: There's another interesting bit of context that I'd like you to share.

Kyle Roed: My career path, I look back and it's I never would have mapped it out this way.

And I think a lot of people look at their careers that way. And so for those out there that are reflecting on that or questioning career paths, I, I'm a firm believer. Everything happens for a reason. And from my standpoint, the opportunity to work in retail was something I had done.

I, it was one of my first jobs when I was a kid. Was, bagging groceries. And so I knew how to do it. But I hadn't led before. And so what that gave me an opportunity to do was what I would say three key things that I've really shaped my professional career ever since. One is learn how to lead.

This the second thing was understanding how to interact with people, both in a retail setting. So you've got customers and you've got employees and the opportunity to lead in that environment. It's very chaotic can be very stressful, but it's like bootcamp. And I'm a firm believer that if you're going to be an HR operator.

You've got to know how to lead because you've got to know the struggles that leaders are facing if you intend to help leaders improve. And for me, that was invaluable. And then finally the last thing I would say is, the opportunity to get into HR was because of that organization.

And so I think, really foundational. And then when I transitioned into, manufacturing and then in my role right now, I'm I oversee the corporate function within a manufacturing group. As well as an engineering group and some other thought leaders within my space.

That's all of those. Paradigm still exists. Nothing really changed. It's just the industry is different, but all of the skills that you learn how to lead, how to focus on people, interact with people, how to actually look at an HR program and execute appropriately and how to manage through stress I use all those skills today.

Dr. Jim: You've had a career that's gone, a non traditional route into people leadership within HR. And when you think about all of the different experiences that you've had. And you tie it to what's that game changing lesson that you picked up that helped you build a high performing team.

What stands out ?

And you could sum it up as get stuff done. And it, and what I have found is that if I invest my time in ensuring that I am getting stuff done in general things seem to work out how I have got things done has evolved over the years, but. Early in my career, it was all about figuring out how to motivate others to do the work that needs to get done.

I was always one of those individuals that, that was relatively effective at getting things done always, I performed well in school and I could generally get tasks done. Fairly quickly. It was a learning curve to figure out how to get others to do that.

And from my standpoint, a lot of it comes down to number one. How are you structuring the items that need to get done? What are the deliverables? How are you measuring that? What does success look like? What does good look like? How are you validating that the objective is even the right priority.

It's then motivating and engaging the people that are executing those projects, including yourself to, to stay focused on what really matters. And so a lot of my job right now, I consider to be a lot of facilitation. So I am not spending my time doing, I'm spending my time motivating. And helping others do what I need them to do.

And that's really easy for me to sit here and say, but it all comes down to making sure that people understand where they're going, that people trust you and believe in where you're leading them and making sure that there's a shared accountability between yourself and the individuals that you're leading to achieve that goal.

Give you the tools to be successful and that's so that, when you think about a high performing team, I just think about it as simple as get stuff done. How do they get stuff done? Do they win?

Dr. Jim: 1 of the interesting things and I wrote this down learning how to have others get stuff done and. That's one of the trickiest aspects of being in people leadership, regardless of what function that you're in. One of the things that I'm curious about, especially given the amount of time that you've spent in retail and then now in manufacturing, the pace in those environments are pretty unforgiving.

So what were the things that you did to create space? To get others to buy into the bigger picture and be motivated to get stuff done.

And a lot of my work has been around making sure that people understand the priority. And, I said this last week with 1 of my leaders. I said, if you've got 37 priorities, you don't have any priorities. It. What is the organizational vision? What is the most important thing you need to get done?

But the reality is that some of your programs that you have. Might not hit the priority list to somebody who's getting screamed at by a customer [00:12:00] because they need their delivery today, right? And so it's, again, I go back to early in my career, learning how to lead and learning the pressures that leaders are under is really critical and making sure that you're not tone deaf and what those.

need to be. But I also think that a lot of it comes down to making sure that you've got a level of trust and understanding and empathy with your team so that if they get overwhelmed or if they have a question or if they don't understand the priority They tell you and that's the other thing that I see so often is individuals who will get really frustrated because, they've communicated until they're blue in the face or they feel like they've done a good job making sure that people understand what needs to get done or how it needs to get done.

But the reality is that people don't have that level of trust to. Ask and have that collaborative discussion. I think that's another critical component that certainly I could always improve in, but I try to do that. And I certainly try to coach my leaders to do the same.

Managers and leaders have to get really effective in doing that in the moment and on the fly versus in a traditional corporate setting where you have the space for detailed one on ones and things like that. I think when you're thinking about building that space for trust, a lot of it can be accomplished doing it in the fly.

And that's going to be critical, even in the busiest of organizations from a leadership perspective, I think the more leaders in those environments can say stuff out loud about where they're at, where their headspace is that tying the vision to the top three priorities and getting.

Agreement around that. Those are just core best practices that I think work in any environment. One of the things that you mentioned and it was early on in the conversation is focus on the competency of managing execution.

Kyle Roed: This is easy. My, my school of thought is that you can't engineer it because. Human behavior is illogical. And so if you're trying to create, let's just, we'll use a policy as an example, cause that's the, that's the space of execution that I operate within.

So it's policies, structures, procedures et cetera. So in the realm of policies, as an example, you can sit there and you can think about every detailed scenario that could hypothetically potentially happened and maybe happened once 10 years ago that some random person remembers. So we better put that into the policy.

You've got individuals that will follow that rule to a tee. You've got individuals that will try to follow that rule to a tee and will fail because they don't understand it. And you've got individuals that will just not follow it because they either Weren't paying attention or don't care.

If any of those things are not there. Usually you'll find issues. The other thing I would say is nine times out of 10 people's motivations are typically fairly pure, people don't, I don't believe that people wake up and go to work and say, I'm really, I really want to suck at work today.

I want to try to make this just a really miserable experience for everybody. But so often. What happens is people think that they're doing what they should be doing and they're just misaligned. And that for me is a leadership issue. And if people are struggling or there's challenges with people understanding objectives or accountabilities, then again, that goes back to leadership.

Managing execution for me it's about making sure that you've got the right framework to succeed in. But then the win or fail factor is really on the leadership.

Dr. Jim: There's some practical implications of that too. And I like how you err on the side of what I call being aggressive.

Kyle Roed: The challenge that we run into as an organization is the fact that we need to be nimble and we also need to be innovative. And those two things are in direct conflict with what I would call your kind of your command and control bureaucracy that you'll find in many organizations that have focused extremely heavily on the engineering.

Actually systemize, use technology, use automation. Are there shared tools, resources and capabilities that can be leveraged across an entire organization? As an example, from an H. R. standpoint. Why don't we use a common merit planning tool? Okay, that takes everybody out of an Excel spreadsheet, probably saves everybody some time and energy, and it gives me some centralized ability to drive, equitable pay programs and ensure that we've got the appropriate job leveling and global normalization of compensation information.

There's my HR nerd coming out. But but as an example, like that's a system that's a systemized. Way to improve and drive consistency and kind of engineer a process when it comes to local decision making where it is about innovation, it is about being nimble. It is about going out and having the right to win in the markets that we're in.

So from my standpoint, you can't have, you can't have both. You can't have heavy bureaucracy and have nimble decision making and innovation. And if anybody does I want to come hang out with you for a week because I'll be curious to see how you do it.

Dr. Jim: Those signposts that you mentioned about being nimble and being able to pivot.

Really good conversation that we've had so far, when we think about. The stuff that we've covered so far, how you build out and structure with a bias for speed and a bias for action.

What are the big takeaways that you want to make sure that the listeners walk away with when they're looking at how do I build my organization to position ourselves to be a high performing team?

Kyle Roed: I'll give a little bit of context there for that question.

In my experience, so I spent my first, I don't know, 12 years of my post college career learning what good looks like, really learning best practices. So I was working in a couple of different fortune 500 companies, got to see, what is considered good in the, in that realm.

What I did before jumping in and trying to, change the world and the organization is I started really small. I took those best practices that I had observed and I figured out which ones mattered the most. And then I fixed that problem and I didn't mention it was just me and one other person who happened to have been doing payroll for the last, 20 years and she was a solo HR person.

She's amazing. She's still with us and doing amazing now, but, so it was just me. So before I could do anything, before I could get resources, before I could get any street cred or capability, enhancements, I had to prove that I knew what I was doing and validate that the value existed to invest in what I needed to get done.

Hey, helped manage through this employee relations things, filled this position. Here's a recruiting structure and strategy. Here's an applicant tracking system to help take away, manager headaches, these sorts of things as these started to check off, started to. Build some kind of some internal coalitions some street credit, if you will, and then I was able to start validating for resources.

And my approach has always been this. So I set my strategic vision five years ago, and I have five key elements within my organization after about a six month assessment that I wanted to make sure I checked off. It was, it's things like employee experience enterprise risk management, talent acquisition career development.

But it's, it all started with the, these kind of these daily incremental wins and focuses. And even if it was one person who had, an improved employee experience or one improvement in the talent acquisition process that's really how I would encourage anybody to think about it, whether it's human resources or any other aspect of team building is where are the small wins?

Where can you take the incremental improvements? And I call it rampant incrementalism. So just, you just have to be fanatically. Better a little bit every single day.

Dr. Jim: I really like that last point. Your focus shouldn't be going from where you are today to the moon tomorrow.

Kyle Roed: Absolutely. You can hit me up on LinkedIn.

It's Kyle K Y L E road, R O E D. I've got a a website, www. kyleroad. com, or you can check out the podcast on podcast players. It's rebel human resources. We talk about all sorts of fun stuff and have way more interesting guests.

Dr. Jim: It's a good show. You should check it out. Really appreciate you hanging out with us.

When I think about the conversation that we had and I'm tying it together here are the big things that stand out to me when we're looking at systematizing what you did and bringing it to any organization and making it a successful first, you start with. Defining what good looks like. Then you identify what are the things within your organization that you should prioritize to solve and the impact that it can have, and then start small on those things.

Thanks for hanging out with us and listening to the episode. For those of you who have enjoyed the conversation, leave us a review. Tune in next time where we'll have another leader on the show, sharing their game changing insights that helped them build a high performance team.