Posted by Caveo Learning ● January 6, 2016

Sears Talent Manager Talks Change Management, Democratizing Data

holly_englerThis is part of our ongoing series, Interviews with Learning Leaders.

Holly Engler is manager of organizational effectiveness for Sears Holdings Corp., parent company of retail chains Sears and Kmart. She has led the design, development, and change management of associate-facing HR tools and processes within Sears' talent management function. Most recently, this has included the transformation of performance management to transition away from performance reviews and ratings for salaried employees. Holly also leads enterprise-wide engagement and culture strategies for more than 200,000 associates. She is passionate about innovation in HR, personal effectiveness, and the evolving world of work. She holds a master's degree in organizational psychology from Roosevelt University and a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Akron.


How are you addressing the specific challenges related to retail training?

This space is changing, whether we like it or not—we’re not just administering learning the same way that we’ve consumed content in the past. Traditional learning is costly, time-consuming, and mostly ineffective. We’re in this very innovative space right now where we are creating learning experiences that are easily consumed, effectively retained, and engaging for the associate. You’re going to see some similarities across organizations in this approach, but I don’t think you’re going to see organizations redesign this space the exact same way as each other. Technology is changing all of the time—we just can’t justify the amount of time and resources that we spend on learning in the organization when we know that six months from now, the content and the delivery of it may change. So we really have to find ways to use the technology to help get that information out without relying on human beings being present to facilitate content anymore. It’s a very interesting and fun space to be in now; it’s very exciting.

How is your curriculum evolving?

We know that traditional learning is going away—“sit down and spend an hour taking these courses and reading materials and take this quiz.” We have a lot more dynamic content in real time now—social learning and microlearning. We’ve got an internal platform that allows associates to go and view content such as Harvard Business Review articles or articles that are out on the web—lots of content that you can consume in less than five minutes. Associates are able to easily locate content that is relevant to their role and their development—they’re not waiting for their manager to assign learning to them to help them with their growth and their development. They’re building their expertise in real time. Since we have also redesigned our performance management approach, we now have the ability to create targeted learning experiences based on feedback you receive from others, and specific capabilities that you need to build. There is a real value there.

I’ll give you an example. I source a piece of feedback from a peer, and my feedback is that I need to execute with speed. Now I can connect that with learning and I can push personalized learning back to the user to say, “Hey Holly, you got some feedback on needing to develop around speed of execution, here’s a Harvard Business Review article on five things you can do to execute better.” Here it is, consume it in less than five minutes and start developing in this capability.

What are the current trends in learning and performance that you love?

These processes are becoming more dynamic, more democratized, more datified, and more fluid. Finally, we are seeing the trend toward designing processes for associates, instead of exclusively for managers and leaders. One of the examples I always give is the engagement survey. When you do an engagement survey, you never go back to the associate and tell them what their score is. You never say, “Holly, you’re 32% engaged. Here are some things you can do about that.” You aggregate it at the team-level, you roll it up to your senior leaders who sit on it for a couple of months, to figure out what they’re going to do to touch the masses—which, by the way, is probably not going to engage me as an individual, because you’re not accounting for my individual contribution in that overall engagement score. And I’m probably not going to do anything differently to engage myself, because I don’t know what I can do because I don’t really have a sense of what my personal engagement is. And so we’re seeing this trend of democratizing the data, giving it back to associates so that they can get started without their managers.

You see this in the quantified wearables like a FitBit, which tracks steps every day. That’s where you originally saw this trend of, “I know how many steps I took or how many calories I burned for today. And when I get to the end of the day, I can see I’ve only got 9,000 steps, so I am going to take an extra flight of stairs today. And, most importantly, I am going to do something different as a result of that data.” And you don’t have that opportunity with any HR practice, whether it be learning or engagement or performance, because we never give the data back to associates. You’re seeing more of that, whether it be mood, learning—you’re seeing people gamify content now and push that back to associates to say, “Here’s where you stand, and here are some things you can do right now differently as a result of this data.”

Sears recently rolled out some significant corporate culture changes. What were some challenges that came with that? 

I joined Sears in 2013, when we were just beginning to introduce a brand new culture to the organization, which consisted of seven new cultural beliefs, four new key results, and a new mission statement. We knew we needed to drive stronger results, and new cultural behaviors would help us get there.

The old behaviors weren’t aligned with where we are trying to go. Since we are such a large organization that has been challenged with our results, we are consistently needing to be agile and adapt quickly. Change happens very fast here. We knew we needed to implement a culture that was aligned to our individual accountability to drive meaningful member experiences, operational results, and an engaged workforce. Part of our culture change effort was getting the senior leadership team together to identify what was really getting in the way of us adopting the culture at the level that we needed in order to drive business results. One of the big things that came out of that conversation was that our performance management system was not aligned to our desired outcomes. We analyzed our performance management platform and realized that associates just didn’t have the tools and the resources they needed to know where they stand and how to improve, to be accountable for their individual contribution to the bigger picture. Waiting a year to reflect on our performance wasn’t supporting the agility we needed to respond to changes in the organization. Redesigning performance to be in tune with our change in culture just made sense.

It’s a lot of change—and people don’t like change—but the rollout really happened very conveniently for us because we had launched the new culture, and at the same time we started having some conversation about performance. It took us over 12 months to really understand how we were going to redesign performance, build a set of tools, pilot those tools, make any tweaks to it, and do the change management and actually roll out the process. In the meantime, we had also launched Objectives and Key Results, a quarterly goal-setting methodology. And so we layered that onto the new culture, and then a year later came back and said, “Now you have this quarterly cadence down, you’re talking more frequently about what you’re working on, now let’s also add in this feedback tool so you know where you stand on those objectives that you are working on.” And so it made it a little more consumable for our associates, and it also helped with the transition.

What are the results of that change initiative?

We are seeing positive results. We see about 75% of our salaried population setting quarterly objectives regularly. We are conducting our fourth series of quarterly check-ins now, and we are seeing about 54% of people who are regularly checking in. And more than 70% of our target audience has interacted with SoundBoard, our instant feedback tool that allows associates to source and give feedback dynamically.

Ultimately, we want to see that using these tools is, in fact, driving performance. When we look at data from before and after our redesign of performance, what we see across any of the tools is about a 10.5% chance that you can improve your performance by an entire level if you’re utilizing any one of those three tools. This is the difference between your leadership team identifying you as a middle-of-the-road performer versus a high performer. We see some differences in your opportunity to move up in the organization—about an 11% chance that you’ll move up in the organization if you just regularly check in with your manager and have more frequent conversations. What is most encouraging is that we see a 21% chance that you’ll move up in the organization if you use the SoundBoard feedback tool. This is really, really, really exciting, because what that tells us is if you give information and they make the adjustments they need to improve their performance and their ability to move up in the organization much more than merely relying on the manager to manage their performance for them.

The quietly performing employees sometimes get overlooked. Now you don’t have to rely on just your manager’s feedback; it’s always been a biased conversation, what your manager thinks of your performance. Realistically, your manager’s not in the room with you when you’re doing every presentation or meeting and every project milestone. Now you have tools available to you so you can understand the feedback from your customers and your peers, the people that you’re partnering with, your leadership team, your manager. As much as these are tools built for individual associates, they are also tools that are built for managers, in the sense that we’re taking a lot of the heavy lifting off of the managers who traditionally spend a ton of time in the nitty gritty every day, managing the associates’ performance for them. The managers didn’t have time to really step back and be in that role of coach, or guide or advocate for their associates, because they were are so in the weeds about filling in the forms and coming up with the numbers and calibrating the ratings, so it’s important that you can remove the managers from that work and give that back to the associates. Now you can really utilize the managers in a different capacity, which, of course, is a whole other cultural shift in thinking about the role of the manager in the business.

A lot of really big companies have eliminated their performance review like Adobe, Gap, Deloitte, and now Accenture is doing away with it for 300,000 associates. You’re also seeing this change in the engagement space, where organizations are eliminating that once-a-year engagement survey.

What was the most unexpected obstacle in the change process?

One of the things we found most eye-opening was that it’s hardest to change the minds of your own folks—and when I say that, I mean HR and legal. Those were our hardest obstacles to overcome in this change. Because we have historically tied so many of the talent or business decisions that we make to performance ratings, you now have to convince a legal and HR team how to make those decisions otherwise. For us, it wasn’t difficult to get people aligned to the fact that the current process wasn’t getting us what we needed. I think everybody resoundingly agreed our current performance management process, giving a rating and having annual conversations, isn’t giving us the performance we needed, and so we’re aligned to the fact that we need to get rid of it. But we were not aligned to the fact that there are better, more responsive ways to do it. So we had to educate our teams and business partners—the legal and HR teams. We leveraged neuroscience with our business partners to really get them to understand that there is a better way to do it.

It’s ongoing change management that that has to happen, not only because you have talent turning over or new leaders coming into the organization, but because you’re continuously iterating on the processes. And in order to be a more agile organization, you have to be able to build a process or a protocol or a piece of technology and iterate it as you go. If you wait until it’s perfect, you’re never going to get there. We are constantly working with our managers, our leaders, and our individual associates to talk about what good feedback looks like. You have training to talk about the usage and how to utilize the tools, but you’re not done there because you really need to focus on continued usage and continued value-add and how to incorporate it as part of your conversations. And how to give good quality feedback, goal setting, and learning interactions.

You mentioned leveraging neuroscience with your business partners. Can you talk more about that?

The work that David Rock of the Neuroleadership Institute has done was really a pivotal part of our performance design. If you haven’t read Your Brain at Work by David Rock, I highly suggest it. His work helped us understand what really happens inside your brain when you receive feedback or have a performance conversation. As humans, we walk into these conversations already in flight mode; they are not comfortable conversations. And as soon as we hear, “You’re a 3.4,” we immediately fixate on the numeric value and start to tune out the remainder of the conversation that focuses on opportunities for growth. Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, was also an inspirational piece for us. We learned more about how to instill a growth mindset, as opposed to a fixed mindset, for our associates by leveraging more frequent conversations and a style of conversation conducive to learning.

What's the first thing you focus on in a new role?

In each new role, it’s most important to establish yourself as a trusted partner and really help people understand your vision. People want to be inspired and energized. It’s critical to establish trust with your team, clients, partners…. go for the small wins to begin establishing yourself.

When I got put on the performance enablement redesign, I was basically tasked with redesigning performance and creating a platform that was going to deliver results. I had not done this before, so the best shot that I had was partnering with other companies who were thinking through similar conversations. At the time, Kelly Services and Adobe were really the only ones that had done it, and there were a couple of other organizations that were thinking about it that we were able to have some conversations with to be able to say, “What ideas do you have and why do you think that would/wouldn’t work?” It is a challenge in that a lot of what we’re doing hasn’t been done before, so it goes back to really understanding what is it that you’re trying to achieve, and building really good relationships with your business partners so that you can influence them to come along with you, because your ideas at first are going to sound crazy. When we first went out to the businesses and told them that we wanted to eliminate the performance review and rating, people looked at us like we were nuts: “It will never work.” So you really have to start building some strong relationships with people to say, I have an idea, but I also have an idea of how to get there. And make sure that you’re tailoring that to the needs of the business. Add some evidence, or support from other research or benchmarking or whatever it may be… to say that if we do this, then the results could be X.

Topics: Interviews with Learning Leaders