Ebonee Ifeobu
Chief People Officer
Heritage Medical Associates
Episode 187
Beyond HR transformation: Why cultural renovation drives real impact.
Current chapter: Built by People podcast features insights from world's top HR leaders
Built By PeopleMay 16, 2025 · 12:03
Thesis
“Effective HR leadership prioritizes understanding and building upon an organization's existing culture to achieve 'renovation' rather than imposing top-down 'transformation'. Measurable impact is achieved by deeply analyzing HR metrics within context and fostering a culture of continuous learning.”
Show notes
Most culture change programs fail before they start — because they're designed by someone who doesn't understand what's already working. Ebonee Ifeobu has a word for the alternative: renovation.
Now Chief People Officer at Heritage Medical Associates, Ebonee has led people functions across healthcare, CPG technology, and automotive — including significant time in Latin America, where she learned quickly that relationship-based cultures require a fundamentally different change approach than transaction-based ones. Her distinction between transformation and renovation is precise: transformation is when a leader arrives and reshapes the organization to fit them. Renovation is when you look at what already exists, understand its strengths, and build from there. One makes people feel invaded. The other makes them feel seen. Her experience in the region also shaped her view on KPIs — specifically, that turnover numbers on their own tell you almost nothing. What matters is the context: when in tenure does turnover happen, and why?
When she found that 50% of Heritage's attrition was occurring within the first year, she traced the causes back to onboarding gaps, training deficiencies, and role misalignment — and redesigned the retention strategy around those specific findings. Her approach to compensation in a flat organizational structure is equally thoughtful: rather than inflating titles or overpaying for market pressure, she uses in-grade promotions and regular job evaluations to reward high performers in ways that are meaningful without creating organizational debt. Her closing advice to leaders is personal: never stop learning, and lead from a posture of humility — because the most effective culture renovations come from curiosity, not certainty.
- Cultural renovation vs. transformation — the crucial distinction that determines whether change initiatives feel collaborative or invasive
- Leading in relationship-based cultures — how HR approaches in Latin America required rethinking everything about process, trust, and change sequencing
- Turnover as context, not metric — why the raw number is meaningless without knowing when, who, and why attrition is happening
- 50% first-year attrition diagnosis — how Ebonee traced the root causes and redesigned retention around actual findings rather than assumptions
- In-grade promotions in flat structures — rewarding high performers without inflating titles or creating compensation structures that don't scale
- Humility as a leadership practice — why continuous learning and seeking to understand are the foundations of authentic people leadership
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What you'll take away
- 1Focus on cultural renovation by adapting and strengthening existing cultural elements rather than attempting a complete transformation, especially in diverse global contexts.
- 2Shift beyond raw turnover numbers to actionable KPIs like 'quality of hire' to understand the root causes of attrition and implement targeted retention strategies.
- 3In flat organizational structures, utilize 'in-grade promotions' and regular job evaluations to reward high-performing individuals and enhance retention without creating unnecessary elevated titles.
- 4Cultivate a leadership style centered on continuous learning, humility, and seeking to understand, which fosters authenticity and encourages team contribution.
- 5When implementing changes, consider the unique cultural nuances of different regions (e.g., relationship-based cultures in Latin America) to ensure new processes resonate and attract talent.
What most organizations get wrong
- •Pushes back against the common executive tendency to implement top-down 'cultural transformations' that force new structures and people to fit a leader's style, advocating instead for a 'renovation' approach that builds on existing strengths.
- •Challenges the perception of turnover as an inherently good or bad metric, asserting that it is neutral and only becomes actionable when understood within its specific context (e.g., first-year turnover, reasons for departure).
- •Suggests that for flat organizations, an 'in-grade promotion' strategy (adjusting pay within salary bands based on performance and actual job duties) is often more effective for retaining talent than creating potentially meaningless elevated titles.
In Ebonee's words
“in my mind, when the leader changes the structure and the people and the rewards to fit them, that's the transformation versus when you look at what's already there, you adapt, you strengthen, you build, that's the renovation.”
This quote defines Ebonee's core philosophy on cultural change, distinguishing between top-down transformation and adaptive renovation.
“But turnover is not inherently good or bad. It's the context behind it.”
This highlights a nuanced view on a common HR metric, emphasizing the importance of qualitative understanding over raw numbers.
“what I realized is that about 50% of our overall turnover was happening with people within the first year. Some of it, it was the training or lack thereof. Some of it was just a bad hire or a bad fit.”
This identifies specific, actionable drivers of high first-year attrition, moving beyond surface-level data.
“for a flat structure, I don't want to necessarily create elevated titles that are meaningless to people. I don't want to overinflate titles or overpay for salary. But what I can do is look at the people periodically that have been here that are high performers and see if the job that they're doing is actually the job that we hired them for.”
This quote outlines a creative and practical compensation strategy for retaining talent in flat organizations.
“I think our job as leaders is to learn, right? I think we should seek to learn versus seek to lead, because when we seek to learn, you're showing that you believe that other people can contribute to your ecosystem.”
This offers a humble and authentic leadership philosophy, emphasizing growth and valuing contributions from others.
The problems this episode addresses
- •Leaders struggling with cultural change initiatives that are met with resistance because they are perceived as top-down transformations rather than adaptations.
- •Organizations experiencing high first-year employee turnover (e.g., 50%) due to issues like inadequate training, poor hiring matches, or lack of cultural fit.
- •HR departments needing to move beyond basic turnover metrics to understand the specific contextual drivers behind attrition for more effective intervention.
- •Companies with flat organizational structures facing challenges in retaining high-performing talent without overinflating job titles or salary bands.
- •Global organizations struggling to integrate standardized HR processes (e.g., hiring practices) across diverse cultural contexts without alienating local candidates or employees.
In this episode
Built by People podcast features insights from world's top HR leaders
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Ebony says she successfully implemented a cultural renovation rather than a transformation
Cultural Revitalization: The Right Approach
Ebony created a people strategy that linked KPIs to measurable impact
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Ebony had to think creatively about compensation to attract and retain talent
Exploring the Compensation Framework
Ebony says leaders should seek to learn rather than lead
Ebony On Leading With Integrity
Topics covered
Organizations and entities mentioned
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