Communication, I have to say, is a struggle for every organization

Welcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top executive leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce. That's previe. Now let's jump in and get started with our next guest.

Welcome to the Build by People podcast. I'm thrilled to be joined today by Christy Lake. Christy, thanks for joining us today.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Absolutely. Starting point, always for all of our episodes, Tell me a little bit about your career journey, the unexpected turns, and what ultimately led you to leadership.

Well, to start, I've, I've always been in the automotive industry. So I grew up in Michigan, so Motor City capital of the world. I just kind of seemed to be a natural place to start, so been in automotive the entire time. Um, I didn't start out with my eyes set on leadership. It just kind of happened over time. I, I started out working for, for Wabasto as a Tier 1 automotive supplier and was really happy working for them. Uh, worked for them for about nine or 10 years and a leadership opportunity came up. Went into it, took, took the opportunity, and I've just been growing in leadership ever since. Eight years ago, there was an opportunity to come out to Southern California for webasto, starting a new division. They offered it to me to come out and start out the new division, get everything started up onboard the employees. I took that opportunity and I'm very thankful that I did. It's been quite a growth journey and it led to a couple of other opportunities down the road. And now I'm as vice president of HR for sema.

That's awesome. Tell me about your top priorities right now.

So right now, as I'm sure is probably common for a lot of organizations, we're dealing with a lot of change management, which encompasses many different things. Looking at how we do things, how can we streamline, how can we improve efficiencies, systems, processes, workflows, staff, you know, the introduction of AI, how can we embrace that, how can we incorporate that into making things a little more efficient? One might not, not necessarily connect HR with all of those activities, but we're right in the middle of it. Managing all of those changes for people is different for everyone. So it's working a lot with the leadership team on how to manage those changes, how to communicate, how to make sure we're offering the proper training, managing the emotions that come with all of that. So that is by far top priorities right now of things that we're working on.

What's one initiative you've rolled out recently that you're really proud of?

Actually, it's our core values. So as an organization going through all these changes, you know, we're calling it our state of transformation. And with that, we need to identify what's important to us. How are we going to operate every single day? How are we going to work together? And with that was identifying our core values. So we spent a significant amount of time with the executive leadership team identifying what's important for all of us. How do we want to work together? What are those core values that we want to integrate throughout the organization? And we did a rollout of those core values with the employees. So now we're in that state of owning it and really driving it throughout the organization.

If I can ask, you know, what are the core values?

Great question. So, number one is integrity. That was hands down most important to every single person on our leadership team. So operating integrity, you know, doing what we say we're going to do, following through, being truthful and honest and so forth. And number two is ownership. So with that comes accountability, owning the outcomes. And that doesn't necessarily mean dropping the hammer in terms of accountability, but making sure that we're all striving towards the same goals and removing obstacles that we identify along the way. Third value is courage. So that might seem a little bit strange, you know, and out of the norm for some, but we really want to encourage employees to speak up, you know, candidly, even if it's uncomfortable or if they feel like it's not my place or that's not my swim lane, have the courage to speak up, have the courage to make suggestions, think outside of the box, and be okay with things. Perhaps not working the very first try, but having the courage to do so anyway. Service is really big for us as well, especially being an association. You know, a huge part of what we do is serving the automotive industry, but we also want to serve each other internally, Making sure that we understand how everything connects and that we're not just operating in a vacuum or a silo. Unity is the next one, Making sure that we're we're collectively working together. We're rowing in the same direction as opposed to working in our silos and just focusing on our own tasks. And the last one is passion. Having passion for the community, what we do, passion for people, passion for car culture in general. And that is one that we definitely do not struggle with here, is having passion in everything that we do.

Oh, those are awesome. I think any organization could take maybe a play from your playbook there and come up with some awesome values there. That's great.

Thank you.

You know, as we interview a lot of different guests, one reoccurring theme comes up a lot. Employee communication. Employee communication is just becoming harder and harder across every organization. So what's one area where you're trying to improve engagement through better communication? And how do you approach making sure employees actually see, understand, and act on the information that is sent out to them?

Communication, I have to say, is a struggle for every organization. And that is the one thing I think employees always bring up. We need better in communication, but it's this vague topic, right? Communication, because it involves so many things. One of the ways that we're trying to manage this is through listening sessions. So it's open forum format where we schedule time where employees can join either remotely or through teams, or they can be in person, they can ask questions to our executive team. Right now, it's mostly me leading that from an employee engagement standpoint and for change management as well. We want to allow opportunities for employees to speak up, feel comfortable to speak up, make suggestions, things that they're seeing that are working or not or could be working better, and taking notes, summarizing all of that and assigning action plans from those suggestions and just being transparent with the employees, letting them know up front. We can't act on every single suggestion. It's not feasible. But please don't discourage, you know, let that discourage you from speaking up and stepping forward anyway and just showing them we're going to listen, we're going to act. And during our all staff meetings every month, we provide highlights and summaries of things we've done, you know, that we've acted on based on their feedback. So that's just one way that we're trying to keep the communication open and fluent with the employees.

Great. What tools or platforms are most essential for your operations today?

That's very much dependent on the different functions of our organization. Broadly, of course, it's, you know, the Microsoft tools and the teams, the outlook, the things like that that touch all of us. But we're Also in process of implementing a robust HR system, Paylocity, that will allow us to operate in different modules throughout the organization. And we're also working on Monday.com to manage project tasks, you know, general project management. But the idea is to really consolidate our systems as much as possible so we don't have this list of 30 logins and information located in various different locations. We're trying to condense as much as possible so that employees have ease in where to find information. That's great.

If we sat down again in 12 months from now, what would you hope has changed most in your organization?

I'm hoping that we have a lot more clarity in our structure from all of the changes that we're going through. So as I mentioned previously, just this state of transformation. So 12 months from now, I would hope that we're really clear on what that structure looks like. Everyone knows their roles, their responsibilities, and we've created some standardized processes for everyone to be more efficient in their jobs.

Last question I have for you, Christy. If you could leave one piece of advice for our community, could be something you wish you had known earlier in your career or just as you've navigated the waters of leadership, what would it be?

Invest time upfront with your planning to communicate with everyone, all your stakeholders upfront. Shooting from the hip or just moving fast in the end doesn't get you any further ahead. In fact, it creates a lot more ambiguity, frustrations, and rework down the road. So the more you can communicate up front and involve all your stakeholders. It takes more time, but it's definitely worth the effort.

Well, thank you for all you're doing. Thank you for being our guest today. It was a pleasure having you, Christy.

Thanks so much. I appreciate it. Have a good one.

You too.

Thanks.