Logan Sutherland

▶0:01IntroWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce.

▶0:45HostI'm excited to welcome Logan to the Built by People podcast. Logan, thank you so much for joining us. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:55GuestYeah, thanks Dave, and thanks for the great work you do with Built by People. It's been good. So yeah, I've wanted to be a business person since I was about 7. My dad was a small business owner, owned a floral shop. I did my own version of what he sold when I was a kid. And so fast-forwarded to me going into college and I said, okay, I want to do business. I need a skill. At the time it was the late '90s and I figured IT was was the place to be given everything in technology. So I actually got my undergraduate degree in IT, worked at Safeco Insurance for several years in IT. And through that process, I kind of always wanted to, or I planned on getting an MBA at some point. And I had a transformational conversation with an OD person at Safeco Insurance. And as I thought about what I wanted to do, and she talked about leadership capability building and even thinking of organizations as a system, as a person who worked with information systems at the time, it was fascinating to me. So that kind of led me to, to where I chose to study, got an MBA in organizational behavior and HR, went up to Microsoft and worked there for a long time. Maybe there might be some listeners who remember the short-lived Zune product line. It was the iPod competitor of sorts, I guess, that lived for about 3 or 4 years. So my offer letter was actually to be an HR business partner at Zune. By the time I got there, that role was gone. And so I ended up working in Xbox with the game studios. My son thought it was the coolest thing in the world. He's like, dad, you go, you make video games at work. I had to, it was hard to talk to a 6-year-old about what HR did, but He could believe that. So that was my first experience in HR. It was awesome. Worked and learned from so many great people at Microsoft. I still learn from those people today, but came in through an HR development program. So rotated through a few different things, ended up doing some M&A work and then ended up leaving that program and joining the legal and corporate affairs team, which was awesome. Not quite as cool to my son, but such great experience working across the world. There's a lot, as you can imagine with Microsoft, there's a lot of business function in the legal and corporate affairs world with all the challenges that are happening with monopoly concerns and fair competition, all of that sort of thing. So learned a lot in that role, and it was a global role, which was really fun as well. And then came back to lead the HR development program that I had initially joined Microsoft in. And it was my first experience where you get to do the thing that you have a lot of opinions about when you experience it yourself. I guess parenting is probably the first one, but professionally speaking, that was the first one. Great, super satisfying. Got to work with a ton of talented HR people who left different universities and joined Microsoft. So I was blown away by their capability and talent. And got to see kind of talent development up close and personal from day one with a lot of those people. So that was fun. By the end of that role, I was working remotely. I may have been a bit before its time in terms of when remote work was fully accepted. I hit a bit of a ceiling in terms of our ability to stay. We moved to Utah to be closer to family, but decided to leave Microsoft and took the lead HR role at a company called Bluehost, a tech company, website hosting. It was my first experience being part of a cross-functional leadership team. I love that element. As I said before, I love business in general, the fair exchange of value that happens in a business. I think it's, we give a lot of props deserved to teachers and doctors and policemen, but man, if you made me built a car or made me create an iPhone, we would be in trouble. So I'm really grateful for business and I saw that kind of up close and personal at Bluehost. It was a company that was still relatively young, had grown very quickly. HR had not grown along with it. And so got to bring it into some best practices with HR, which was fun. After that, moved to out of my first foray out of tech. Into the medical devices space and went to a great company called Nelson Laboratories where I was, led HR there. It was, there was 3 different business units that were owned by a parent company that was VC-backed. And that was a new experience for me. It was really good from a business and kind of efficiency standpoint, tight business practices and just the people there again. Were really good. The leaders that I got to work with, that market was consolidating. And so we've made a few acquisitions while I was there, and that was acquisition work is really fun. All of HR in a Petri dish, cuz it all happens, comp and culture, it all comes together in a very short timeframe. And that's really fun. And then that led me to where I'm at today. So now lead HR at a company called Stampin' Up. I had a friend who was on the board at Stampin' Up and said, hey, if you're interested, Stampin' Up! is a company that gives experiences, creative experiences to people. Its products are generally stamps, ink, and paper. This was right around when COVID was happening that I made this transition and people are like, including myself and my wife, you're going to leave the medical devices field at the beginning of a global pandemic and go into a paper crafting company. And turns out it was a great decision. I, Stampin' Up! does some really good things in the world and have been able to come in and in the space of just a few years, introduce talent management, introduce pay for performance and associated kind of compensation practices and work with an awesome HR team. Have loved my time and continue to love growing and developing in a business world with an HR skillset.

▶7:10HostLogan, as we prepared for this call, you've mentioned building management capability as a passion of yours. What makes it such a crucial focus area for HR leaders and how do you approach developing strong managers?

▶7:24GuestI think I see managers as one of the key fulcrum points for anything we want to do with our employees as a company. They are a strong predictor of success and potentially happiness for employees. And so anything we can do to help build capability there really does multiply throughout the company. In terms of how, first and foremost, and in my last couple of jobs, sometimes managers understand, or managers and/or leaders understand that their job is different than it once was. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they're like, okay, I'm just the best computer scientist, or I'm the best technician, and so that's, I just need to continue being the best technician. So helping them understand really what those practices and activities are is key. And I know that's baseline, but in some smaller companies, sometimes they never make that leap. Awareness and good clarity of expectations is really important there. And then just providing a common language and a framework where people can have a conversation with another manager. They may think, well, I manage customer service people and you manage designers. How can we have a conversation that's going to be helpful? Because it's so different. Honestly, a lot of times what you're talking about, if you understand the term career development or you understand expectation setting or performance management, you can have a really good and robust conversation, even if you do something different. That has been a big piece is just establishing management and leadership as a discipline, and then helping leaders understand that. Specifically for me, one-on-ones are a huge passion of mine. I came to find out early in my HR career that as I diagnosed what was going on, almost never, it was a, with a few exceptions, were regular and healthy one-on-ones happening if there was a lot of misses between an employee and a manager. So that would be in the diagnostic process. Are you having one-on-ones? Yes, we have monthly, but we miss some months. I'm like, oh, so you don't talk for a couple months. I don't know why things could be going wrong. So that's been a key passion of mine. I feel like that's the basic unit of leadership is good, healthy conversations with employees. So in a couple of places where I've been, one-on-ones haven't really been a common practice. So instituting those and then overall leadership development. Through classroom learning and other job learning.

▶9:54HostIt's a great jumping off point to my next question, Logan. That is, how do you establish effective listening techniques to stay connected with employee sentiment, both on a broad scale and individual level?

▶10:07GuestYeah, I think listening is, especially at the pace that business moves today, is hard sometimes. It's hard to stop and actually pay attention to all those who are doing the work. I think it's actually one of the most important leadership capabilities for any leader. So there's obviously broad-scale listening techniques and tools. Employee engagement surveys is pretty common. I've had that in every place I've been. And that's, those are very helpful and can get good quantitative snapshot of quantitative understanding and then build some action planning around that. Additionally, so at Stampin' Up!, we do a monthly one-question survey. So it's literally one question, just goes out through our HRAS and about half and half are pressing questions and fun questions. So one month it may be, tell me how you feel about your manager. And they're open-ended questions. The next month might be, do you prefer salty or a savory or a Sweet treat, and then we'll provide something in response to that. So try to keep it light, but that helps employees give cons— more consistent feedback than the annual piece. And then additionally, I meet every month. I have just a session called a Lunch and Listen, and it is, it has proven invaluable as an HR leader and as a member of our leadership team. I just pick, have a random sampling of employees, 5 or 6 employees. We provide a lunch and just ask them what's going well, what we can do better, and what ideas they have. And my goal, Stampin' Up! is a smaller company, but I've been doing, I think I have 36 of these that I've done, and it's influenced policy. It's influenced some of the other initiatives that we have going on around performance management and kind of understanding, do people get it? Do they not understand? So I think finding ways to listen, especially that good high-fidelity qualitative type of a conversation, can be really helpful.

▶12:20HostLogan, when it comes to building business acumen in HR teams, particularly from transactional backgrounds, what strategies have you found most effective?

▶12:31GuestOne, awareness. Just giving it time. So we have a weekly meeting, weekly staff meeting. We have a pretty regular schedule and one of the items on our agenda is just a business update. So we'll talk about how sales is doing, talk about any launches or product changes or big events that are happening to keep that context in mind so people aren't just focused on the HR rhythm. I've also always tried to encourage, especially for those who have historically been more transactional, encourage them to participate in staff meetings or standups or whatever the kind of business update is for the groups that they're supporting to be there and be part of those. And it's amazing to me, I cut my teeth in HR and that was an expectation, but it's amazing to me how often that isn't. How often people aren't attending that standup meeting to understand, oh, this is why this is happening throughout the business, or this is why we may need to add some headcount with this capability because there's this new product line that's coming, or this is why we may need to make some changes because we're no longer emphasizing this particular thing. Yeah, just participating as part of the business. And honestly, Dave, sometimes there's a willingness on the business's side, sometimes there isn't. And so there have been times where I've needed to step in and say, hey, will you let them participate for a few times? And if there's not value there, then we can reassess it. I've never had someone come back and boot someone from their staff meeting after the fact when the HR person started attending.

▶14:07HostLogan, can you share a specific example of how you've helped transform an HR team member from having a purely transactional mindset to becoming a strategic business partner?

▶14:18GuestYeah. And that's really cool to see that. And all of us kind of work through different, up the value chain, so to speak, throughout our career. So when I was at Nelson Laboratories, I had a super talented person on my team. They were relatively new to HR, had come in from an adjacent part of the business, but did go and get a degree in HR. Were very strong on the transactional side, and that had been what had been expected of them. But we started doing some of the things we had talked about in terms of, hey, attend the meetings, participate, talk to your business leaders. I encouraged them to have one-on-ones with some of their key business leaders to understand what was important to them. And then, as I'd mentioned earlier, we acquired a couple of companies. And in one of the acquisitions, it was in a different part of the country here in the U.S., and they needed an acquisition integration manager. Onsite, and I suggested in our kind of broader company leadership meeting, I suggest this person for my team and they said, really? An HR person to come and be the integration manager? And everyone knew this person was very capable. But anyway, they, we, that happened. They moved their family across the country and were there for about a 4-month period and totally expanded the their view of what HR could do and what our business was. And they've gone on to do bigger and better HR positions at other companies. But giving that on-the-job experience where you're doing something that may not be a traditional HR role is a huge way. And it's been surprising that more often than not, there's willingness to let people— so obviously we're probably not going to have someone start as the product line manager of the most important product in the company to cut their teeth, but to find that right balance of challenging but non-HR business imperative work really helped this individual.

▶16:16HostLogan, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

▶16:21GuestI think as HR professionals, we do very important work, not just in our organizations, but in the world. The work part of our lives, given the amount of time we all spend at work, is really significant. And anything we can do to improve that work portion of life improves the person and helps their life better as they go home and are with their loved ones or community or family. So sometimes even when we have the hard and sometimes unpleasant parts of HR, remember the difference that you make in helping better align people with what they're good at, helping them achieve their potential does bleed over and help. We can make a big difference in the world in general. And I just wanted to say thank you for, because you probably don't hear this very often, HR people. Thank you for all that you do in your organizations. I genuinely feel like if we do our jobs, we can make our employees' lives better, and that can have positive effects outside of work.

▶17:27HostLogan, thank you so much for joining us on the Go Light People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶17:32GuestYeah, thanks, Dave. Appreciate it.