Louie Lugo

▶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 Louie to the Built By People podcast. Louie, 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.

▶0:54GuestAbsolutely, Dave. So my career journey actually started in my previous career when I was a professional musician by trade. I performed and taught trombone for some time. And I was given a musical project that had a lot of non-musical items to it around workforce optimization and some core HR pieces. That was the beginning, essentially the genesis of my HR career, because I realized that these non-musical pieces needed to be executed at a very high level for the music to be executed at a high level, thinking professional Maslow, if you will. And that really led to me leaving music as a profession and diving into human resources. Very grateful. I love the HR field, seeing people at their best and facilitating organizational success. It's a wonderful way to spend the working days.

▶1:58HostLouie, thank you so much for that great introduction. I'm going to jump into our first question here, and that is, how can CHROs create internal success stories that showcase the impact of HR strategies on both organizational and individual success?

▶2:17GuestYeah, well, I, again, you know, what CHROs and CPOs, heads of HR do, ultimately what we're tasked with is bridging people strategy with business strategy. And to do that, it really requires understanding the business model, regardless of what sector that is, whether it's private sector, public sector, nonprofit. What have you, in how to best do that. So a lot of what we see in terms of success stories are broadly, you know, turning something that can be viewed as a negative into something that is a positive, turning weaknesses into strengths. And, you know, there's a number of ways that we are able to do that. I think in my current role as CHRO at Northreed Behavioral Health, we have a number— we're presented with these potentials for creating success stories on a regular basis. And to be able to help our managers really navigate some pretty intense challenges provides those unique opportunities on a regular basis, for which we're grateful.

▶3:26HostYou touched on the topic of strength very briefly, and it's a topic that we're going to dive a little bit deeper into with this next question. And that's, uh, what approaches do you use to help employees align their work with their strengths? And how do you see that impacting both job satisfaction and performance?

▶3:49GuestYeah, again, the business model is critical here to consider. So in my current role, um, most of what we do is clinical, of course, being in behavioral health. So. A lot of what we see is our largest FTE are clinicians. And when we run into a situation where we have an opportunity to help someone with their work performance, we have a number of different levers around performance conversations. How do we measure the what work outputs? We're big into solution-focused brief therapy and performance thinking. So we were really able to kind of bridge, marry some clinical concepts with some more broader kind of performance discussion pieces with collaboration across our senior executive team, our chief culture officer and our chief clinical officer. One of the things we can do is that if someone in a specific program might be struggling, but they what they do, you know, they're highly qualified, they might be a better fit for a different program. And that's not a one solve for everyone, but it certainly has garnered some quality outcomes. So that's certainly one way that we can help support an employee to success.

▶5:13HostLouie, you talked a lot about the importance of aligning and understanding the business model. Curious how you bridge people strategy with business strategy. To achieve both individual authenticity and organizational goals?

▶5:30GuestRight. Well, so on the organizational goal, our purpose is to provide people with as much care as they need and what's ultimately most appropriate for whatever they might be going through. Honestly, it's really just getting people through the door. So as we look at our different verticals and our deliverables in terms of what kind of care we provide, which geographies and what type of care that is, we want to make sure that we're filling the roles and we want to make sure that we have alignment of the people that we are putting in those roles in collaboration with the respective managers to provide that care that is most appropriate for the people coming in. So So that's kind of the broad strokes of what that bridge looks like.

▶6:20HostLouie, what role does altering job descriptions and responsibilities to focus on strengths play in boosting engagement and retention among employees?

▶6:33GuestYeah, I think at the cost of having the tail wag the dog, you know, we do what we can. We certainly generally, I would say are probably not in the practice of altering a job description to a person or a candidate. But ultimately, I think it's, you know, really down to what does, what are the primary purposes of a respective program that we offer? So whether it's jail-based behavioral services or youth and family or EMDR, you know, we have a, really, we have such a full range and a comprehensive list of programs to support people in anything that they might be going through. We have a robust co-responder program as well that are essentially— they're clinicians that go out with first responders to some pretty intense situations, you know? So we tend to keep the job content within a job description to be largely or fully aligned with whatever it is that they really need to do. And we plug the clinicians or whomever it may be, the provider, or certainly we have non-clinical roles as well. If we need to potentially have some minor adjustments to what that job content looks like or potentially the org chart, then those are some other options that we can look at.

▶7:58HostAnd Louis, how do you measure the success of some of these HR initiatives, especially in the context of helping employees bring their most authentic selves to work? Yeah, so good question.

▶8:12GuestSo that kind of feels like a two-parter for me. The first piece is how do we measure HR metrics or what our value is to the agency? And we do that in a number of ways. So quantitatively, we're, you know, HR in most, potentially all organizations is essentially internal customer service to some significant degree. So any sort of internal, what we call HelpSpot tickets. We, we cover a fair number of those on an annual basis and we receive them pretty much every day. We look at what our response rate is, how many tickets we're covering per day, various time metrics, and, you know, what the outcome of those tickets were. You know, what's something I'd, I'd be remiss to, if I didn't say, is that what I have a lot of gratitude and value for is that our people feel demonstrably comfortable approaching HR for a number of different concerns, both at the employee and the manager level, which, you know, I think as we know is not true everywhere. So to have that level of trust that we continue to cultivate, that we're here to help and we enjoy what we do, you know, every, you know, we run into a number of issues that are are complex or complicated and take quite a bit to resolve and get into the end zone, as we might say, but we're happy to do it. And again, as we talked about earlier, it's, these are opportunities to create success stories one way or another. It was about, well, authentic self, the

▶9:46Hostauthentic self in relation to how you're measuring success.

▶9:52GuestYeah, no, that's another key piece of this as well. So, We're really big into work outputs based on the performance thinking model and work outputs look a little bit different depending on where you are in the org chart and what your role is. But certainly for me, for HR and many of the managers, relationships are a key work output. Honestly, it took me some time to kind of wrap my head around fully, but if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. One, there's a culture piece to it that's incredibly important around collaboration and how we can create or manifest positive outcomes. Our three values are customer first, collaboration, and compassion. So kind of helps us tie the room together from a collaboration standpoint to facilitate the other two. There's also a more plain way to look at this that I think is pretty resonant and aligned in that if you have good relationships with those around you, it is easier to get things done. There's a synergy, there's a productivity piece that is very real. And then also kind of a right-brain piece. It feels good. It feels good to work with people on various items that you have a positive, constructive working relationship with. And I think in part, Sometimes that means having hard, vulnerable, transparent conversations that embody open communication in a way that invites and garners trust. I think that's pretty significant. And, you know, a lot of managers in other organizations, I think, don't feel that they have the appropriate psychological safety to have a lot of those conversations. And what happens far more than should is where those conversations don't happen, relationships are not cultivated, positive outcomes are stunted, you know, and it, it's really a domino effect to the downside. So the relationship piece, both in terms of collaboration, is incredibly important, but also just as a general culture piece, Something that I like to do is, you know, we have over 30 different programs in 24 buildings. It's a significant agency that we have. And what I love to do is to just pop into different programs and say, hey, you know, Louie the, you know, Louie the HR guy type of thing. I usually don't even say I'm the CHRO. I just come in and I talk to people. I want to know what their life is like, what their pain points are. Maybe we talk sports or, current events or something easy, something connecting where it kind of grounds us to this piece where we're all human, you know, and we're all on the same team and we're looking to help people. And if I haven't mentioned this already, is that in HR for NorthRange Behavioral Health, what we really enjoy is that we help people who help people. We don't make widgets and there's nothing wrong with making widgets, but when we get to help people who are doing the work to help others who are really in need. And we're actually in these programs, seeing what's being done and knowing how our support helps others be their best to support others. That's incredibly fulfilling and motivating on an intrinsic level that I think is underrated in many areas of the HR field.

▶13:35HostLouie, what parting advice would you like to share with our audience?

▶13:39GuestYeah. Parting advice. You know, I, that's a great question. And maybe one that, that requires a little bit of introspection, but I think that when I speak with other HR executive peers and different people in similar spaces, they talk about some negative mantras or experiences with HR or being an HR professional or leader. I think that We have to make a commitment to ourselves as HR leaders and professionals to not get jaded, to not be jaded, to think up, to assume up, to envision what we think the HR function or the people function should look like and kind of reverse engineer from there. Certainly, there are management teams that don't support HR. I think sometimes HR leaders don't know what to ask for. So it, it's a double downward spiral. I think that parting advice is to remember to breathe. If we have any sort of anxiety or frustration and we do a self-inventory check of, oh, I feel bad, whatever that bad is, am I breathing? More often than not, the answer is no. And when we start to breathe again, we self-regulate. You know, I think it's Dream big, execute, get people on your bus, and you'd be surprised at how much a little vulnerability and laughter and owning your mistakes, being real and doing the right thing. You know, you don't have to be a Boy Scout, but be a productive citizen in your organization. Lead with kindness and gratitude. And, you know, I think a lot of positive outcomes will come your way.

▶15:28HostLouis, thank you so much for joining us on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶15:33GuestThank you so much, Dave.