Mandy Clark

▶0:00HostWelcome 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. I'm excited to welcome Mandy to the Built by People podcast. Mandy, thank you so much for joining us. And as a starting question, I always love to ask each year a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:49GuestAbsolutely, Dave. Thank you for having me today. This is really exciting. So I like to describe my career journey as I started out at the really big companies coming out of school. I joined GE, later joined Pepsi. Some people describe them as academy-like companies. I was very purposeful in my selection of those companies in my earliest formative years because they were certainly known for very progressive people practices, which in the field of HR, I think if you learn from the best, then you can take that with you for the rest of your career. So I think all those like fundamental foundational kind of values and people practices that I learned in those first 15 years of my career have carried me forward. So the last level— latter half, I should say, of my career, maybe last 10 years or so, I've spent at more medium-sized companies again, taking all those tools from my toolkit and trying to apply them to a couple billion-dollar-sized companies, of which today I am the CHRO at Shutterfly. So Shutterfly is about a $2.5 billion in revenue company. A lot of people don't realize how many brands we have under the Shutterfly umbrella, but we've got Shutterfly, we've got Lifetouch, Snapfish, JCPenney Portrait Studios. The list goes on and on, but we have a very diverse workforce and very proud to be the sitting CHRO today.

▶2:20HostMandy, thanks for that great introduction. I'd love to start off by having you tell us about your experience at GE and how that shaped your perspective on leadership development. What specific practices from that era do you think are missing in today's corporate landscape?

▶2:37GuestSuch a great question. Yeah, I'm— like I said, those formative years starting at GE, I joined GE in the early 2000s, just after the Jack Welch era. Jeff Immelt had become the CEO, but Jack Welch had really created some of the most world-class leadership practices. Most leaders at GE knew that they could go off and run companies all around the world. So I do feel like I saw the very best of the best, the way people, the way we looked at our talent in that organization, the investment that was made in the talent, the career pathing, the ability to move talent around the organization and the development of the people that was very that was very particular, and being surrounded by some of the very best leaders in the world, I think, really shaped how I looked at leaders. It was carried through in my time at Pepsi. Pepsi was another organization that truly valued kind of bringing people in early in their career and shaping them, making the investment in them, both formally from a learning and development standpoint, but also informally or through on-the-job experiences and nurturing them as they grew into roles of greater and greater responsibility. And I think, you know, what I saw in those two companies was the investment that companies were willing to make at that time and that long-term value proposition that they were able to glean from the employee relationship. I think to the second part of your question, what's missing now from a leadership standpoint is I think all too often, you know, we're focused on the short term and what we can get out of the employee in the here and now, and not so much about that long-term relationship that we're trying to build. And I think that unfortunately has inspired a lack of loyalty on both sides of the fence, right? If the company's not looking at the employee as a long-term investment, what can I do to develop you and make you that great leader that we want to have in our organization for the next 20 or 25 5 years, the flip side to that is the employee loses that, that same sense of loyalty and they don't feel invested in. And so therefore we see this sort of self-fulfilling prophecy where employees feel like they've got to hop from one company to the next in order to get that development. And you just don't see, you don't see the same kind of values and characteristics being built within those leadership teams. I was just talking with a former employee of mine from my Pepsi days, who, wonderful human being, probably one of the best HR talents that I know out there, and left Pepsi and went on to work for one of the best technology firms in the world. They shall remain nameless for this discussion. But he was telling me how, you know, nobody really pays attention to a career path at this amazing company, right? This success, super successful company. He's having to push for his own kind of development and posting for jobs internally instead of the intentionality of looking at sort of the development and the career path that needs to be built and developed in order for people to, to really have that kind of impact on the organization. So I just feel like we've lost that value proposition and leaders don't have the same value in the organization as they used to.

▶6:13HostMandy, when was a time you successfully implemented back-to-basics leadership principles at Shutterfly, and how did that impact your organization's culture and performance? And maybe we could start with just defining back-to-basics leadership principles.

▶6:27GuestGosh, yeah, back to basics. I think it has a lot to do with listening to your employees, staying connected to your employees, leading with courage, leading with integrity, doing the right thing even if it's not for the immediate benefit to the bottom line, standing up for your employees, clearing the way for good decisions to get made. So yeah, I have a great example. You know, at Shutterfly, as I mentioned, we are a house of brands, and under that is our Lifetouch photography business, which if you're not familiar with it, it is school photography. So quite literally like the headshots that kids get taken in schools. So we have thousands of photographers across the country, both US and Canada, that go out and take these pictures both in the fall and in the spring. And this business had been really affected by COVID, as you can imagine. When the schools shut down, so did our photography business because there wasn't— there weren't kids in the schools for us to take pictures of. And the business took a pretty big hit from a top-line standpoint, as you can imagine. So a couple of years ago, we brought in a brand new leader of that business. And one of the things that impressed me the most about the values that this person brought in his leadership role was truly that back to the basics. So in his first 6 months on the role, he spent every day in the field, on the road, in the schools, side by side with the photographers, side by side with the area leaders. This is a very distributed workforce across thousands of locations across the country. And he was— he took the time to learn the business from the bottom up. He took the time to see exactly what these employees were doing on a day-to-day basis, the challenges that they faced, the, you know, learning from them and listening to them, what they— the suggestions that they were making. And as a result, the credibility and the trust that he was able to earn from spending the time with both the employees and the leaders in the field has earned him the right to ask these people to run through walls for him. And it's been amazing to see. It's still a business that is in a turnaround phase, because we're not that far off from the days of COVID when the business was pretty much decimated. But as they build those relationships back up with the schools that they take pictures in and then ultimately— excuse me, ultimately with the parents who buy the pictures from us and where we earn our revenue, those employees are out there beating the street every single day. And what we hear from them the most is they do it because they believe in his leadership. They believe in his vision. They believe in the direction that he's giving them because he took the time to come out and spend with them to really understand what they go through on a day-to-day basis. And that's the kind of leadership that I think we need and oftentimes are lacking because I think all too often leaders are more in it for kind of their own gain, their own, you know, whatever fills their own ego, as opposed to really being about the people that they're leading.

▶9:55HostMandy, how does leading HR in a seasonal business with up to 17,000 employees across multiple brands influence your approach to building consistent leadership practices?

▶10:06GuestYeah, that is an everyday struggle for us, Dave, for sure. We have a core employee population of about 4,000 to 5,000 people, but we do spike up to 2, 3 times that every year. Both these photographers that we hire in the Lifetouch business And then also on the Shutterfly side, the e-commerce side, we hire a lot of technicians. And as the spikes in production go up, particularly in our fourth quarter business, and it would be really easy for us to just take the approach that, hey, those employees will leave and we'll hire new employees next year, just a cyclical approach. But I think our operations team does an amazing job of putting their money where their mouth is. With the development of the operations leadership, we have a primarily promote-from-within mentality. So, a lot like what I experienced back in my GE and Pepsi days, where we invest so much time and so much development in the folks that are coming in. They might start as a seasonal employee, They become a full-time employee, then they have opportunities to become a supervisor of other employees, into manager positions. We have fantastic examples of folks who've done all those steps along the way and are ultimately sitting in plant leadership roles today. And so I think we could have made the choice to just look at it as people are exchangeable. People, the long term doesn't matter. We've actually taken the opposite approach. And again, because those leaders have done each of the jobs every step of the way, it makes them such a better leader in the end because they truly understand. They walked a mile in the shoes of the people that they lead. And so that credibility is huge and, and allows them to be that much more effective leaders.

▶12:07HostMandy, can you share a story about a time when you had to balance maintaining strong people-first leadership principles while meeting challenging business objectives? What were your key learnings from that experience?

▶12:19GuestYeah, gosh, I have been in that position more times than I even want to think in my career, often viewed as a bit of a turnaround queen. And yeah, when I was in my last role at Pepsi, I actually moved from Texas out to California at a time when our West Coast region was actually losing money on a year-over-year basis. Things had gotten quite out of control within that business or within that region of the country. So they brought in a new VPGM, brought in a whole new leadership team. We took the opportunity to actually assess and make some pretty significant changes in the leadership team below that. And then we invested like crazy in those people. So some of those folks, by the way, were, I would say, more raw talent. They weren't necessarily the most experienced leaders. They were folks that, you know, we saw sort of a hidden gem and we said, we are going to invest and we are going to develop in, you know, those folks into great leaders. And we pulled people together. So we had an amazing emerging leaders summit where we brought 30 of the top leaders from across that region together. Didn't spend a whole lot of money. We were very scrappy because we were, we were not yet making the profit that we needed to, but just by bringing folks together, aligning on a vision, aligning on the type of leadership team that we wanted to be. So setting the core, the values, the principles, and then aligning on how we were gonna go tackle this business. And it was amazing what we were able to accomplish. I was there in that role for a little over 3 years, and we went from being in the red to in the black. We connected, we had a really cool program called Exec Connect where we— wasn't a formal mentorship program because sometimes those can get a little unruly, but we had this opportunity to just connect these more junior leaders in the organization with the senior leadership team on an informal basis, allowing them to know what was going on in the broader business, just keeping them on track with that vision that we had created and inspiring them, inspiring them to want to go out and do their best that they could in leading their teams every day. Most of the time in my career, it's been in a tough environment that I had to inspire great leadership. And sometimes being in the trenches together can do that. But yeah, I think if you just make sure that you've got the right principles and the right people in place, you can move mountains.

▶14:59HostMandy, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

▶15:03GuestIf there's HR folks that are listening out there, if I reflect back on the younger Mandy who started out at these big behemoth companies like GE, like Pepsi, It was no thought at all for a company like Pepsi to invest millions and millions of dollars in the development of people. For those who remember the Crotonville days, it was this immense infrastructure of developing leaders. I think for the HR person of today, we have to scrap that idea. There's probably still companies out there that can and will do that, but I think we also have to just reset our expectations that we're going to have to be scrappy. We're going to have to do a lot of these things a little less elaborate than they used to be done, but we can still accomplish the same thing. For non-HR business leaders that might be listening out there, I think the critical piece is remembering that these kind of fundamental back-to-the-basic values maybe the lost art of leadership is so critical to role model. Listening to your people, connecting to your people, creating that long-term vision, creating accountability but not blame, and really thinking about the legacy that you want to build. I guess I'd like to end with a quote that I will pull from Jack Welch. So the good and the bad that comes out of some of his leadership philosophies, I think one of the most amazing things that I can remember him saying was, before you're a leader, success is all about growing yourself. But then when you become a leader, success is all about growing others. And I think we all, as leaders, need to put our egos aside, forget about the short term. It's not all about the short term. It's about the long term, and grow the people around us and make that investment.

▶17:01HostMandy, thanks so much for joining us today on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶17:07GuestThank you. Thanks for having me, Dave.