Nicholas Nyhus

▶0:00IntroWelcome 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.

▶0:39HostI'm excited to welcome Nicholas to the

▶0:41IntroBuilt by People podcast.

▶0:42HostNicholas, 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.

▶0:49GuestGreat. Thanks, Dave. And I appreciate the opportunity to be with you here today as well. I've been fortunate to have a career journey that spanned not only from the Midwest, but from coast to coast over the last 25, 30 years. And each region and each industry that I've been part of has brought unique challenges and, as you can imagine, different cultural nuances that expanded my own personal lens on leadership and human resources in general. In the Midwest, I learned a lot of great things about the power of consistency, community-rooted decision-making. Had the opportunity to be out in Los Angeles for a number of years as well. Where I got to work in the education, higher education fields and financial services there. And off to New York, where I had the opportunity to do some work with a global organization and spend some time overseas as well. And then boomeranged my way back to the Midwest in a combination of healthcare, education, and financial services. So a wide set of industries that allowed me to really rapidly learn how to innovate and deal with different labor forces and just dealing with people in general from a variety of different walks of life.

▶1:56HostNicholas, thanks for that great introduction. I want to start by asking, how can HR leaders transform their roles from being seen as merely transactional to becoming essential business partners within their organizations? And I also want to ask if you could share an example where you've successfully implemented that type of transformation.

▶2:18GuestSure. It's one thing that I've learned is that HR can't succeed with a one-size-fits-all approach. We have to tailor our strategies to local realities while remaining aligned with the broader organization values. And that's where the real work and reward of HR begins and ends in certain cases. If you look from a transformational standpoint, this has been the bane of HR's existence. How do we move away as much from the transactional type of work? But there's a necessity to some of that transactional type of work that has to be done, which we typically call table stakes today. But to be true business partners, I would actually suggest that we kind of look at, are we really organizational effectiveness partners in addition to being business partners? And I think the key to that is, is HR needs to move from reacting to anticipating. And that requires us as leaders to not only understand the business, which has been a mantra for a long time, but we also have to think like the operators and we have to drive results through talent, culture, and organizational capability. And we have to act like we are one of them, but our expertise happens to be focusing on the people side of things. In a couple of my previous roles, I had significant labor shortages, which is not a surprise, especially in healthcare. And how do we expand services in growing emerging markets? And it's not just about posting jobs. We have to do that. And it's not just about increasing incentives. Of course, we have to look at market pay. Those are typical transactional responses. But the way we can make a bigger impact is we implemented like a workforce pipeline strategy. That aligns with the broader organization goals and the growth plans. That's like partnering with schools, creating rotational internship pathways, implementing predictive analytics. And now with the advancement of AI, that really should boost that functionality within human resources and using that to anticipate not only attrition but skill needs where we have some significant skill gaps that are coming up on the horizon here, as well as continuing labor shortages. When we put those types of places or processes or programs in place, it's really not that difficult to reduce things like contract labor. And so we were able to successfully reduce some contract labor spend by over 30% in just the first year and cutting things like time to fill. And it actually elevates our role as a business driver and not just a support function throughout the organization.

▶4:37HostTell me about a time when you helped develop the next generation of leaders within your organization. What specific strategies did you use to ensure they were equipped to motivate, coach, and enable their teams effectively?

▶4:50GuestThis is probably one of my most favorite aspects of the HR function in and of itself is how do we really enable people to be their best? And for me, a big part of that is one of my proudest opportunities was leading a cross-functional emerging leaders program. And we did a combination of behavioral assessments, executive mentorship, and probably most important was the real-world kind of problem solving, giving them action learning projects to do along the way. And coaching them along the way. And so some of the key things we did there were around behavioral insights, assessing emotional intelligence, 360 tools. We happen to use the Leadership Circle, which is a phenomenal 360 tool that helps people understand their leadership style, because our philosophy was that you're leaders in every chair, whether you lead people or not, you're leading projects. So if you're an individual contributor, you still have to lead and influence people, including yourself. And looking at it just on whether you're a people leader or not, to me is a pretty narrow point of view. Experiential learning is the other part, making sure that participants led real projects. Theory doesn't work in business. It's nice to be able to have academic theory behind you, but then there's actually putting that into the real-world solutioning and dealing with people. People have challenges and issues, and not everything goes as smoothly as it looks in the textbook. So that experiential learning and how to get through those barriers and challenges was really important to coach people along that way. And then looking at different feedback models and adaptive leadership. Now more than ever, we've talked about the VUCA world. It's We're probably at VUCA 4.0 at this point of how volatile and uncertain things are and continuing with the ambiguity and such. We learned that reinforcing values and leadership through coaching is not a one-time event, but it's got to be a daily discipline that has to be done. And learning never stops. And that was our— probably our biggest opportunities to help people with that. And then finally, frequent touchpoints with leaders, that executive visibility, learning how to have executive presence. Making talent visible and letting them shine and learn through proximity was an important piece as well. And so that pushed up against things like the work from home and remote working circumstances on when did people need to be in the office and get that face-to-face time. And those types of things were all important aspects of this. So not only were we able to build a bench of capable leaders, but we saw increases in engagement scores. And wherever those leaders were placed, their teams actually had increased development and engagement scores as well.

▶7:14HostNicholas, can you share a case study or story where you successfully implemented organizational effectiveness initiatives that impacted the company's goals and employee engagement?

▶7:25GuestSure. I've been fortunate to be a part of a number of acquisitions, and acquisitions can always be challenging. I think people are hard to change in a variety of ways or manage through change. And I actually even don't like using the term change management because it implies that you can actually manage it in a way and it's really more— I look at it as change enablement. HR professionals sometimes can be the worst people to change. We like to tell people what to do and those rules don't necessarily apply to us. So I think we as a function also need to take a step back and look at that. But from a case study perspective in an acquisition, HR is often first to the party that has to get everything going and get past our own issues. And rather than pushing top-down changes, we put in an organizational health index assessment that I let employees talk to us early on to get a baseline, then to drive the change and enable the change from that standpoint. So part of that included a clarity of purpose. So making sure that everybody was aligned around our single mission and created cascading strategic priorities. And that goes beyond just the mission and vision and value type of conversation. But what are we really here to do? And then decision rights and accountability. That is, how do we get through governance in an acquisition? And are we doing what we say we're going to do? Is it an affiliation? Is it an acquisition? Is it a merger? Being really clear upfront who's making the decisions, what's our overarching goal going to be here, and how do we manage trade-off decisions that have to be made and get the best of both worlds when those types of events are happening. And then listening in action is an important part too, to make sure that we have very timely feedback loops, whether they be through pulse surveys or new technology that allows you to get a better understanding and handle of what's happening, especially ways to escalate issues. So during simple system implementations, for example, how do we get on top of things that need to be fixed sooner rather than later, where you can't wait for a long period of time, especially if those systems are tied to your revenue? So those are very important aspects of that and measuring our results. So from that baseline result, we were able to increase some engagement by 12 points, turnover dropped, and especially measuring it in critical roles, we were able to retain people and not have any layoffs that we were actually committed to do.

▶9:37HostNicholas, what parting advice would you like to share with our audience?

▶9:42GuestI think most importantly, HR needs to know the business better than anyone at the table. We've been finally invited to the table, but we need to understand that business better than anyone. We have to be more fluent in understanding not only the financials, but operations and strategy and The more influence we will have is based on understanding those three things: the financials, the operations, and strategy. That will let us catapult our role into being a critical part of the organization. And as I mentioned before, it's not about managing performance, it's about enabling performance through people. And lastly, I'd probably say that leading through courage, especially during challenging times, you've got to lead through courage, advocate for the hard truths, champion for those voices that may not be being heard. And then never underestimate the ripple effect of being a really good people leader, or whether you're leading people or not, but just a leader in general. Those little small, engageable moments go a long way in the long run.

▶10:39HostNicholas, thank you so much for joining us on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶10:45GuestYes, thanks for having me, Dave.