Beyond HR: How a 360-degree People Strategy Builds Purpose-Led Culture

Welcome 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 Sandy to the Built By People podcast. Sandy, 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.

It's wonderful to be here, and I would be happy to. My career journey is interesting. I was an athlete my whole life, and in college at University of Buffalo, I played 4 years of volleyball, and I worked in the athletic department. And I had aspirations to work in college athletics for my life. And the gentleman that I worked for, he encouraged me to pursue a degree, a master's degree in sport administration, which I did from Kent State University. And then I went about looking for jobs in college and university athletics. But during my search, I stumbled upon an opportunity through a temp agency for a licensing administrator role at the PGA of America. And let me pause and say the Professional Golfers Association of America, which is different than the PGA Tour. We're a professional trade association. We represent more than 30,000 men and women who've elected a career in the business of golf. So they're managing about 10,000 golf facilities around the country. And we do own and operate events like the Ryder Cup, the KPMG Women's PGA Championship, and the PGA Championship. So anyway, backing up, temporary assignment for 90 days as a licensing administrator at the PGA of America, that has blossomed into a career. And here we are almost 29 years later, which is unbelievable to me, but also amazing. And I've had a really unique opportunity to move around the business and up in the business. So I went from licensing to marketing services to business development, then over to what we call player engagement. I started to lead our women's initiatives where we were trying to bring more women into the sport of golf and retain them in the sport. And that work in the women's space and the gender space is what opened my eyes to the world of diversity and inclusion. So I got to lay out the strategic plan for inclusion for the PGA of America, and that's been under my purview actually since 2014. But at the time in 2018, our then CEO Seth Waugh, he had a vision for a Chief People Officer at the PGA of America. We had not previously had a Chief People Officer or a CHRO role, but Seth recognized and felt that that was important to have that role at the executive table.. And he gave me the opportunity to step into that role, which was incredibly exciting for me. Daunting too, because I didn't come from that background. But that's a brief nutshell of my journey to date.

Sandy, how did your transition into HR during an unprecedented period shape your approach to leadership and culture

building? It was an unprecedented period, and I'm glad you said that. And again, when Seth gave me the opportunity, I was incredibly honored and I said yes and I leaned in. I didn't know at the time that we were going to be opening this incredible 660-acre campus in Frisco, Texas, north of Dallas. And that is where the home of the PGA of America is. We have this incredible 106,000-square-foot facility that is our home, the home of our PGA of America members. We've got an education center downstairs, production studios, event function space. So that was unique and different. And then also we were going through a lot of other changes technology-wise. The company shifted from being a Microsoft shop to a Google Workspace. That was a big change. We shifted from ADP on the HRIS side and Oracle Fusion on the finance side, shifted the entire enterprise to Workday. So as I reflect back and I think about those changes, the pandemic, the corporate relocation from South Florida to Frisco, Texas, the technological changes, and really delivering against the number one charge and vision that Seth had for me was to build a shared values, purpose-driven culture, especially again, not coming from an HR

background. Sandy, what inspired your CEO to bring in someone without a traditional HR background for this role, and how do you think that decision has benefited the

organization? I think Seth was inspired by the idea of an individual who had, again, worked around the business and in the business and came up through the business and could look at it through a different lens. And maybe with a 360-degree approach. We've been incredibly blessed at the PGA of America to have an incredible people operations team, our human resources team. We call it the people team, but we have some leaders that are steeped in the ways of human resources, and they are dedicated professionals, and those practices and those protocols and those ways very well. And again, they have decades of So we've been incredibly blessed in that way. But I think Seth wanted someone, again, to look at maybe some of the other sides of the people experience versus just the people operations, and think about a values-based culture, making sure our people are having the opportunity to work on purpose-driven work, and the idea of getting to come to work every day versus I have to go to work. So someone to bring that perspective. And again, I touched on it earlier, having the people lens at the executive table, he recognized that that was important and that there was a void up to that point at the executive table.

Sandy, can you share insights into the shared values journey at the PGA and its impact on your culture, the business, and the business's performance?

I'd love to. I'm really proud of our shared values journey, primarily because it was developed by our people for our people. It wasn't something that was developed at the top and pushed down upon the people. We literally took an idea out of Patrick Lencioni's book where he talked about And I'll tell you, we sent a one-question survey out to all of our staff. Again, it was inspired by Patrick Lencioni. One question went out to everyone, and it said, if you were piloting a rocket ship to Mars and you had 4 seats on your rocket ship, who from the PGA of America team, who among your teammates would you put in those seats on the rocket ship to go to Mars and build the next PGA? Who would you choose based on the quality of their character. So that— the survey results formed our Shared Values Working Group of employees from different areas of the association, of the company, different levels, different backgrounds, identities, abilities, who went about building the Shared Values. And we have 4 Shared Values: Get Better Every Day, Practice Gratitude, Have Each Other's Backs, and Start with Clarity. And under each of those 4 shared values, they all have 5 supporting behavioral statements. And those statements are critical so people understand what it means to show up in that way. But all of that was created by our people and is still overseen, if you will, by our people. If there's ever a request to tweak a shared value or change a behavior, it goes back to that Shared Values Working Group for consideration. And that's been really part of our secret sauce. And then those shared values and the supporting behavioral statements underpin the entire employee lifecycle, from the time we're looking for talent, identifying and vetting talent, onboarding them, developing them, and ultimately offboarding them for voluntary or involuntary reasons. The shared values anchor that journey, and it's been invaluable, particularly during the pandemic. The shared values were finished by the working group in early March of 2020. And I had great trepidation about rolling them out because the pandemic had just ensued, if that's the right word, upon the world, and everyone had gone home to work in a distributed fashion, which we had never done before at the P&G in America. We are a very traditional workplace. In-office, et cetera. And I thought, oh my goodness, is this the right time to roll out these shared values? But we did. We rolled them out in late March of 2020, and I think it was the best thing we ever did because it provided this cultural connective tissue that kept our team together. We're a relatively small team. We're about 325, but it was the thing and still is the thing that ties and binds our team together. It's a shared language.

Sandy, what challenges have you faced in embedding shared values and how are you continuing to refine that

process? I would say two challenges come to mind. One is around accountability, and I think that's something we'll always be challenged with. In a good way, making sure that individually we are holding ourselves accountable to embody those shared values, and especially our people leaders and our senior leaders. We have to make sure we're modeling the behaviors that we expect of the team. So accountability is one, and then two, also guarding against that the shared values don't ever get weaponized. And I'll try to give you an example or an illustration. One of the shared values is have each other's backs. That doesn't mean if, you know, you come to the people team and there's something that you want or something that you need and maybe you don't get it, it's not to say, oh, you don't have my back. You need to be used and leveraged and lived in the right way versus ever being used as a weapon. Like you didn't have my back because I didn't get what I want. So those are two things that we keep top of mind to make sure we don't head down an adverse path.

Sandy, what advice would you give to organizations rethinking what they need in their next chief people officer or

CHRO? I would encourage them to really step back and think about What does the business need from a people perspective and even just a human perspective at that executive table? Because I think it may be easy or a leader could be quick to say, oh, we need a traditional CHRO that's steeped in the ways or has come up in the ways of what sometimes I think of as kind of institutional HR. Time, attendance, compliance, benefits, payroll, all the necessary and very important things that you have to have. But there is so much more on the people side of the organization and the business that I would encourage leaders who are looking for that next potential CHRO or CPO to think about someone that brings a non-traditional background or a different lens to that role.

Sandy, what parting advice would you like to give to our

listeners? I'm smiling because a bit of advice, and I try to remind myself of it regularly because I need to, is the idea of putting on your own oxygen mask first. The people side in the business, and I didn't really know this until I was in it and lived it, The people side of the business is really hard, and you have to make sure that you're taking care of yourself fully and wholly, physically, mentally, emotionally, in a way that allows you to take care of your people across your organization, to be able to show up every day, be present, be on, be authentic, and be ready to, to serve them and partner with them and engage with them. And you've got to put on your own oxygen mask first, or you can't do that. Oftentimes, HR leaders will say, we'll chuckle to ourselves within our cohorts, we'll say, you know, there's no HR for HR, because there isn't. It's kind of like, who's our HR? But yeah, put your own oxygen mask on first and make sure you're taking care of your physical and mental and emotional health, because that's going to allow you to really deliver for your people broadly and for the business.

Sandy, thank you so much for joining us on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure having you involved.

My pleasure. Thank you.