Organizational Design

“I really love to be part of scaling organizations and trying to connect those dots between what are the business objectives, what is the people strategy, and how to connect that to one another.”

“We're looking at a complete review of how we're structured. That started probably even back into late 2024, called Project Horizon is actually what our whole project name was for.”

“When startups scale, pretty much everything breaks.”

“The top 2 I see are role clarity and then the compliance infrastructure.”

“If I could just wave that magic wand, I would zero in on role clarity, the org design, and how that evolves as a company grows.”

“You can't get mad at your HR department. They're doing what you designed. They set up what you set 'em up to do. They're not capable.”

“How do we look around the corner about how AI is going to revolutionize the way that organizations are going to look? And it's not on the horizon. This is like in the next 12 months, in the next 24 months. And I'd say th...”

“HR isn't here for HR. HR is here to support the business needs.”

“One of our tenets was fundamentally redefining what an HR business partner's role was.”

“I would have hired probably all of our HR business partners in the 2000s, and I look to do this now from different functions. Either from consulting like McKinsey or Bain or PwC or Deloitte, or from the marketing or fina...”

“What inspired me to pursue my master's in HR administration was prior to grad school, all I heard about HR was hire, fire, discipline, right? That was the function, hire, fire, discipline. And what I started to realize w...”

“We make decisions and solve problems and build strategies based on fundamental truths rather than established playbooks and established best practices in quotes.”

“If I've got constraints around budget or headcount, that's fine. I can decide what I can do with that. And it could be operations. It could be very focused on, look, we've got to have strong rigor around compliance and b...”

“Being able to kind of come in and out as someone who's influencing the leaders and showing them what the talent could be does allow you to design the talent to ensure that you're creating a truly high-performance team wi...”

“middle management is gonna be augmented. So you, you might have middle managers that have traditionally in HR, we kind of say 6 to 7-ish, you know, reporting structures is ideal. That might be 30, it might be 40 if you h...”

“Similarly, for the employees, it was very important for us to make sure folks understood where the delineation was.”

“At Genomenon, I took it a step further and consistently used the same, what we called competencies. So, things like accountability, results, the manager track, that would be like performance management and team structure...”

“in order to create more innovative outcomes, we need creative time. And time is the thing that, you know, most of us can say is very challenging, that we just don't have enough time to get everything done that we need to...”

“I think that people would feel much more clearer about what's expected of them and more supported if we just had better and much more disciplined people ops.”

“It's the HR function transforming from a support function into a strategic business function, which involves all of those things that you just mentioned.”

“So, you know, working for the players union like the, like I do, it's a bit interesting being a part of the union and the players are the union members. And so we have around 5,500 members... I kind of was thinking about...”

“I don't ever think payroll payroll should be part of HR. It's a financial tax function, but my point is, you know, you're really rolling up your sleeves and getting some things done.”

“So we've actually crystallized around the term a big small firm because we want the big in terms of what we can offer for learning and development and capabilities, but we want small in terms of if somebody knows that th...”

“I don't look for party planners. And that might sound derogatory, but there's still a lot of people out there think that, you know, when you want to have some celebration, you go to the HR person, they do it. I try not t...”

“If you wanted to know how many directors we had, how many VPs we had, you're just looking at individual titles and trying to manually sort. And I really do mean manually sort to assemble What do these populations look li...”

“The trick is to get that progress and to have a game plan for how you're going to build that broader talent agenda, that common language, those set of connected initiatives that when you look at them holistically are gon...”

“Tubi's 700, and to be fair, we are part of a larger, great, phenomenal company in Fox... but the reality is when you look under our cover, we are tiny and mighty in so many ways, and it's really part of our ethos to be f...”

“And paradoxically, the more control you try to exert, the more folks who don't have that power are going to exert back, which is often termed reactance in psychology.”

“If I could wave a wand, I wouldn't fix anything. So what I would do is just reimagine how we work.”

“building business partner functions for certain companies has helped a lot with making sure that key leaders have that thought partner, somebody to lean on, somebody to make it feel less lonely, you know, to be at the to...”

“It wasn't about less safety training, it was about focused safety training.”

“Sean, if your executive team came to you and said, We are no longer going to fund HR. The only way that the HR department is going to stay relevant is for your customer to pay for your services. How would you do it diffe...”

“So it's not just running HR as a function, but designing it as a business accelerator.”

“Getting our team to be business people first and then people second.”

“HR needs to move from reacting to anticipating.”

“I continue to believe that people, the HR function, is core to an organization's success. In many ways, we're the engineers of an organizational system. That can thrive and grow and change as companies change, which we a...”

“We had really been doing a lot of work, a lot of evolution of the organization in this matrix world. Of what we do. And we got to a point where the leader's like, if you could really help us define the who, the what, the...”

“It's not about trying to limit anyone. It's not about that. It's about what are you great at and how do we leverage that? How do we bring it out within teams?”

“Everybody has a manager who's not their functional manager and who really supports them in their everyday work, their work life, in their personal growth and their development.”

“so many organizations, you know, then cater to this 1% and we want to create something pretty special here where we can lead with trust. We know we're going to hire amazing people that are really good at what they do. We...”

“Introducing structure gave leaders credibility. It created clarity for employees, but we were careful not to lose the energy of the entrepreneurial culture that smaller organizations typically have. They cherish and they...”

“We design work experiences for people.”

“From an HR standpoint, our team was certainly still lean. The complement of the HR structure was very different than it is today. Like, our team looks— there's some still common members, but we were extremely lean and st...”

“one of the things we did was I looked at the makeup of the workforce, and AmeriCorps is quite different from many other agencies. Their average age is about 35 to 40, when most agencies you're talking 50 to 60 or a lot h...”

“One of our values at Harvey is decisiveness, but as you might imagine, as a company that is doubling in size at any given time, we have to add some level of process and rigor.”

“you don't always have the right people with the right talents doing the right pieces of the puzzle. And you can get a project across the finish line sometimes just by moving players around and doing some different things...”

“He is like, I'm gonna hire someone in strategic HR first. And he had to convince these two 26-year-old bootstrap founders that he was gonna hire someone in HR when they, really didn't have any employees.”

“HR is at its core an enablement function. We're here to accelerate and amplify the organization and really remove friction from the employee experience so that people can thrive at work and drive the biggest impact.”

“Well, at Harris County, I have 6 bosses. I have 5 members of commissioners court and the county administrator who I report to on a day-to-day basis. And so I think that's probably the greatest difference...”

“How do we enable the company and the business? How do we enable managers? And then how do we enable employees?”