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AI is reshaping leadership, strategy, and the very role of HR. In each episode, the host Barb Bidan explores how AI drives innovation and leadership in HR with actionable insights for the future of work.
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The Human Element - Dana Kellerman
Barb Bidan: Today, my guest is Dana Kellerman, the Chief Human Resources Officer at OnPoint Group. Dana's career is unusually useful for the question that I would like to ask today. Dana spent more than 15 years at GE, became a lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, and later held COO and CHRO responsibilities at the same time. She's built functions, redesigned legacy ones, and led in environments where execution is absolutely not theoretical.
Barb Bidan: Dana wrote recently about culture and that the gap isn't in awareness, it's execution. And that feels like the right lens for AI readiness in HR as well. We've got no shortage of awareness, no shortage of training, demos, or pilots. the harder question is whether HR has the operating discipline to redesign work, build real capability, measure what changed.
Barb Bidan: And stop doing things that no longer create value. I could not think of a better person to join me in this conversation. So, Dana, thank you for coming on the show today.
Dana Kellerman: Yes, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Barb Bidan: I would be remiss if I did not kind of go back to the GE experience. It's such an enviable experience and such a great company in terms of the leadership and leaders that it produces for the rest of us in other companies. GE built something that most organizations really have never come close to, I think. a systematic
Barb Bidan: enterprise wide approach to leadership development and capability building. What does spending fifteen years inside that environment teach you about what rigorous actually looks like? And how is that kind of frame how you think about things?
Dana Kellerman: Yeah, you know, I'd say what GE taught me is that rigor is not a slogan, it's an operating system. And what I mean by that is when I was at GE, leadership development, capability building, it was coupled with process discipline and accountability. They were not treated as separate initiatives. They were integrated into how the business ran.
Dana Kellerman: You know, at GE development was systematic and expectations were clear. Talent was also assessed consistently. Leaders were certainly expected to not only know the business, but understand the operating model. we had to use data, we would always look to improve processes and and build capability in others.
Dana Kellerman: So when I hear organizations talk about AI readiness today, I listen and I ask plenty of questions, and you'll find that I do ask plenty of questions. My team would certainly agree to that. But I do so in order to really ascertain whether we're talking about technology or actual organizational capability. Because buying AI software is not about readiness. If we talk about
Dana Kellerman: Organizational readiness, it means that the organization has the leadership discipline. We have the data quality and process clarity in place as well as governance. We certainly don't want to overlook our governance requirements, but we certainly want to have a form of a solid learning infrastructure in place. I'd also add that the organization should have a level of
Dana Kellerman: Cultural trust to use AI responsibly and effectively, which is why I stressed the governance component. And while the statement, like I said, was certainly a lot, it definitely boils down to our leaders understanding what decisions AI should support, where human judgment is still essential, and how work will change or what skills employees need to build.
Dana Kellerman: I'd say unfortunately, I believe that many organizations are really underestimating that part. They're treating AI readiness more as a system implementation when it really is an organizational capability challenge, if you will. So from my perspective, I challenge leaders to be curious, right? They need to be asking themselves if they have the management muscle to absorb.
Dana Kellerman: change? Do they have clean processes and do they have accountable owners or leaders who can translate strategy into behavior? That's a critical one. You know, do your employees understand how AI will help them, not simply replace or monitor them, which is a big fear that we're hearing in the workplace. And it's your
Dana Kellerman: Governance, strategy, you know, really ensuring that your technology is being used ethically and fairly and in line with the business. So a lot of questions, but all critical. so really just digressing back to your question, I'd say, you know, GE taught me about rigor and that rigor is not bureaucracy, right? It's asking the right questions, seeking clarity, having success measures in place.
Dana Kellerman: It's certainly driving leadership accountability and repeatable capability building. And in the era of AI that we've all been catapulted into, that kind of
Barb Bidan: Yep.
Dana Kellerman: rigor is certainly going to separate the organizations that experiment with AI from the ones that actually transform with AI.
Barb Bidan: And when you left GE and started working in smaller, right? Because anything, when you move from GE, most things are gonna be smaller, but a smaller organization, what was the biggest gap that you encountered in how companies think through building capability?
Dana Kellerman: It's a great question. I would say the biggest gap I saw wasn't the lack of talent. It was the discipline around talent development. Fortunately, I still worked with incredibly smart and committed people. However, what was often missing wasn't the individual's learning capability. It was that system for building capability.
Dana Kellerman: So if I think about GE, you know, leadership development wasn't just a program. It was just part of how the business operated. Leaders were expected to identify future capability needs.
Dana Kellerman: They were expected to develop people systematically and treat talent as a strategic asset. Capability building was always proactive. However, in many smaller organizations, development tends to be a little reactive at times. You know, training happened when a problem occurred, succession planning happened when somebody resigned. New skills were discussed after the market had already shifted. And honestly,
Dana Kellerman: I think we're seeing some of those gaps today when we think about HR's readiness to absorb AI. you know, many organizations are they're focused on the on technology alone and not enough on the capabilities or skills that they will need to use that technology effectively.
Dana Kellerman: many of them are asking, what tools should we implement instead of what skills and behaviors or ways of working do we need to build? So be really these organizations I think to get the most value from AI, they're not the ones that adopt it first. They are the ones that intentionally will be building the learning culture.
Dana Kellerman: that teaches, you know, business acumen and critical thinking and the adaptability, if you will, to work alongside with AI. And I think that's where you know some of the competitive advantage is gonna come for many of us. Right? It's gonna come from developing capabilities before you need staying ahead of the market. and I think AI is like testing whether some of those organizations know how to do that, know how to
Dana Kellerman: really test those waters and build the proper capabilities.
Barb Bidan: Completely like far more parallels between the leadership development that you're talking about and AI readiness right now. When you talk about GE, what I hear is things are embedded and integrated within the system, right? So the approach to leadership development is not programmatic. And I think it's like that same lens that we could apply with AI, right? We're not like
Barb Bidan: Slapping a tool on top of things programmatically, how do we actually look at the whole system and think about how to integrate it? which is just the way that I think you were probably trained to think about approaching business problems at GE as well, which is probably why the world loves to learn from leaders who have spent time at GE.
Barb Bidan: So you've also held COO and CHRO roles simultaneously at Adirondack Health and then again at Frontier Psychiatry. The combination is unusual enough, becoming more usual, which we love. But I want to understand from your point of view what you feel like that dual role actually changes when you're accountable for operations, but also people simultaneously. How does that change?
Barb Bidan: what you think about the skills that HR actually needs.
Dana Kellerman: Sure. what changed for me when I held both the COO and CHRO responsibilities is that I stopped viewing people's strategy and business strategy as separate conversations. You know, at both Adirondack Health and Frontier Psychiatry, I was accountable not only for talent outcomes, but operational outcomes as well.
Dana Kellerman: That meant I couldn't hide behind good HR programs if the business wasn't performing. If a patient wasn't approving or service delivery wasn't scaling or quality metrics weren't improving, or patients weren't having a better experience, then clearly the people strategy wasn't working, regardless of how great it looked on paper. what became very evident to me was that HR leaders need a much deeper understanding.
Dana Kellerman: of how the business creates value, which tends to be a big gap, especially in hospital-based HR. HR really needs to understand operations and finance and customer experience, process design and even change management, not just talent management.
Dana Kellerman: and by the way, I'm not stating that HR needs to be subject matter experts in all those areas, but they do need to have a solid understanding of those functions and how their HR work will impact the broader organization. for example, at Adirondack Health, I was responsible for operations and human resources, IT facilities and several other shared services functions in there. we
Dana Kellerman: redesigned human capital plans and implemented new technologies and really looked to improve our recruiting outcomes and union negotiations and we drove a lot of operational improvements and we did it simultaneously. So that experience taught me that most business problems show up as people problems eventually, but most people problems are actually business problems first.
Dana Kellerman: And what I mean by that is the you miss a growth target, you struggle with execution or fail to integrate technology, and sooner or later you're dealing with turnover and engagement issues, you know, capability or leadership issues. But I also learned the reverse is true. Most so-called people problems are actually business problems first. They're they're usually rooted in in poor strategy and structured decisions or poor processes.
Dana Kellerman: So that's again where great HR leaders need to have the the business understanding. Because if you only treat the symptoms, you're never gonna solve the underlying problem. On the flip side,
Barb Bidan: Well
Dana Kellerman: at frontier psychiatry.
Dana Kellerman: We were scaling rapidly. We grew from a small startup to more than 50 employees in a very short period while building that culture and operations and customer experience as well as HR infrastructure. And we're doing that from the ground up. So in that environment, every hiring decision, every process, leadership capability, and every operational workflow.
Dana Kellerman: Had a direct impact on growth. There was no nowhere for HR and operations to operate in silos. So I'd say it's because of those experiences. I really believe that the leader, the HR leader of the future, needs that broad skill set. Yeah, and many organizations have not incorporated having that broader business skill set.
Dana Kellerman: So I mean we absolutely still need, right, our HR expertise, for example, in talent, employee relations, etc. They're all the great skills that embody HR, but we also need that business acumen and data literacy and operational systems thinking as well. Hmm.
Barb Bidan: I'm curious
Barb Bidan: on that part as whether you have found particularly useful ways to expose your HR teams to developing business acumen, developing business understanding. If maybe you inherit a team that maybe hasn't thought that way in the past and they have great HR skills but need to deepen their business expertise, how do you tackle that?
Dana Kellerman: Yeah, you know, I tackle with tackle it with them really becoming engaged with their business partners, understanding how the business functions, what the business truly needs to attain its goals from the human side. How do we help them build the talent that they need to hit their revenue targets or design their succession planning? But it's really that
Dana Kellerman: partnership that needs to come in play where those HR leaders are embedded in that business. And I always tell them too, get a little uncomfortable. Go into a meeting that you know nothing about, ask questions. Many people are excited to share, a bit more about their business or what their needs are. You know, get inquisitive, ask a lot of questions, and set up some of those meetings. And I've also encouraged my team to get out in the field.
Dana Kellerman: you don't have to be always behind your computer. you should be interacting with our frontline workers all the way up to the leadership teams that you support. And of course, from there, we kind of build upon any additional skill sets they may need through specific, you know, leadership development classes and things along that line. But they really do need to understand that business strategy.
Barb Bidan: Yeah, I
Barb Bidan: I mean leaders are so willing to share, right? as long as our teams I think show up with curiosity and seeking to understand what the business is doing, like there's usually no shortage of leader interest in helping us understand what the challenges are that their business is facing or what they're trying to unlock with their strategies, that sort of thing, for sure. So
Dana Kellerman: That's the thing.
Barb Bidan: So I think you were recruited to OnPoint specifically to redesign a legacy HR program. So that means you walked in and had to go about figuring out what might be missing. when you look at HR through somewhat of a diagnostic lens like that, what is the skill gap that you see most often in that circumstance?
Dana Kellerman: Yes, you know, when I arrived at OnPoint Group, the issue wasn't a lack of HR processes. You know, most organizations we all know have plenty of processes. A bigger gap was that HR became and and was very good at administering programs and less effective at really diagnosing those business problems. So the HR skill gap that I see most often is really I would say
Dana Kellerman: business acumen combined with critical thinking. What I mean by that is, we have too many HR leaders who can explain a policy, but fewer can connect that workforce strategy to growth and profitability or productivity and customer experience. They know the process, but not always the business problem the process is supposed to solve.
Dana Kellerman: And I think too that's the gap, AI is really going to expose if we think about it. AI can already help us write job descriptions. It can summarize employee feedback and draft policies, and it analyze engagement surveys. And it can certainly generate faster reports than any HR professional can.
Dana Kellerman: If someone's value is primarily producing information, AI will certainly do a much better job at that. AI will do it faster and and better and most likely cheaper. What though AI cannot do is sit with the CEO, right? And understand a complex business challenge and diagnose the root cause or determine whether the answer
Dana Kellerman: is organizational design or leadership capability or culture, or something else even entirely, right? That requires judgment and context and influence and back to business understanding. So I'd say that, I believe the future HR leader will spend less time creating content.
Dana Kellerman: And managing transactions. I don't believe AI will replace HR, at least not in the near future. However, HR professionals who can only process information may be replaced by those who can turn information into business decisions and really help drive that business forward.
Barb Bidan: Totally. And I would love to test something on you. One of the ways that I think I challenge that with teams or sort of push folks down that path of business understanding is asking teams what is the business problem that you are trying to solve with the HR thing, right, that you are pursuing
Dana Kellerman: Mm-hmm.
Barb Bidan: here. And I think if we force ourselves
Barb Bidan: down that path, if we don't have the answer to that, we should probably rethink the intervention that we're planning here. how
Dana Kellerman: Absolutely.
Barb Bidan: do you yeah react to that? do you think that's a useful question?
Dana Kellerman: A hundred percent. We need to be asking what issue are we trying to solve? Do we have the talent to solve that, concern or or issue? how quickly do we need to do it? And do we have the learning structure in place to be very quick and build those capabilities in HAMPS? So again, it comes back to that inquisitive nature of asking, you know, pertinent questions, knowing
Dana Kellerman: What to your point, what questions we should ask and when. because if you don't have those answers, you really need to take a step back and then look at the entire situation again, right? You need to understand what business issue you're trying to solve from the people side of the company.
Barb Bidan: I could not agree more. I want to continue to go down this path of like redesigning HR for the AI era and what is actually required. So this idea of redesigning is a thing that has appeared right in your career history multiple times because you did the redesign at OnPoint, you built from scratch in the growth situation at Frontier Psychiatry.
Barb Bidan: you did transformation at Adirondack. If you were redesigning an HR function specific to this era that we are in right now with AI, and you could actually start with a blank page again, what do you think it would look like and what would you cut from how HR currently operates?
Dana Kellerman: I guess now that you pointed that out, the comment that throughout my career has been redesigned. However, I'd have to say whether I was building HR from scratch or transforming an existing function or even realigning a new business strategy. I think the real work is never about HR itself, right? It's about again, helping that organization perform better.
Dana Kellerman: So if I was redesigning the HR functions specifically for the AI era today, I wouldn't start with the HR processes. I'd start with the business and ask pretty much like we were just discussing, what capabilities does the organization need to win in a world where AI can be part of that workflow? The HR function I think I would build would look much less like an administrative function.
Dana Kellerman: and much more like a business capability function. So that being said, I'd most likely focus on core HR fundamentals and build or organize AI around four pretty critical priorities. And I'd start with workforce strategy. You know, HR needs to be able to assess right the skills the business needs today.
Dana Kellerman: What skills it'll need tomorrow and how quickly can we close those gaps. We'd also need to look at organizational effectiveness. AI is going to force companies to redesign work and roles and our decision making and team structures. HR needs to lead that conversation, not react to it. I'd also look at
Dana Kellerman: Capability development. So instead of delivering training, we'd focus on accelerating learning, right? That goal would be to create a workforce that can adapt continuously as technology changes. So again, gotta be nimble. And then last but probably not least, I'd look at the people analytics and business insights, right? HR,
Dana Kellerman: would use data to predict workforce risks and identify productivity operations and opportunities, but also guide the business decisions rather than simply just reporting historical metrics, which we do a lot of. I think what I'd also eliminate if I'm being quite honest, I think I'd eliminate a lot of the transactional and compliance heavy work that still consumes much of
Dana Kellerman: HR's time today, AI can really automate, a lot of that. I think I'd also eliminate the tendency to measure activities instead of outcomes. if you think about HR, we still talk about training hours and requisitions filled or performance reviews completed or engagement survey participation. And I still fall, I'd say, into that type of behavior at times, but those are activities.
Dana Kellerman: If we think about, you know, business leaders, they care about productivity and
Dana Kellerman: execution and profitability. So I do think AI, in the era of AI, HR has to stop measuring how busy it is, but really start promoting and measuring the value that it can create.
Barb Bidan: So if we have a CHRO peer listening to us talk today and they honestly are recognizing themselves in this skills gap, right, that we've been talking about, and maybe not themselves, but themselves and their team, some version of that, where would you advise them to start?
Dana Kellerman: That's a great question and it can certainly be overwhelming. I'd say the first step is not necessarily learning AI, it's rebuilding your curiosity about the business. You know, too many HR leaders immediately ask, what AI tool should I buy or what training should my team attend? And I think that's the wrong starting point.
Dana Kellerman: I'd recommend the place to start is by again, you know, being inquisitive, asking questions. You know, I'd personally start with looking at how does our company make money? I mean, it's that basic. How does our company make money? what are our biggest constraints preventing us from growing faster or serving our customers better or operating more efficiently?
Dana Kellerman: And which of those constraints are truly people related? and I think if you cannot answer those questions with some fluency as your CFO or COO can or business leaders, that's the capability gap to address first.
Barb Bidan: And the good news is a lot of that gap can be filled with questions, curiosity, and just the willingness to go out.
Barb Bidan: Ask the right questions, learn. The information is all there, right, within the organization
Dana Kellerman: Right.
Barb Bidan: for you to consume. But you need to be thinking about going out and consuming it and orienting yourself, I think, in that way. So I have gotten so many good notes from our conversation today. but I am gonna move us into the lightning round. so some quick hit questions,
Barb Bidan: just sort of whatever comes to mind and
Dana Kellerman: ship
Barb Bidan: The first
Barb Bidan: one is of course after we have already figured out the business problem that we are trying to solve. We know what the organization needs from us. But after you've done that, what is one AI tool that your HR team is actually using today and finding helpful?
Dana Kellerman: Well, specific to my HR organization, we're a little early in our AI journey. we are using copilot tools, for example, for various administrative tasks and evaluating our current processes to see what can truly be automated. And we're testing those within Copilot. And it's it's been pretty exciting, and we've been able to streamline some of our current processes and then continue to build upon those.
Barb Bidan: I love it. what is one HR skill that you think will matter most in five years and that does not exist in abundance in the profession today?
Dana Kellerman: Hmm. I'd say that the HR leader of the future won't be a policy expert. They'll be a capability architect designing how people and AI work together to create business value.
Barb Bidan: Awesome. what is one thing that 15 years at GE taught you that most HR leaders or even like for you would have been hard to learn any other way?
Dana Kellerman: GE taught me that the strongest organizations don't wait for talent to emerge. They build it. They build it with intention and rigor and discipline and very proactively.
Barb Bidan: Fantastic. So I like to try to do a recap. Let's see what justice I can do to some of what we've talked about. But there was a lot in what we covered. I the a takeaway from GE, which I think is unique and something not happening in all organizations, is that leadership development is actually coupled with process discipline as part of that leader's development and the concept of accountability. it is not
Barb Bidan: programmatic, it is like systematic and ingrained in the system. So to the extent that we can learn from GE in that way. I also loved this is a fairly simple concept but critically important. business strategy and people strategy are not separate, but I loved this and I think it holds very true is that most business problems are people
Barb Bidan: problems first. And that's why our roles are so important, but also why it's so critically important for us to understand the business. And last but not least, I loved Dana, your non-administrative or less administrative HR organization of the future and the four things that you covered. Your organization of the future would be focused on workforce strategy, organizational effectiveness.
Barb Bidan: Capability development, but really acceleration of learning within an organization. And then analytics and business insights. And of course, those analytics and business insights would be oriented around outcome, not activity, which I also loved. So I took a ton away from our conversation today. I love to leave guests with the final word though. If you were to speak
Barb Bidan: to one of our peers that has maybe listened to this podcast on their drive home today, what would you give them to continue thinking about for the rest of their drive?
Dana Kellerman: I would encourage all of my colleagues out there, you know, to embrace the change. I know so often, and for all of us, change is stressful at times, but AI is here and it's really impacting us at a speed that I don't think anyone has seen before. So if we can embrace that change.
Dana Kellerman: encourage our teams to embrace the change and help them embrace it, right? By setting them up for success and looking at the best ways that we can solve that overall business issue via our people skills, everything will be good. we will get there. We will continue to work alongside AI and support our business functions successfully.
Barb Bidan: Absolutely. We will get there. thank you, Dana, for coming on the show today.
Dana Kellerman: Thank you for having me.