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Lead The People is your guide to unlocking your true potential as an authentic leader. Hosted by Dr. Matt Poepsel—The Godfather of Talent Optimization—this podcast dives deep into the art and science of what it takes to lead at the next level. With insightful conversations and practical strategies, each episode equips executives, strategic HR pros, and aspiring leaders with the tools it takes to boost performance, inspire teams, and drive meaningful impact. Whether exploring the latest workplace trends or tackling real-world leadership challenges, Lead The People offers an enlightened approach to leadership. Embark on a rewarding journey to become the leader your people deserve—the leader you were meant to be.
Tracie Sponenberg (00:00):
I talked with somebody that had 300% turnover and they're like, "Well, that's just the way it is." Nope, it's not the way it is. It's the way it is with you. So there's something going on there. Some turnover is good, but you don't want to make an assumption that it's just the way it is in the industry. You want to look at people as people, not as bodies, not as job recs, not as some type of line item. People as people.
Matt Poepsel (00:36):
Hey there, leader listeners. I think you're really going to enjoy my conversation with Tracie Sponenberg. Tracie has this tremendous amount of experience when it comes to frontline and deskless work environments, and she really encouraged us to talk about and think about how people aren't just a cost center. A lot of times if we look at our spreadsheets and we look at our payroll, for example, then we can lose the fact that there are real people working in our business every day. So for executives, for leaders that are running the strategies of the company, for example, just making sure we always remind ourselves that the people are at the heart of everything that we do and understanding that culture matters. Culture matters a lot. And not every time that there's been an acquisition, Tracie talks about in her history, what those different scenarios have been like and just knowing what it takes to really create a situation where people can be as highly engaged as possible.
(01:26):
It's something that we don't need to focus on. We need to do the things that make a positive work experience and let engagement take care of itself. So I really found her insights in that regard super interesting as well. She's been a friend for a long time. We have a very lovely conversation. She's got her new book and she tells us a little bit about that as well. So I'll let you get to it, but I really hope you enjoy this conversation with Tracie.
(01:50):
If your company runs on a warehouse floor instead of an office, most of your workforce never touches company email and standard HR playbooks weren't built with them in mind. My guest today spent nine years closing that gap. She led people at the Granite Group, a wholesale distributor with more than 700 employees spread across six states, and helped shift the company from paper-based HR to a genuinely people-first operation. Tracie Sponenberg now runs her own consulting practice, helping distribution and manufacturing companies build cultures where deskless workers actually want to stay. Her new book, The Frontline People Strategy comes out this month, and her work has been covered by outlets like NPR and BBC. Tracie, welcome to the show.
Tracie Sponenberg (02:29):
Thank you so much, Matt. It's good to see you.
Matt Poepsel (02:31):
It's good to see you. We have been friends for so long. We kind of came up in the business together in so many ways. I was so glad to be able to introduce you to the stage at one event recently, and you've just been taking off. It's been awesome.
Tracie Sponenberg (02:43):
So you gave me my first ever interview, I think. It was years and years ago. You
Matt Poepsel (02:48):
Invited me to come see you up in New Hampshire and did a small lightning round kind of talk for disrupt, I think it was. We've had quite a few chances to get together over the years, but never on the show. I don't know how that's happened. No,
Tracie Sponenberg (02:59):
No, no. This is great.
Matt Poepsel (03:01):
Here we are. Take us back a little bit. I want to talk about your first job, which I understand was in a grocery store at a bakery department maybe. And I know the manager had a certain interaction with you. I thought maybe you could just start by telling my audience about that.
Tracie Sponenberg (03:13):
Yeah, starting with a great story. So there weren't a lot of jobs for a 15-year-old back in the late 80s, and we had a brand new grocery store opening up, and so that's where almost everybody went. And I wanted to make my $4 an hour and have a little spending money and graduate from babysitting. And so I interviewed and figured I'd be a cashier, and they decided to put me in the full service bakery, which people would come up, order, and because I wouldn't have to do math back there. And it was an early introduction to all kinds of things and bias and how people saw young women and also how people didn't see people. No questions asked. I was a straight A student. I probably would've been a great cashier, but it ended up working out in the end. It
Matt Poepsel (03:58):
Did work out in the end, but that's an unbelievable situation. Probably still happens today too. I hate to say it. We look past people, especially young people, and just totally discount what they can do or maybe misread because their style might be different than ours. So it's unfortunate that it happened, but like you said, it's our gain because you did enter the people space and went on to help hundreds and hundreds and thousands of other people who get to see you now every year in the audience and hear you telling us how to do a much better job than that first experience you had.
Tracie Sponenberg (04:25):
Yeah, and I don't think I had the words for it back then. Now I certainly do, but part of what I want to do is help leaders never view people that way through that.
Matt Poepsel (04:34):
Yeah, and carrying on that theme a little bit, I know in your book you also opened up talking about having an executive point to the P&L and say, "Where are your people? Show me." And it always shows up in the same place. What led you to that observation or tell us a little bit about why you do that?
Tracie Sponenberg (04:49):
I've heard even wonderful CEOs, and often wonderful CEOs are wonderful because they know how to control the financials and they know how to make a successful company, but it's not just numbers, it's people. And if you're viewing your people strictly through the lens of their cost centers, then they're number one, going to feel that way. And number two, that's what you're going to end up with. But if you treat your people as profit drivers, which is the other side of the same coin, you get them involved in the business, you help them understand what it is you do and what their impact is, because every single person in the company has a huge impact on your business, then you can completely change your culture.
Matt Poepsel (05:31):
It's so true. When you look at the nature of people inside the business, especially as businesses get bigger, I think it might just be hard to envision all these people. I talked to CEO the other day who said, when my company got over a hundred people, that's when I stopped knowing everybody's names and their families, and it became more spreadsheet exercise at that point. So you kind of understand that, but I think you're talking about a philosophical difference of saying, don't just look at these checks you write, where do you think all the innovation's coming from? All the customer interactions, all the good stuff too.
Tracie Sponenberg (06:00):
Yeah, your best ideas are in your frontline. Yeah,
Matt Poepsel (06:02):
And the frontline is the part that I learned from you a bit because I have not worked in those types of businesses before. Not only did you work in it, you actually quite enjoyed it and you went on to understand it and get really good at it. It makes it even more delightful when you open your eyes a little bit and I got to learn from you about what it's like and just the differences. And sometimes I'd work with a client and say, "Okay, well here's how this survey's going to work. Send everybody email." They're like, "Th don't have email. What are you talking about?" I'm like, "What do you mean they don't have email?" That's how that is. I think that also you lay out different levels or layers when it comes to how to look at frontline workers, and you talk about strategic performance as well, where even a frontline worker can see all the way to how they impact the bigger picture.
(06:41):
How does that actually work? If somebody's listening and they say, "I've got frontline workers," and how do I connect the dots for them so they can see just how important they are to the business?
Tracie Sponenberg (06:51):
So many businesses are reactive, including a lot of businesses I've worked with, and I've worked in frontline companies for most of my career. We're reactive. Something happens, we take an action. And where we think we really want to get to is that proactive. So where we think we want to get to is we have people making decisions, anticipating customer needs, et cetera. And that's wonderful and that's great for all kinds of companies, but what you really should get to is strategic performance, and that is going beyond that proactivity. It's having people connect the business, connecting the business to what they do every day. So there's no reason a driver shouldn't deeply understand their relationship to the customer, their impact on the business's bottom line, how one action that they take or don't take can affect everybody else on the team. When they understand that, when anybody in the company, whether frontline or not, understands that can really, again, change your culture for the better.
(07:50):
That's very easy to say, very hard to do in practice. It
Matt Poepsel (07:53):
Resonates with me as a military person because we would always try to push as much situational awareness to the equivalent of an individual contributor as you could because things were so dynamic. But you said it earlier too, that the best ideas come from the field. They're out there working with your customers, they see things. And if you create the mechanisms, it seems like those ideas would come back in and I'm sure you've got plenty of situations, types, examples where that has happened for sure.
Tracie Sponenberg (08:20):
Yeah, for sure. And one of the things I do when I work with people now, one of the things I did before was HR leaders, I make them get out on the floor. I make them get out in the warehouses. I make them do that because that is where they're going to learn. And all of them, once they do, even if they haven't done it before, they love it. And because that's where you learn and that's where a lot of the work happens that often tends to go unseen. And
Matt Poepsel (08:43):
I think it sends a real message too to the people who are in the field every day or in the trucks and all these things and saying, if you're willing to come out here and take an active interest in how I do my work, then you're not just an email I get from a department, you're an actual person and it humanizes something that can be otherwise a little bit more transactional perhaps.You had spent so much time at the Granite Group, including several acquisitions and even the pandemic of course back then. How did that experience that you had over that period of time evolve your understanding of the people practice and certainly the importance of people leaders in HR to the business?
Tracie Sponenberg (09:20):
I think they're a little bit different. They're both very change heavy things and I think every HR leader, particularly a chief people officer, went through a pandemic and a frontline company has a lot of stories to tell. Most of them probably ended up finding other jobs. It's a whole other story. It was a time, but I learned so much. And I think one of the things that we did that was critical to getting through it, because nobody had any idea if we'd even have a company, we didn't know what was going on early on, is we communicated in multiple different ways every single day, early on, good, bad, whatever was going on, we kept those open lines of communication. Every single person in the entire company had my cell phone number. Somebody could call me anytime. This is 700 people at the time. Anytime they had questions, they were afraid of something, they couldn't come to work because they had babies at home and they were afraid of what was going to happen.
(10:09):
And so that is a deeper level of care than I ever had experienced before, but it was something that was necessary at that time and I'm glad we did it. It had far-reaching consequences, positive and negative down the road, but I'm glad we did that. And acquisitions are different. And sometimes I've been through acquisitions where the company is thrilled to be acquired and been through acquisitions where they're not so thrilled to be acquired. And those require different things of HR teams and the companies and how you handle that for sure.
Matt Poepsel (10:41):
And again, I'll ask this question out of complete ignorance. We hear about culture all the time. We think about culture. How does culture play out when you have frontline workers? Is it the same? I mean, they don't come into contact as much because in many cases they might be out in the field more. Is it easier or harder to shape for frontline workers than it is for more centralized or consolidated workforces? It
Tracie Sponenberg (11:03):
Depends. So there's a company culture and you try to foster and drive the culture that you want and the values that you want within your company throughout your company, regardless of where your people work. But then you have little microcultures, particularly when you deal with distributed workforces. If you have a multi-location company, maybe you have a culture, hopefully you have a culture, but you also have all of these micro cultures and these are heavily driven by the leaders. And so even within one location, if you have six manufacturing lines, you've got a warehouse, a receiving center and a distribution center, you could have different microcultures. They're often driven by the leaders. So people are people and culture is culture, but culture everywhere is heavily driven by the leaders involved. The saying is everybody owns culture, but those leaders have such an outsized impact on it.
(11:57):
And
Matt Poepsel (11:58):
You mentioned some of the, I guess I'll call it lumpiness that can happen between different groups. I know there was an anecdote where you talked about some leaders who know their people right around them by name and they just are really connected to people and others that are a little bit more, I don't want to say standoffish, but maybe don't have that level of fluency or familiarity with their people. What is your general experience with that and how does something like that happen? This
Tracie Sponenberg (12:19):
Is why I talk so much about frontline leaders when I talk about the work that I do. We tend to, in distribution manufacturing, promote the best person in X, Y, or Z job. I talk about the best forklift operator, right? Okay, so your forklift operator, you're great and your reward for being great at this job that you love is to get a new job where you're maybe paid a little bit more, but also you have a whole lot more responsibility. So we're taking the person off of that job, we're giving them a job that they're not prepared for, and then other people see that this person's getting a job that they're not prepared for. So it has really far-reaching consequences. Maybe it's good and maybe that person gets some training, but that's what I've seen, at least with a lot of the companies I've worked with.
(13:04):
It's not the manager's fault, it's a systemic issue. So it's a system that promotes people who aren't ready. It's a system that doesn't give them the training that they need, and it's the system that allows that to happen. Not everywhere and not every location and every company, but it does happen with everyone that I know in frontline companies. This is something we talk about all the time. And
Matt Poepsel (13:26):
You worked for a company that most of us are familiar with UPS at one time, and I know you were talking about boxes and what's the game where you try to fit all the pieces together?
Tracie Sponenberg (13:35):
Yeah, I loved doing that. I learned how to load tractor trailers there. You put me in the back of an 18-wheeler and you say, "Here's a bunch of boxes." I could stack that thing perfectly so not one box would fall. I promise you. It was super fun to learn how to do that because I had to learn it because I had to teach people how to do it.
Matt Poepsel (13:51):
This is the one thing that almost ended my marriage, Tracie. Many, many years ago we were leaving base housing out of North Carolina, moving up to New England where we are now, and I was in charge of packing the U-Haul, did a terrible job. I needed Tracie on my side. It wasn't it? Yeah. Couldn't fit in my bride's favorite couch. Guess what? It didn't make the trip and I almost didn't make it to see the other side of that. So I'm glad you have that superpower. I know who to call if I ever need that.
Tracie Sponenberg (14:15):
It's fun.
Matt Poepsel (14:15):
It is fun. But ultimately, when you think about frontline and trying to fit the pieces, it sounds like that's something that it's kind of like when you're looking at your organization, like you mentioned, what do you do with your best forklift worker? If you're like, we need somebody to lead this group and this person loves their job, sometimes we convince ourselves. Sometimes we do it for the wrong reasons because we have a hole and we just coerce somebody into it and they don't want it and it's not a great fit and we end up paying for it. I don't know. Is that analogy stretched too thin if we think about trying to stack them and pack them when it comes to the boxes, but also load our organization with the right people at the right levels too?
Tracie Sponenberg (14:47):
Absolutely. Right levels, right time, create those dual career paths. So create an opportunity for people to move up, to get more money, to get more responsibility in a way that it doesn't require them to supervise people because not everybody wants to do that. Not everybody's good at that. But if that's the only opportunity to move up in the career and make more money, then there are a lot of people who are going to take that that probably shouldn't. I'm
Matt Poepsel (15:12):
Still fascinated endlessly by this notion of the deskless worker and frontline workers. And I could imagine that some people who end up in these companies may not have been in that industry exclusively. So I'm wondering when you think about engaging frontline workers, I have a feeling that the techniques I've relied on inside of software companies for so long are probably either wholly ineffective or at least only partially so. What does leadership sometimes get wrong when it comes to how to ensure engagement among deskless and frontline workers? The
Tracie Sponenberg (15:43):
First thing they get wrong is talking about ensuring engagement. So engagement's a byproduct of a really good employee experience. And I see this all the time, I'm sure you do too. We see leaders, and I've been guilty of this. We talk about getting people engaged. We want people to get engaged, and that is us forcing something on someone else. And maybe you're working in a great company and maybe you're creating a great experience, but more than likely there's a lot of work to do there. So what I like to talk about with leaders is work on creating that experience. Work on making sure that you have a place that people actually want to be. If your experience is terrible, if somebody comes in and their manager doesn't know they're starting on their first day, they have to sit behind a computer for 12 hours and nobody bothers them before they're allowed to get out and do their job.
(16:37):
They don't know where to go. They don't know where the lunchroom is. They don't know this. That's a terrible experience from day one. So work on that employee experience, I always advise fix the first few days because people are going to make decisions, then work on everything else throughout that whole experience and then go from there. But start with the experience, not with expecting people to get engaged. I love
Matt Poepsel (16:59):
That idea. Focusing on those precious first few days, because I would imagine there's a lot of turnover in that industry. And so if you come in and you're having a terrible time and you didn't know if you really wanted that job in the first place and you have a terrible experience, you're like, "You know what? I'm just going to go drive for Amazon or DoorDash or whatever." It's got to be really competitive at some level. Yeah.
Tracie Sponenberg (17:18):
And that's something we worked really hard on at The Granite Group, and we had a voluntary turnover of less than 10% for most of the time. Not initially, but we worked on that, which is incredible for largely a deskless workforce. And you always want to have some turnover, and that's why you measured voluntary. That's because we worked really hard at creating great experience. If
Matt Poepsel (17:38):
You're a manager type and you have people that are working these frontline delivery jobs or other sorts of fulfillment drivers, et cetera, you may not have as much in common with them, but how do you recommend that a manager go out and take an interest in their work, their job? I could see where that might be a little bit of an awkward conversation for some of my listeners that are just thinking like, okay, they have a very different job than mine. How do I actually start the conversation?
Tracie Sponenberg (18:01):
I have never had most of these jobs either, and you think, okay, maybe I don't have a lot in common with that person, but you always have something in common with another human. There's something somewhere. If you have kids, they have kids. You like to hike, they like to hike, you're interested in music. There's some sort of commonality, so that helps. A lot of the people I work with came up through the industry, so that's easier in a way. But I think just getting really curious about people and that learning what they do doesn't have to start with, well, tell me what your day is like. It starts with, tell me about you. Tell me how you got here. Tell me what you like to do outside of work. Just having a conversation like you would with anybody else and getting to know the person as a human.
(18:44):
It sounds really simple, but it's very, very effective in actually getting to know your people and then show up and demonstrate that you're willing to get curious about what they do and you're willing to listen and you're willing to have them listen to you, go back and forth, have a conversation. So it's really hard, but also really simple. It
Matt Poepsel (19:05):
Does go a long way just taking an active interest in somebody's job and their life, their interests, their family, whatever it might be. And then we can be genuine about those things. I don't know why I'm such a socially awkward person for some reason, but when I can start talking about the work, I'll go listen to a forklift operator. I'm curious how it all works. How do you get your orders when something has to be moved? How do you know? What do you do when you're done? How do you tell them it's finished? I have no idea. I don't mind asking dumb questions. I've had the chance to do this from time to time and people who never have anybody asking about their jobs, they just beam with pride when you take an interest in what they're doing and how they get so good at it and stuff.
(19:41):
And they're like, nobody wants to hear about this. Nobody ask me that. I do. I want to hear about it. Yeah.
Tracie Sponenberg (19:46):
Nobody asks me that. Get curious. I'm also socially awkward, but I love people and listening and getting curious about what they do. And I bring that curiosity up over and over and over and over again because I think that that's one of the best skills that we can have in leadership. And then approach the work with a healthy amount of respect. I respect the hell out of anybody who's making or moving things. Those jobs are so hard that's not something that I think I could do. I don't have the skillset for it. I have so much respect for folks in those roles, and if we can teach our companies, teach our leaders to respect the heck out of those roles, we'll all be better off. That's
Matt Poepsel (20:28):
Really well said. And that level of curiosity, the willingness, once you get past that first awkward question, and even if you fumble it, it'll just lead to the next. And that curiosity really does make a difference. I've seen people with these jobs that we don't think about a lot stand up a little straighter and a little pep in their step because they had a chance to talk about all the cool things they do. And they are cool things. It's your business. You've got to move things on time quality-wise. You got to have safety. These things may not be the things we celebrate or talk about as much, but they sure are important. So let's make people feel important. I want to talk about the book. You've got a five-part framework in your book, but I wanted to ask you, Tracie, what is the nature of a mindset shift?
(21:05):
You've written a book that's not an HR book. This is a business book, and it's one specifically for this deskless, this frontline work environment. So what do I need to know going in?
Tracie Sponenberg (21:16):
Yeah, I think a lot about the leaders that I've worked with, and I've worked with leaders from the speaking work that I do to the advisory or the fractional work that I do. And I've worked with leaders that they just don't know. They don't know what they don't know. I really approach it from an education mindset. So if I could write something that I didn't see out there that would help people look at their people a little bit differently, then that's something I can be really proud of. And I think I did it. I'm very happy with it, and I think it's really hopefully going to help some people see their people differently. And really, the framework you're talking about starts with seeing the whole person. So when I was describing the book to a friend of ours this weekend and he's like, "So it's basically like you're telling people how to respect people." I'm like, "Well, basically, yeah.
(22:01):
I mean, there's a lot more of it than that, but it's having a successful business by deeply understanding and respecting your people." I think a
Matt Poepsel (22:10):
Lot of times when it comes to people who don't feel respected have choices in any job market, top performers always do. And I think that sometimes we might think, well, this person's an hourly worker or they're a low cost, but how should we more properly look at the cost of losing some of these people? Like you said, if you lose your best forklift driver, for example, some people who are not in the industry might look at that and be like, "Well, what's a big deal? Go get another one." You're like, "Ha, it doesn't work like that." What's a better way to think about the loss that comes with that? So
Tracie Sponenberg (22:37):
For any position, there's a turnover cost, there's a calculation that we don't always think of as a real cost, but it is a real cost because there's time that goes into it. There's money that goes into advertising. There's training that goes into that. And I think, and I have seen this, and I have unfortunately been guilty of this earlier in my career, there's a tendency to think of, say, let's talk about warehouse workers as replaceable. Well, that industry has a high turnover anyway. I talked with somebody that had 300% turnover and they're like, "Well, that's just the way it is." I'm like, "Nope, it's not the way it is. It's the way it is with you." So there's something going on there. And so it starts by looking at, okay, you don't want to keep everybody. Some turnover is good, but you don't want to make an assumption that it's just the way it is in the industry.
(23:27):
You want to look at people as people, not as bodies, not as job recs, not as some type of line item. People as people. And if you flip it that way, it's a little bit harder to look at discount people and just say, let's get rid of this one, let's get rid of that one, if we're looking at people as human beings. And we don't do that often enough. We
Matt Poepsel (23:50):
Don't do that often enough. And I always say it, and it's true in any industry, every business is a people business. And I think that where I might be an outsider to frontline and deskless workers, the reality is that they're people and they're interacting with customers and they're driving efficiencies and quality standards and they're bringing ideas from the field and all that stuff. It's still true. It's still true.
Tracie Sponenberg (24:12):
Yeah. No better or worse than the work that we do, it's just different work. I'm not a doctor, so I don't know what doctors do. I'm not a warehouse worker. I don't really know what they do. And so approaching with curiosity and respect for all of the work that people have to do and looking at the deskless work as some of the most important work that we do in the world, and we realize that during the pandemic, I think really is something that we could have more people doing and be better off in our companies. I think
Matt Poepsel (24:42):
It's a delightful title that you chose for the book too, because it melds these things that are so important to hang together, but we don't necessarily think of them together. You've got frontline, people, strategy. It's like this strategic nature of people in a business where we might not always think of that. I'm so excited for you to bring this thing to life and just encapsulate everything you've learned in your career. It's so cool. Yeah.
Tracie Sponenberg (25:05):
Yeah. Thank you. I'm very excited. Well, I'm
Matt Poepsel (25:07):
Excited because we're about to play a trivia game. This is my signature segment, I call it. Are we smarter than AI? And I always try to pick something from my guest's personal background. You are a coffee lover. We see coffee photos, you love coffee. I though we'd have to get a trivia question about coffee. It is multi choice, thankfully. So here it is. Which country produces the most coffee in the world? Is it A, Colombia, B, Brazil, or C, Ethiopia? What is your guess? What do you think?
Tracie Sponenberg (25:35):
I'm going to say Brazil. We're
Matt Poepsel (25:37):
Going to go with Brazil. Audience, if you're playing along at home, which country produces the most coffee in the world? Is it A, Colombia, B, Brazil, or C, Ethiopia? We went with Brazil and spot on, Brazil is the correct answer. It's the undisputed heavyweigh champion of coffee for over 150 years. A third of the globe's supply, including some vast percentage of your own coffee, Tracie. How about that? Yeah.
Tracie Sponenberg (25:58):
One of our local shops has coffee farms in Brazil.
Matt Poepsel (26:02):
There you go. Well, I have a much better question for you, Tracie. Where can my listeners go to learn more about you and your wonderful new book?
Tracie Sponenberg (26:07):
You can go to my website, which is traciesponenberg.com or follow me on LinkedIn. Love
Matt Poepsel (26:13):
It. Listeners, I'm going to have both of those links for you in the show notes. You're only one click away from getting connected with Tracie, learning more and more about all the great things that she shared with us today. Tracie, you're the absolute best. I'm so excited that you were able to be on the show. I love seeing you as always.
Tracie Sponenberg (26:27):
Thanks for having me. It was good to see you too next time, hopefully in person again.
Matt Poepsel (26:31):
100%.