Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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.
Sponsor
Wisq is the AI platform for HR. We built Harper, the world's first AI HR teammate — designed to handle the judgment-heavy work that has historically consumed HR teams: job changes, performance concerns, leaves of absence, onboarding, and employee relations issues. Where HCM bolt-ons and chatbots deflect the easiest questions, Harper resolves full cases, end-to-end. The result is an HR function with the capacity and strategic bandwidth to focus on the work that moves the business.
Companies get Harper live in weeks, not quarters, with implementation support built on deep HR domain expertise. Wisq serves HR leaders at leading companies across industries, helping them raise the bar on employee experience and expand what their teams are capable of.
For more information, visit https://www.wisq.com
The Human Element - Kyle Roed
===
[00:00:00] Welcome to The Human Element, presented by Wisq. I'm your host, Barb Biden, and in each episode, I sit down with CHROs and senior HR leaders to explore how AI, innovation, and human insight are reshaping the future of HR. We'll explore how technology is reshaping leadership, strategy, and the role of HR by sharing candid stories, practical ideas, and strategic perspectives to help you shape the future.
The Human Element is brought to you by Wisq, the leader in agentic HR and creator of Harper, the world's first AI HR generalist. Learn how Harper can resolve up to 80% of routine HR tasks autonomously. Learn more about Wisq at wisq.com.
Barb Bidan: Welcome to The Human Element. Today my guest is Kyle Roed, and Kyle started in IT before moving into people leadership. So I'm kind of excited to hear about these dual tracks. Kyle ran actual [00:01:00] sales floors at Target alongside his HR work, and spent eight years as the CHRO at CPM Holdings.
CPM is a global industrial manufacturer operating across four continents. Kyle also hosts the Rebel HR podcast and advises organizations on AI-enabled transformation through human innovation. His conviction built across all of it is that the HR leaders who understand how the rest of the business actually operates are the ones who will be capable of building the agents that replace what HR does today.
So, after my own heart, I always say I like when folks have worked in the business before they work on it. So Kyle, I'm super excited to have you on the show today, so thanks for joining me.
Kyle Roed: Thanks for having me, Barb. Looking forward to it
Barb Bidan: Yeah. ~I~ wanna actually let guests get to know more about you and your background. So before you were ever an HR professional, you were an IT manager, I think. So you understand how systems work at an infrastructure [00:02:00] level. Tell me a little bit more about where you got your start.
Kyle Roed: Yeah. Appreciate the opportunity ~to,~ to talk to you ~and,~ and I joke way back when, this has been over two decades ago when I was first starting my career, ~I, ~I did a lot of different things. And I also joke my first HR job was actually being a bartender. It's basically the exact same skill set as being an HR professional.
You just actually have a tool to make people happy. But ~one of the,~ one of the first jobs that I had that was like a real big boy job was~ an IT,~ an IT manager ~in a,~ in a school district. And so my job was to make sure that ~the,~ the administration was set up for success as it relates to all things IT.
20 years ago the landscape was pretty different. It was a lot of hardware. Software was incredibly slow. And AI wasn't even a thing, right? ~But ~but what was interesting about that job that I think carried over into my foray as an HR professional is it was all about systems and how those systems work together.
And I've been fortunate to carry that into my career as HR. I took a job at Target right out of school and the [00:03:00] decision process there was which job pays me the most, and Target did at the time. And so I took it. And I was blessed with ~some,~ some amazing mentors at Target~ that,~ that really kind of guided me into human resources based upon their observations and got ~the~ the opportunity to step into the career at that time way back when, and I just haven't left ~the~ the career since.
~Worked in,~ worked in retail for a while and then I transitioned over to manufacturing and most recently have been ~the,~ the chief HR officer here for CPM Holdings, which is international. ~40, ~41 locations in 14 countries, and I get to help run HR for a couple thousand folks. So it's been a great time.
Barb Bidan: That's an incredible arc, and I'm super interested in hearing how you connect, like the breadth that you've had across different areas of the business to this argument you're making about AI, right? That the leaders who are going to do well with where we're at in our profession are the ones who have spent time really understanding the business problems.
How does your arc help you [00:04:00] to kind of have that unique view on really understanding the businesses that you support?
Kyle Roed: Yeah, ~it's a great--~ It's an insightful question, and I, Barb, I think you and I probably share a similar perspective just given what you've shared. I'm a big believer that if you wanna be a successful human resources professional, you have to understand what your internal customers are facing and dealing with.
And for my money, I think the best way to do that is to actually have experience as a leader of people outside of the HR function. And, I was blessed to have that opportunity with Target. I~ at, at,~ at times I had teams of well over 100 people reporting into me and had to figure out how to engage and inspire and coach and teach and in some cases discipline and in some cases recognize.
And what that enabled me to do when I stepped into human resources was have empathy and sympathy in some cases for what leaders go through and what really [00:05:00] matters. ~And I think, I'm a big believer,~ I'm a big believer that if you set up ~a,~ a structure and a system appropriately, and then get out of the way and enable great leaders to lead, you will be successful.
And unfortunately, I think ~a lot of times ~A lot of HR professionals can fall into the habit of let's just create a policy, let's create a procedure, let's create a rule," when what we actually need to do is edit and make sure that we are looking at things that don't make sense in the context of what a leader is trying to do and what the business needs a leader to do.
And I would attribute a lot of my success to having a more pragmatic view of the things that need to be done and making sure that the priority is actually on the focus of enabling the humans in an organization to be successful. ~so what I th-~ the way I interpret that in the context of kind of AI and is it, AI is just another tool that we can leverage.
And it needs to be leveraged in a way that fits the business need, the business strategy, what leaders need it to do. It's no different in my [00:06:00] mind than hiring a new hire. That is an individual that you're hiring that you are attempting to use as a tool to do something.
It was interesting when I was reflecting on ~this,~ this topic and this podcast.
I've been blessed in my career to work with super smart people, and I had the opportunity to go to an AI hackathon, a few months ago, and some of the smartest people ~in,~ in the space of AI and, we're talking like the IT, like straight up nerds, right? Like, they understand stuff. I don't even know what they're saying.
I'm like, "This is like way above me." And I was in the profession for a little while, right? I don't even know what that means. But ~as,~ as we were talking about, specifically about agentic AI and what it can do, what we were doing in the hackathon, we weren't coding. We were giving an AI agent instructions on how to code something And I had a light bulb come on in my mind at that time, and I'm like this is no different than building a job description or a position profile as I'm getting to recruit, or ~trying to be-~ consult with a leader to try to figure out why do [00:07:00] I have a gap in my current organizational chart and how do I fill it?"
And the light bulb for me was, this is what HR does every single day. ~This,~ this whole~ this whole~ AI thing, this should be an HR function. ~We,~ we have a tool now that enables us to speak directly into some of these IT tools that we don't necessarily have the vernacular to use correctly.
But we don't need it anymore. And so, ~what that,~ what that prompted me to do was to start to take a look at this as a tool specifically an HR tool, not just to, address some of the things ~that w-~ that AI's being used for now, like coding but to figure out how do we take aspects of people's jobs that can be agents, AI agents, and basically help them become more effective ~and,~ and give them a little bit of a multiplier effect that ~they can,~ they can spend less time doing the administration and highly tactical aspects of their job and think more, and let some of ~these,~ these agents take some of the things that are frustrating or mind-numbing [00:08:00] for folks. Yeah. So ~that's,~ that's the thesis.
Barb Bidan: I am on side with you there 100%. I think the obvious objection potentially is AI is a technology, and technology is IT's domain. But what you're really talking about is~ the,~ the role of AI in work redesign, and clearly that's ~HR's H-~ HR's domain really, right? To help lead.
What do you think is wrong with the, AI is a technology and technology is IT's domain? What's wrong with that argument?
Kyle Roed: ~I, I,~ I think that that is an incredibly myopic way to view the world, and that's just not how the world works, right? To me that argument that, ~technology--~ tech should be IT, is bogus. ~It--~ is anybody claiming that only ~I-~ IT should have emails, right? Email is a tool, it's a tech tool that's leveraged everywhere in the world by almost anybody ~that,~ that has any sort of an office job, right?
That's how I view AI in the future. It's like the next email. Everybody's gonna be using AI in some way, shape, or form or some [00:09:00] fashion in the future, right? ~My,~ my take is that IT needs to have a seat at the table and help guide and help us understand capability, help us understand safety and security as it relates to some of these tools and cybersecurity and all the kind of the risks that are associated with it.
No different than any other risk that's been present with ~a, ~a technological tool. But IT being the only ones with a perspective ~on,~ on technological utilization and capability ~isn't,~ it's not ~the,~ the right way to do it, in my mind. It's like the tail wagging the dog, right? The business and the strategists, the leaders of the business need to help understand what we need done, and then technology is simply a tool that helps us get there, in my mind.
And maybe not. Maybe technology is not a tool that helps us get there, right? I mean, I think ~it's, it's a,~ it's a quiver and it's an arrow in a quiver. It's not necessarily~ the,~ the solution for everything either. ~And,~ and I would say the more I've learned, the more the limitations of AI have been realized as well.
~I don't think... ~I am not a believer that [00:10:00] AI can replace everything. It's just, haven't seen it demonstrated yet. ~Maybe,~ maybe in the future there's some jobs that can be, kind of replicated, but ~human-- ~humanity is not algorithmic. An algorithm ~is--~ makes sense. Humans don't always make sense behaviorally, right?
~And, ~and some of the greatest innovations don't make any sense,
Barb Bidan: Mhm
Kyle Roed: at least not ~in,~ not on paper or not on a computer program, right? And so there's an element of humanity that just isn't replicated ~in, in,~ in AI. So again, I think it's a tool. It can be a broadly utilized tool. It's something that we should be cautious of, but not scared of. And IT and tech teams have a place, but they shouldn't be the only one involved here.
Barb Bidan: Yeah, there's a difference between administering the infrastructure, I think, and actually defining the business requirements, right, for how a tool will be used. And ~so,~ so you've also long been in favor of disrupting for HR to disrupt itself really, not disrupting HR per se. So also a [00:11:00] fan of that comment.
So, you founded Disrupt HR Cedar Valley, "The Rebel HR Podcast." I mean, it's all in the name, right? In those two cases. So when you think about where we're headed with AI, what sort of accelerant do you think that AI might provide to like actually helping us to do more of the disrupting ourselves that you'd like to see happening?
Kyle Roed: Yeah, I'm so Rebel HR, that's kind of an oxymoronic statement, right? It's like it doesn't make sense as to, most people thinking about HR. But ~f-~ for me, HR is ripe for disruption and so much of it comes down to the way that, HR started in organizations.
~H- ~HR used to be just a purely administrative function. I mean, I started, back when HR was basically ~was~ personnel. And it was like, just make sure people get paid, make sure people, don't sue you and ~ma-~ you know, make sure that positions get filled. But there wasn't a whole lot of strategy.
So ~I'm, ~I'm pretty pleased to say that since I started the Rebel HR podcast, this was back in 2020, I do feel [00:12:00] like we've seen a little bit of an HR renaissance where HR has started to become more prominent and have ~a, a,~ a seat at the table become more strategic as a function.
I think organizations are realizing what I've been saying for years, which is, people are the business or the organization, right? That you don't have an organization without the people. And so if you don't have systems and structures to support your people, then you are literally not supporting your organization.
And my argument for human resources has always been that we need to be the advocates there, and we need to be able to articulate that need, speak truth to power, be strategic, be guiding resources for our organizations, and call out BS when we see it, right? As opposed to, I think ~a lot of the,~ a lot of the bad reputation that HR has is that people just think that they are purely there to protect~ a,~ a company, right?
They're not actually there for the [00:13:00] people in the company. And my, ~my~ belief is that ~there has--~ you have to have a balanced approach and that ~you can't,~ you can't fully support one side or the other. You have to be measured in how you approach things and be logical and supportive either way.
Whether you had ~a, a,~ an individual who made a mistake, or you had ~a s-~ a representative of the company make a mistake on in dealing with a person, right? And so, the other thing I would say ~on,~ on the disruption side of things is I also am a believer ~that,~ that HR has a really, really big material impact on the actual bottom line of a company, and we need to start speaking the language ~of,~ of the company as opposed to the language of HR.
So I think we can be a little bit overly legalistic in how we approach things. I do a lot of speaking, and ~one of the,~ one of the things I like to talk about is compliance, 'cause it's everybody's favorite topic. Everybody loves it. Payroll and compliance.
Barb Bidan: So fun. So
Kyle Roed: it's the best. I love it. But the truth is, like ~I,~ I tell people, like if you [00:14:00] ever make a decision purely because you're afraid of getting sued, you are making that decision in the wrong context, right?
And I think so often we are in human resources, ~we're just~ we're incredibly protectionist as opposed to being, more realist and pragmatic in how we make decisions. We shouldn't be making business decisions because we're afraid we might get sued. We should be making business decisions that support the business and the people in it.
And by doing that and treating people right, you reduce the opportunity to get sued. Right? Like it's a totally different context, but it's actually the same objective. It's just a whole lot more fun ~to go,~ to go win, and nobody wants to sue you because they feel like they work for the best company in the world
Barb Bidan: Absolutely. I love to say set it and forget it when it comes to compliance, which I don't wholly mean forget it, but I do like that it's not top of mind, right? I think that's what I mean by that, is that it's not the thing that is leading your decision-making. It's not the tail wagging the dog. [00:15:00] It's like you've got the right frameworks to keep things safe, right?
In that respect, and compliant and then you go do the really good and interesting work that we want to be doing, and you're a good human and treat people well in all of those pieces which also leads to, like you said when you're doing those things that typically keeps you in a good place with respect to compliance as well, right?
Kyle Roed: Couldn't agree more.
Barb Bidan: And I think one of the things I want to pull us back to for a minute is when you talked about building an AI agent is the same, right, as writing a- an SOP or a process document or defining a job description, right? You need to know the work, and, and you have to be able to document exactly how the work gets done, what decisions get made, et cetera, right?
Like that level of detail and that HR leaders, right, we've been doing that for our whole careers. So if you think about how we as HR professionals can actually help support, not within our function, but within the business, right, helping [00:16:00] leaders think through the application of agents to their work, how do you see HR teams being able to get involved and help leaders navigate some of what they're needing to do to build out an AI future within their teams?
Kyle Roed: Yeah, so I think my take on this question is that you have to be very thoughtful about how you approach this, and I can use some examples of how I've done it. ~Obvious-~ clearly I am an advocate of looking at this. I'm also not an advocate that every position can be agentified, right?
There's, There's some positions that just flat out shouldn't be. The way that I've approached this has been~ two,~ two different paths. The first path is targeted systematic projects in areas where work, it should be getting done but is not getting done at the kind of pace that we want it to be done at.
So as opposed to saying, "Oh, I need to go [00:17:00] hire three more people to get this project done," strategically going, "Okay, what AI tools exist that can take workload away from this project team or do some of this project work so that these folks can be freed up to spend more time to get the timeline completed?" Great example, let's talk about SOPs. So standard operating procedures for those that aren't in the manufacturing world. These are the tools, these are the instructions. Basically, when you hire a new hire, these are the work instructions. They're the instruction manual that tell them, "How do I get this stuff done?" How do I put this thing together? How do I run this machine? How do I not get into a safety incident? These things have historically been absolute pains to get done, and by the way, you're never actually done because they're constantly changing, 'cause you're constantly changing work, right?
Or changing machines, or you got ~new hires ins-~ or you've got trainers ~that,~ that are learning how to lead. So one of the great use cases was we've got these people that spend all day long just putting together SOPs, typing up stuff, [00:18:00] typing up work instructions, standing out here talking to operators to figure out how to do this and how to do that.
What if we just take an AI transcription tool, take some video, have the person talk about what they're doing, and then take that video, put that into the AI tool, and then it actually populates the SOP for you. Oh, that's a great use case. Guess what now I can do with the people that were previously sitting at a computer, hammering out work instructions all day long.
Now they've got an opportunity to go do more. So it's a multiplier for their work, right? So it's some of these like kind of strategic projects an opportunity. The other thing that we've done is every time we've had any sort of turnover and we're getting ready to hire a new person, ask-- Just as, it's as simple as ask the question: What aspects of this role can be utilized can AI be utilized to replace? Not every job has that, by the way but what's been interesting is, now there have been a few jobs, specifically ~in an-~ administration as an example, where it's like, "Oh yeah, ~this per-~ I [00:19:00] don't necessarily need a person that has this level of expertise. I can probably hire a ~low-~ lower level position and just have them use this agentic AI tool that we have available through, that we already have available through ~a, like a, ~an HR information system or a finance calculation system."
Some of the coolest stuff in AI right now is as simple as, Excel tools that allow you to do, advanced analysis without knowing advanced Excel skills reporting dashboards, things like that. Like, some of these things, again, that would take a lot of time for people to figure out. ~It's been pretty, ~it's been pretty cool.
So ~a- ~and think ~the other~ the final thing I would say is, 'cause I know there's some naysayers that are like, "We can't do that. We don't have all these tools," or, "These tools are dangerous," or, "I have IP that I have to protect." We built out an AI governance team that basically says we can do this or we can't do that, right?
And so ~there, there is,~ there's an executive alignment. I would say I'm probably ~the,~ the primary champion of that as the chief HR officer. But you just need one. You need one champion at a senior level that can, like, say, "Hey, we need to look at this." [00:20:00] And then you need to get the right people on that committee to help keep an open mind, and then you need one naysayer that can make sure that you don't go off the rails, because there truly are some things that you don't wanna do.
But and you need a well-rounded perspective to do it. And ~by,~ by actively seeking out the naysayers, you're actually doing yourself a favor, because if they're not on your committee, they're gonna be the ones naysaying it outside of the committee and set it up for failure. ~And,~ and no disrespect, but typically that's an IT person.
Barb Bidan: Which is, back to why ~y-~ your view is that, AI should be owned by HR. Which but again, we do need ~the,~ the folks on our team that keep us in balance. But when it comes to keeping eyes facing forward on where the work is evolving, like how the work can change and be made better, that really does fall into HR's domain.
And then this brings me back to where we started, and I didn't share at the beginning, but I got my career started in distributed retail services, right? So an area where you are out in the business, the buck stops with you, similar to where you were at [00:21:00] Target. ~And~ and ultimately that is how it sounds like you and certainly how I learned the business ~that I~ that I was running before I actually moved into HR later.
And so your argument is that the HR leaders who will win in this era are people who know the business in the way that, like you and I are describing, like we've gotten this immersion. If someone's further along in their career, already in our HR team~ they can't retro-~ They can't... they can, but they're not gonna necessarily ~gonna, ~retroactively go back and like work on the shop floor, do the whole, like all of the jobs that lead to the job that they're in.
What are the alternatives? Like, how are you thinking about, say with folks on maybe your own team that are, ~that~ fit that, that mold? How can they go back and make sure that they're still immersing themselves in understanding the business so they can be that empathetic and sympathetic HR leader?
Kyle Roed: Yeah. No, that's a great question and yeah, that's the reality. And, it's been interesting in recent years there ~li-~ there are actually human resources degrees that you can get, right? Which I didn't have. ~Y-~ I got a [00:22:00] business degree and, HR was like chapter eight in Management 101, and that's like the amount of human resources education I got, formal education in college, right?
Went back and got my certifications and all that good stuff once I got into the field. But ~I do tell, I--~ for anybody who's graduating college with an HR degree, I tell every single one of them, " Just go be a leader. Go into a management training program and just get run through the wringer.
Run through all the crappy parts of management, and all the kind of the dark side of being a leader and the hard stuff." And, but not everybody's at that capability, right? And some people have just fallen into the career and or actively just don't have that interest and wanna just be in human resources, which is fine.
You can do it. You just have to be incredibly curious. And you have to be mindful of the experience gap, and you just can't be too preachy, right? It's because ~you're just,~ you're gonna lose trust with your team if they feel [00:23:00] like ~you're,~ you are talking about something you don't understand. But I would say in general, most HR professionals that I have interacted with are pretty high empathy folks, in general. ~I don't~ I don't know many people that go into HR that are like I don't like people," or, "I don't understand people," or, "I don't have a desire to understand people," right?
Lean on that skill set and just be curious. And sometimes it's as simple as just ~being~ being thoughtful with your internal business customers and being ~an, a,~ a resource for them, actually being a human resource for them as opposed to someone who's like chewing them out, or telling them what to do, or telling them how to do something, right?
Listen before you give advice. A lot of stuff, it's like kindergarten rules, right? Like, treat others the way you wanna be treated.
But the other thing too ~some of the best, ~some of the best HR professionals literally just go out and like job shadow for a few hours, right?
We used to call it, back in one of my former positions, we called it MBWA, manage by walking around, and ~li-~ [00:24:00] literally just spending the time to interact with people and understand. You don't have to be an expert. You don't have to be an expert on welding to understand how to help a welder, right?
You don't have to be an expert on logistics to understand that somebody in logistics might need your guidance and support, or how to lend ~a,~ a helping hand to them in an area ~of,~ of ~the,~ the business that they don't understand, or help a new leader coach someone who's incredibly frustrated. ~Those,~ those sorts of things I think naturally can...
~are,~ are skill sets of most HR professionals. So don't be afraid to be a little bit different than the people that you're supporting as well. So I think maybe the last thing I'll say on this, 'cause ~so I--~ most of the work I do now is kind of in the executive sphere. So, executive coaching and, I'm hiring C-suite folks and stuff like that.
And ~it-it's~ interesting. We did ~a,~ we brought in a consultant. Shout out to Bob Kelleher with the Employee Engagement Group, ~my,~ my [00:25:00] boy Bob, dear friend. ~He--~ I brought him in to help me ~do, ~do some executive coaching ~and,~ and some executive team building. And we went through and we went around and we did kind of ~a, y-~ there's a lot of different versions of it, but, there's like the DiSC profiling or ~s-~ or strength finders or whatever, PI, whichever version ~you, ~you use in your company, I would say just use what's standard.
But we did these executive profiles for all the exec team, and everybody kinda clumped together in my s-sphere. It was like analytical and like dominant, right? And then there's me. I'm like, like this weird outlier way over on the other side and like highly creative, like totally neurodiverse compared to the rest of my team.
It mostly engineers, ops folks, ~super,~ super smart people, but smart in a different way than I'm smart, right? And so for an HR professional that's trying to figure out their place in the world, maybe they're ~not,~ not able to kinda spend ~a, spend a,~ a day in the life with their actual customers.
You've got strengths that your team doesn't have, and I think most HR professionals [00:26:00] probably do. So don't be afraid to lean on that and lean into to being different, 'cause there's... Like I guarantee you that your brain works different than somebody you're supporting, and just listening to them and providing a different viewpoint can build just as much trust as spending eight hours next to them on the, manufacturing floor or on the retail floor.
Barb Bidan: I love that advice and great advice for our colleagues sitting in the seat right now. I could go on and on on these topics. I am going to, though bring us into our lightning round and hit you with a couple of quick-hit questions to wind us down here. What is one AI agent that you've already built or deployed within your current context?
Kyle Roed: So ~the the,~ the one that I mentioned earlier, ~the,~ this SOP builder is one that I think is helpful. One that I would recommend though that we haven't talked about, so I'm not sponsored by this tool by the way, but you know, ChatGPT is just the one that I've used the longest. Side note, if you're [00:27:00] gonna use ChatGPT, use a paid one, otherwise it uses your data to train itself.
So don't do this without checking with your IT person and putting any sort of company information in there. Okay, disclaimer done. I went out and built a GPT that can help me look at some of these compliance things by country and jurisdiction, because ~I've,~ I've been in international HR for almost a decade now.
I still don't know all the compliance requirements in every country that we operate. I never will, nor will any lawyer that you talk to either. You have to talk to these, local specialists. So I built a GPT that basically gives me general guidance, and I built a flag into it that says, "You need to talk to local counsel."
So that I can... ~And,~ and for me, it's a barometer to help make sure that I'm looking at something objectively, that I understand the general parameters of the law in the location that I'm working through, and then a, a flag that tells me you should go talk to [00:28:00] somebody. And it's a spec- it's a specialized GPT, so ~it doesn't use,~ it doesn't use the memory of your conversations with it.
It's a purely objective view. It's one of the use cases that I recommend. So it's almost like a little miniature HR legal advisor
Barb Bidan: Awesome. And let me take us back to sort of the focus on learning the business. If you could advise folks in our profession to go learn one business function outside of HR that would help them the most with HR, but it is only one, where would you send them first?
Kyle Roed: I'm gonna answer this question very vaguely and broadly. I will answer it for myself. I am fascinated with sales ~s-~ for me because ~it's, it's kind of an,~ it's like ~a, a,~ an offshoot, a tangential offshoot of trying to understand human behavior. But that's me. My biggest guidance would be follow wherever your fire takes you.
Whatever is most exciting for you as you're interacting with folks to understand more [00:29:00] about. ~That,~ that would be my guidance. ~I don't, I don't,~ I don't know that there's one right answer there. But be open-minded to chase like your w- where your passion's guiding you
Barb Bidan: Yeah, I think never bad advice to go ~u-~ go understand and learn how your company makes money on the sales side, but also yes go follow what is passionate what you are passionate about, right? Is likely to teach you the most, I think is probably ~the,~ the core sentiment there. As we were going, I was really into this conversation, so as we were going, I do try to capture some takeaways, so let's see how I did here.
I the first sort of takeaway that I captured was really that there is no substitute for knowing your customer, right? So you said you don't need to be a welder to help ~the,~ the welding leaders that you support. But I think that this does start from not thinking of yourself as separate and apart from those individuals, but being able to think about how you can come in alongside them and actually be empathetic and sympathetic to the situation that they're facing and showing that curiosity.
So that [00:30:00] was the first one. The second one that I really liked is you had said sometimes HR needs to edit which I fully agree with, right? Sometimes it is less, not more that our leaders and our businesses need from us. So I guess setting a really great structure and then getting out of the way and letting leaders be great leaders.
I do tend to think that the retail, distributed retail background that pushes a lot of responsibility to line managers informs
Kyle Roed: felt that.
Barb Bidan: it's unsurprising that I agree with that, but I do agree with that. And then the last one is that HR can really provide great support in an AI age as we reconsider how work is done, and I really liked the two spots where you really focused attention.
So one was kind of work bottlenecks, like places where there are problems with the work. How can we help leaders understand what's going on there and figure out ways that we can potentially use AI or really anything strategically to improve that. But [00:31:00] I think a no-brainer right now is on backfill.
There should not be a time where we as HR professionals are not encouraging leaders who are backfilling for a role that's become vacant to see if there is an opportunity to rethink that role before you go out and fill it, and where can AI intervene, how can the role be reshaped, et cetera. So those are my big three but I like to leave guests with the final word.
What would you say to the HR leader who's listened to us talk today and you wanna plant a seed of something for them to think about on the rest of their drive home?
Kyle Roed: All right. ~I, i-if~ I can plant a seed, I would say your organization needs you to lead into the future of work. And that's gonna be different for everybody. But I would encourage you to be incredibly curious about what the future of work structure actually looks like. And if you have the inkling, go learn some tools [00:32:00] and then start to use them and share them with folks.
So just be open-minded.
So, I love a good meme. And one of the jokes or memes that's out there recently is, , you're in a room and you're looking around and you realize, "Oh, I'm supposed to be the one that's the adult in the room right now," or, " I'm the one that's supposed to be adulting."
And so often HR is that person. People look to HR to guide and lead and, kinda be the voice of reason. So , one of the things I would leave your listeners with is, is, is a saying that, I think about a lot, and that is, if not me, then who? And what I mean by that is, so if it's not you guiding an organization as it relates to people or people processes or how people interact with technology in the future, then who will be the one doing that?
And the answer or the truth is, in that context you might not [00:33:00] want some people guiding that. You as HR need to take ownership of that so that your organizations can be successful and be human-centric as you think about the future of work. The alternative is you might be making contextual decisions that have a really, really big impact on the people in your organization without full consideration of the impact.
And so if not me, then who, would be the takeaway.
Barb Bidan: I love it. Take the opportunity to lead. Do not be a bystander. Great advice. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show and talk to me today, Kyle. It was great
Kyle Roed: Thanks, Barb. Appreciate the opportunity to be here.