Stefanie Krievins - The Holistic Impact of Change Management
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Welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast, your direct source for the latest trends from experts inside and outside the world of human resources.

Listen as we explore the impact that compensation strategy, data, and people analytics can have on your organization. This podcast is sponsored by Salary.com, your source for data, technology, and consulting for compensation and beyond. Now, here are your hosts, David Teretsky and Dwight Brown.

Hello and welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast. I'm your host, David Teretsky. And as always, we try and find people inside and outside the world of HR to tell you what's going on in the world of HR.

And today we have a repeat guest, someone who we love so much from her first episode, season eight, episode nine, that we had to bring her back. Stephanie Krevins from Change Architects. Stephanie, how are you? I'm fabulous. How are you, David? I'm good. I'm very good. It's a little cold here in my office, but otherwise I'm good. Same, same.

Well, we're recording this in mid-December. Next week is Christmas week. And it's actually decidedly a very cold fall here. So...

Not loving that. Yeah, here in Indiana, it's been the opposite. It's been a very fallish December. Oh, good. Well, and hopefully you'll have a white Christmas that everybody wishes for because we're going to have winter weather this week. So lovely. Yes, yes.

So, Stephanie, tell our listeners a little bit about you. If they didn't catch episode nine of season eight, who are you? No, thank you. Which, of course, they did, because I know your listeners are loyal. Yes. Or they will go back and listen to it now. They should. There was a lot of laughing. And then pick up from here and then listen to the rest, right? That's right. Yes. Yes.

Yeah, so here at The Change Architects, we focus on upskilling and reskilling from the perspective of knowing where your organization is headed, right? You know, naming the strategy and then creating that operational plan and aligning the skills to what the organization needs. So we use a lot of coaching programs, learning and development, online courses to help people understand and plug into the future of their organization.

So cool. And the reason why we love talking to you is it's not an HR thing, really. It's a business thing, right? You talked about the organizational goals. Yes. When people will say, are you an HR? Are you in strategy? And I go, yes. Yes. And in my mind, it's all the same. I did. You did. So, Stephanie, like we do on every episode, what's one fun thing that no one knows about you? Oh, man. Hardest question you're going to get today. I think it is.

I got to think for a second. I'm such like an open book kind of person. I'm going to go with this one. It doesn't feel very spicy, which is my normal kind of go-to, I know. But I'm a really good home cook. I'm not a chef. I'm a really good home cook.

And I daydream about running a lunch counter called Seven Soup, where we have seven soups and they rotate throughout the week or throughout the month or whatever. And sometimes I just daydream about what kind of seven soups would I make this week? Because it's fun to think about.

I love mushroom barley. So if you're going to do one, please make it a mushroom barley. Check. Love. Oh, that's delicious. Yes. I love mushrooms. There's actually nothing wrong with that confession. That's actually a pretty cool one. Yeah. And it's actually actionable. You could do that. That is true. That is true. But I love cooking and the business of cooking. I have no doubts I would hate. So all good. Well, that's why you have to have a friend who is better at the business of cooking. Oh, yeah.

Good point. Good point. So if there's anybody who wants to get in touch with Stephanie, please find her. It's Stephanie Grevins at Change Architects. That's right. Thechangearchitects.com. Exactly. There you go.

So one of the fascinating things we get to do when we have our peak guests is we get to look back and say, what didn't we cover? And so today's episode is going to be kind of cool. It's going to be cutting room floor, the things we wanted to discuss on our first episode together, but we didn't have time. And as we talked about, that was season eight, episode nine. So again, if you want to stop this podcast, we'll

Well, you don't have to, but stop this one, go back and listen to season eight, episode nine, and come back to this one. So our first question, the first topic that we didn't really cover, that we didn't cover last time was around the upskilling and reskilling of executives and their successors. And I guess the question is, what's new in this? What's different?

Where are we? Yes. So I was just reading an article on this yesterday, and I think it's important to clarify. Upskilling and reskilling, even though they're used synonymously, they're two different things.

They're two different strategies, I guess you could say. I don't want to go too broad there, but they are two different strategies, right? Like re-skilling is putting someone into a different line of business, a different function. Upskilling is deepening their existing skills for an existing function. So we got to make sure that we're not using those interchangeably because they're not the same thing.

So one might be an HR person who goes into operations or a finance person who comes into HR, for example. Correct. That's re-skilling. Yes. And upskilling would be getting someone ready to take on new role within a line of business like HR or operations or finance. Exactly. Yeah. So that HR manager who's

purposefully taking online courses and studying for their certification to become a director or an HR business partner. That's upscaling. Okay.

Yes. So specifically as it relates to executives, I think we're very used to executives moving from one line of business to another. That doesn't seem so weird to us anymore. You know, the CIO who becomes the COO or vice versa. And that's been a client of ours this year, actually. And we see great success in that area because that strategic thinking, that drive for results, that ability to manage clients,

across the organization and deep into the organization is a transferable skill. It's the technical skill of the function that they need to learn at certain levels and the respect of their team that they need to gain that is the skill set that they're learning. But if you could imagine that someone was successful in one role and as an executive leading a team,

to your example, the CIO going to become a COO, then that respect, at least from the, I put good people around me to run the technical organization and I have good people around me that can run the operations. So I need to do what I do well, which was organizing the work and organizing the function and allowing the people who are good underneath me

Right.

At the executive level, the ability to manage them technically isn't as relevant, but earning street cred is always relevant because street cred creates trust. Trust creates conflict. Conflict creates commitment. Commitment creates results. So there you go. Yes. There's a value chain right there. There is a value chain there. That is real. I imagine that people, especially in a function,

who would want to be upskilled to get that role would be your challenge. I've had that happen to me in the past where I've gotten a role that other people had vied for and they weren't, well, is he really qualified to do that? And didn't then give you the opportunity. So how do you create the right environment to not only make that person successful, but the people around them successful as

Yeah. I've had that situation too. I was the new person for a newly created role. Unfortunately, I didn't learn about that until about 18 months in. I was like, oh, that's why that person is always... Yeah. It felt a little icky. It felt a lot icky, actually.

Yeah, so I think first off, it's the folks doing the hiring into that role need to go back to those candidates and acknowledge the awkwardness and acknowledge the

Maybe the feedback that needs to be given about why this person was chosen over you and what other opportunities there are for upskilling or maybe even reskilling. You know, if that person is aiming to be a manager, what are the opportunities for that person to become a manager maybe in another function? Sometimes that's applicable, sometimes it's not. But acknowledging the awkwardness should be step one. And I think

Many hiring managers gloss over that because it is awkward. So let's have the awkward conversation and then letting the person coming into that role know there were internal candidates that weren't selected and

And so you need to create an intentional 90-day plan to connect with all incumbents and stakeholders to build trust, to build street cred, to demonstrate integrity, to demonstrate humility as well, because those folks are still going to be additive to the team. That's what I would recommend. That's a great plan, especially given the fact that as successors,

They're working towards they should be working towards the benefit of that person instead of the detriment, which is the you know, we've always had that. I had that a lot of the the people who were.

I guess, disenfranchised, disengaged, and in some ways very passively, aggressively, or aggressively, aggressively working to your demise so that you became the successor again. And how do we, and I guess my question is on that, you know, it's the training of the successors and the upskilling of the successors that also makes this plan better, right?

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And this goes to the other thing that we wanted to talk about in this conversation. It links to, right, how do we spread more accountability and autonomy down into the organization so leaders can lead more? This is the flip side of that problem is as a manager, you can't make yourself indispensable. You have to be working yourself up out of that job by giving more responsibility down into the organization to your direct reports.

So that if you win the lottery and get to buy your private island, if you get promoted again, which is probably the more likely scenario, you have folks to step into your role. That is solving an active succession planning and upskilling problem.

But that also kind of builds the trust there as well, because then those people who may be looking for your demise or your promotion or buying you the lottery tickets, they have the skin in the game as well for you to be successful. Because otherwise, you're going to have people like the A2 Brute situation with the knives out waiting for that opportunity to just, you know,

Absolutely. And that goes again back to 90 day plans. It doesn't have to be your first 90 days, any 90 day plan. If someone is displaying passive aggressive and aggressive aggressive behavior towards you, they have 90 days to fix it. Like you, you need to get yourself on board with my leadership. Right.

Well, having been in that situation, I had 90 days for a transition plan where that person had to leave. It didn't work and it wasn't going to. So I literally, we, we sat in my office one day and had a conversation with this one person who said, yeah, I wanted that job. You didn't, you didn't deserve it. I got, I should have gotten it. And therefore I'm going to work for your demise. I was like, yeah, okay. Clean out your desk.

Let's see. Yes, that was not your decision to make. Your decision is your attitude. Right, exactly. Like what you hear so far? Make sure you never miss a show by clicking subscribe. This podcast is made possible by salary.com. Now back to the show.

And I guess let's go back to the other point that you were talking about, which is really important, which is the ability to provide people with the opportunities to increase their accountability. You know, managers sometimes get to, what's the word? It's almost myopic about the accountability that people have and making sure it doesn't step on their toes and not providing them opportunities to grow and to grow

basically stretch their wings a little bit and be able to take on more. Why do you think that managers feel that need to limit accountability in the context of, you know, you aren't going to be there forever. You need people to grow. You need people to take on more because, you know, with the way budgets are going, people are going to having to do with more, more with less anyways. What's, what's the reticence here?

You know, I'm going to take this a couple levels deeper than I think typical managers speak here. And I shared this with the group of like 60 managers one time and it really resonated. But I think it gets beyond the superficial answers that are out there already. So the first thought is,

The first train of thought around this is it's not just accountability, it's autonomy. You know, at the executive level, I hear a lot of conversations about people need to be empowered to make decisions. And we use that word so often, I don't even know what that means anymore. But some thought leaders that I've been listening to, they're talking about autonomy down into the organization. I was like, okay, that makes more sense to me. Autonomy and accountability for delivering on results.

So how can we get more of that? And as managers who are human beings, like we all are, I think we get triggered and our insecurities come up. And I'm a big fan of the Enneagram, the personality assessment. Have you heard of this? So the Enneagram is, and I'm from Indiana, so I say it real funny, E-N-N-E-A-G-R-A-M.

And it says that there are nine different personality styles, and it's really even something deeper than personality. And they all have these core fears. And based on our styles, it's, you know, just kind of like down deeper into who we are.

It says, based on our fears of what separates us from other human beings, that's what you're going to see activated in a manager. So for some managers, it's control. For some, it's perfection. For some, it's they love to help people so much. They help everyone out of their accountability because they take on too much.

Right.

There's at least nine different answers to why managers do that. So managers have to know themselves. Managers have to understand why are you getting in your own way? And the only way I know how to solve for that is executive coaching. And I don't say that because we do executive coaching. I'm saying I've seen it transform humans and leaders to become less myopic and more objective. Well, Stephanie, I think one of the problems...

when we talk about coaching is people go, yeah, that's really great in times where we're flush with money. But when we can't afford it, you know, that's the first thing that gets cut.

And we're living in a very stressful time right now where the world is changing and the pace of change is crazy. We talk about this on almost every program, how AI is changing the world as we know it. And so coaching to me becomes almost an imperative because there are other people who figured things out and we haven't and we can't.

There's nobody's perfect. Nobody can figure everything out. And if, if somebody else can hold a mirror to you and say, look, here are five attributes or the nine attributes you were talking about before, where as a manager, you're failing. And here are some of the ones of the nine that you're exhibiting. Doesn't that have an immediate ROI? Doesn't don't people then realize, Oh my God, without this, how would I succeed? How can I be a, an impactful leader? Right.

In the year 2025, without having that. I'm as perplexed as you are. And when you look at the data behind executive coaching, executive coaching, credible, high-quality coaching has a six to one ROI. How? Six to one. Hmm.

I don't know why you wouldn't buy it. Now, there comes down to some buying decisions and are there less than credible coaches out there not doing impactful work? Absolutely. So that's a whole other conversation. That's going to be coaching, buying coaching and implementing coaching. That's going to be session number or episode three for us, David. Okay, that sounds good. But six to one, training doesn't have that.

does not have that return on investment. I don't know what the numbers are on mentoring. That's usually a less cash-intensive investment. There's even group coaching and peer coaching

There's multiple ways to get coaching inside of an organization that's not as expensive as executive coaching. And you're also talking about it not for a gigantic population. You're talking about it for a very specific population. That's right. Yes, your high potentials, maybe your managers who were once rock stars and now they've kind of stalled out. Something's happened with their engagement. Your executive leaders that must deliver this year on something impactful. Yes. But even it could be.

People who are wildly successful just because they're wildly successful in 2023 or 2024 does not mean in 2025 and beyond that they're going to be. The world is changing crazily. Yes. Crazily? Crazily. Yes, definitely crazily.

And so one of the things that I would suggest people do, and if you're in an HR leadership role or an HR manager role, look at the people who, to Stephanie's point, may have stalled, may have achieved their plateau, and

And that might be more low hanging fruit for you in order to be able to justify executive coaching. And, and by the way, when we're talking about coaching and correct me if I'm wrong here, I'm playing this back for you. We're talking about making people better leaders who then have the ability to provide that autonomy we were talking about before and making everybody around them more successful. So when you're talking that six to one return on investment, you're,

It's not even just that one person that you're getting that return on. It's you're getting the coaching and the better results from the groups that they support, correct? Oh my gosh, fabulous point. Yes, it's leaders should be leverage makers.

you know, your right leaders turn the output of one person into the seeming output of five people. That's leverage. That's what we need to be thinking about. We need to be thinking about the 20% of our folks that create 80% of the results. You know, the Pareto principle applies in so many ways and output and value, not just output of work, but value that individuals can create when they're leverage makers are

That's who you need to keep your eye on because they have a relationship with change that is healthy, that needs to be role modeled in the rest of the organization. And you don't need to be Apple or Microsoft or what the, you know, very large corporations to get this impact. It could be, you know, much smaller companies, midsize companies, even small companies where having that coaching for, you know, that leader, right.

could really fundamentally change the outcomes of that company. Oh, absolutely. And a lot of innovation studies show that actual real innovation and economic growth comes from the mid-market economy.

And so these organizations that are rocking 100 to 2,000 employees, everyone's definition of mid-market is slightly different. But these companies are creating amazing transformation in the world and in their markets and with their customers and investments in those folks and defining innovation in your organization and what that means for leadership. Yeah.

Magic, absolute magic happens in those industries and in those companies. And that's the magic that happens at that one company.

Let's say they leave, they go to a different company. That person takes with them that magic. But also you have all the people that are left behind who've been around the magic, who also might be, as we talked about, got the benefit from it and now can step into that role. And when we've talked about successors and we talked about the value of being able to upskill and reskill executives,

We didn't mean to leave the successors on the cutting room floor again. We really need to help them as well, right? Oh my gosh, absolutely. This is...

When you do not have an articulated succession plan, you're opening your organization up to a level of risk that you don't know until it happens. For folks in Indianapolis and nationwide, you all saw this play out. If you all remember when Peyton Manning here with Indianapolis Colts got hurt, right? There was no succession plan. And I think our winning record plummeted down to basically zero afterwards with our backup quarterback because...

Because not just our backup quarterback, but with the offense and the defense, because there were no other skills being built on the team to even begin to imagine what if Peyton Manning was taken down? And I believe this was around 2009, 2000. No, I'm sorry. 2010, 2011 when this happened. Yeah.

And which is quite a while ago, but I was in HR then. And I remember watching that play out and I'd go, wow, they don't have a succession plan. This is what we're doing to our companies when we're not intentionally building skills in two, three, four leaders should an executive win the lottery and get to buy their private island or God forbid, get violently attacked in some kind of way. Yeah.

It becomes a risk issue. And as executives, you all know one of your number one responsibilities is mitigating risk. Absolutely. The company moves on whether the leaders are there or not. That's right. And your ability to create a sustainable workforce at the top levels or throughout the entire company, that's your management. Oh, yeah. And so many growing companies focus on scaling. But what you just said is equally important to sustainability. Yeah.

Because that mission must go on regardless of the human playing the role of chief marketing officer, CIO, CISO, whatever that is. That's dire to the world. Hey, are you listening to this and thinking to yourself, man, I wish I could talk to David about this? Well, you're in luck. We have a special offer for listeners of the HR Data Labs podcast. A free half hour call with me about any of the topics we cover online.

on the podcast, or whatever is on your mind. Go to salary.com forward slash HRDL consulting to schedule your free 30-minute call today. So Stephanie, let's talk about the last piece that we left on the cutting room floor, which is kind of cool, but doesn't really get talked about a lot, which is why does change management not get the importance and the kind of the necessary investments they need in the world of HR for HR processes?

The very brief answer is, I don't know. I don't get it. I don't know.

That's very honest. It is. It is. Because companies are calling us and asking us in once a project has stalled out. Yeah, that's not the right time. It is not. Because you're spending three and five times as long trying to get people on board once that project is being unrolled. When if you were to respond in a proactive way, you could cut that time at least in half, if not 75%. And so...

I think this focus on speed and false urgency that a lot of companies tend to manage by nowadays in the well-intentioned desire to keep up with the rate of change that they're seeing in their marketplace, I get all of that. I really do. Logically, I get all of that. But I think that that

that change management is seen as something that slows teams down versus actually speeds them up. And I always, when I think of change management, which by the way is due for a rebrand, right? Like that whole term is just so dated. That's why I... Change management needs change management. It does. It does. That's why I prefer change architecture, right? Like we architect change together. That is my bias. But...

But I think of change management as this ability to almost create flow together. You know, when you tighten where water flows, you speed it up, but you get it all going in the same direction and you corral it and manage it and make it go where you want it to go versus just throw everybody in their canoes in the river and send them on down. It's

Well, actually, if you kind of created this shoot and kind of went one by one and managed it, we could all go faster and farther together. Not to sound all cliche about it, but that is what happens. And that's the power of change management. But I...

It's hard, though. And being a professional at it, if you're a professional at a project like, for example, creating new job titles and creating a salary structure and then being able to then have the understanding and ability to reach all audiences, key stakeholders, as well as even the ones who aren't key stakeholders, and be able to have them understand why you did what you did and what the result is for them, that's really hard. Yeah.

And you might be the best person in the world to create a structure, but you may not be the best person to communicate that. That's where it falls down. Yeah. No, I think that's a great point. It is a skill set that needs to exist on top of other skill sets, right?

It's all teachable, which is the good news. And you have to leverage your colleagues in order to do that. And it seems slower to leverage more colleagues when you're charged with getting 72 job descriptions done by the end of the quarter. And...

How communicating to them that they're part of the change. Yes. Communicating to them that they have to buy into the change, that there is some need that we have, that they provide input to the change. To me, it's a skill set that I think you might be underplaying, given that this is your background. Having been in roles where I've had to deal with people who their job was change management. Yeah.

and struggled to get stakeholders aligned on how it was going to be done and the most effective strategy for getting it done meant the actual death of a project. Yes, I could see that. I mean, that points to so many variables, you know,

Getting people aligned, especially modern organizations tend to rely on consensus a lot as a way to avoid decision making. That's my initial reaction to what you just said. Yeah. And so if you've got someone whose title is change manager and their job is to create alignment with a bunch of executives...

That's probably not realistic. They need to rely on maybe their CEO to create alignment and use more informal power structures to do that. It's a thing. And as an outsider, there are things that I can say and do and deliver that internal constituents can't. I understand that completely. But you're also the expert too. And so they'll listen to you to be able to say, how do other people do this successfully? Yes, yes.

I just don't think it's a good skill set that we have either bought or train internally at companies. That's why they turn to companies like the change architects to be able to provide that service. Cause yeah, as I said, I've seen so many projects internally in my organizations that I've worked for in the past fail because either it wasn't budgeted for appropriately or it just wasn't executed effectively. Yeah. It's, it's,

It's a thing, but that's why we're here. I mean, humans are humans. None of us get it right. You know, we can all learn. We all need additional resources. This is the way of life. I think that's true with communication. It's true with leadership. It's just...

But Stephanie, if someone came to you and said, and I'm coming to you now and asking, what should we budget for change management efforts on a project when we're, you know, just starting out with a project, we're just thinking about it. You know, is there a 1X, 1.5X, 1.0, 1.05X? What's the uplift that we'd have to budget for change management in order to be able to be successful in a project? That was a good question. Time-wise, money-wise? Yes, yes.

So first my brain goes to, is this project by project or is this an organization-wide competency? I would prefer to teach organization-wide competency and overlay it onto existing work versus kind of put it in a separate bucket. But to answer your question, I think a fair amount of time and dollars would be 10 to 15% to get you started. Mm-hmm.

It doesn't have to be a heavy lift. I've actually taught executives how to use AI to craft your communication plan using an existing strategic framework. Wow. That's great. Yeah. And I'm not a huge AI fan because I'm a huge human connection fan. And I get that it's here and I get that it will have a role in business, all of those things.

And I was teaching this group of COOs my communication framework, which is seven by seven by seven. So if you have a big initiative, you communicate it seven channels, seven messages, rinse and repeat seven times. And just saying that, I'm like, gosh, that's a lot of work. That is. And manually, it is a lot of work, except when you give the prompt to...

Chat GPT, whatever your AI tool of choices or has been deemed appropriate by your organization's IT department, which is even more important. Put that in there. It crafts the messaging for you. It creates the cadence for you. It takes, oh gosh, I'm going to say 15 hours of work and spits it out in 15 seconds.

It's real. But the training, the person who's writing the prompt takes 10 days. That was a joke, by the way. No,

No, no, seriously, though. I mean, the person who's doing that needs to have at least some acumen, right? To know what the appropriate outcome is, right? Of course, of course, of course. Yeah. And that's, let's say you get together, you know, a group, you know, your PMO staff. And, you know, I taught this workshop in two hours and there's other levels you could build into it. But let's say we taught three two-hour workshops around that.

Those folks have invested six hours. Let's say you've got 10 people in there, so you've got 60 hours worth of their time in there. That is a skill they now have and can rinse and repeat on every project and gain immense efficiency through ChatGPT. Wow. That is an upskilling project right there that we just created together, David. There you go.

I get it. Everything is time. Everything is time. It really is. And how much time is that project manager going to spend responding to 3 million emails and being, I'm exaggerating here, saying, well, you didn't communicate this and you didn't tell me this and you didn't tell me why you were doing this. And that's also time. Yeah.

So let's be more proactive about it. And what I like about things like plans like that, structures like that, is it allows the communicator to put the onus for comprehension and reading the communication back on the recipient. Because too often when you don't do communication in that structured kind of way, the person responsible for communicating takes all of the blame. Yep.

Absolutely. Well, we know that everybody reads every email they get, though. Right. And so, you know, the seven times part of that is the important part, because tell them, tell them what you told them. Tell them what you told them you had told them. I mean, I'm not going to go all seven times, but you know what I mean, right? Per my last email. Oh, my God. Oh, my gosh.

Good Lord, please don't put that in your emails. No, please do not. That is not a hot tip. That is not a hot tip. That will not go over well. If you had read my other seven emails, don't use that either. Use either of those.

Stephanie, it was such a pleasure talking to you. And I think we've done a pretty good job, although I know we've left some other things on the cutting room floor. So we might have to revisit for episode three with you. Yes. But thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. Same here. Thank you so much. I learned so much talking to you. Oh, my gosh. Same here. I just appreciate your conversation style. You're so curious. I love it. I am. And you know what they said about the cat, right?

No, what? Because he was so curious. But no, thank you so much, Stephanie. You're awesome. We really appreciate it. Same here. Same here. And thank you for listening. Take care and stay safe. That was the HR Data Labs podcast. If you liked the episode, please subscribe. And if you know anyone that might like to hear it, please send it their way. Thank you for joining us this week and stay tuned for our next episode. Stay safe.