How Kyndryl is Leading Culture Change in a 90,000 Person Start-Up

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In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, I’m joined by Maryjo Charbonnier, CHRO of Kyndryl, to discuss how she is leading a cultural transformation at the IT services spin-off from IBM. With 90,000 employees on day one, Kyndryl is the world's largest start-up undertaking rapid change.

Maryjo took on this HR leadership role right before Kyndryl became an independent public company in 2021. She saw it as an exciting opportunity to spearhead a people-focused journey and turnaround for the new firm.

Defining the Desired Culture Early on, Kyndryl asked its 90,000 employees for input on the culture they wanted to create. This feedback led to articulating the desired cultural values and behaviours that provide alignment for how Kyndryl wants people to work together in service of customers. The culture transformation underpins everything as Kyndryl establishes itself as a services-led organization.

Maryjo emphasizes that change management requires systematically anchoring the agenda with leadership, gaining executive sponsorship, thoughtful messaging, and continuous feedback.

At Kyndryl, this meant aligning the top 800 leaders first, then cascading information through different employee groups to explain changes and obtain input. Ongoing governance rhythms ensure continuous monitoring and course correction.

The massive scale of change for Kyndryl’s HR transformation requires stamina and care for the team. Maryjo focuses on honest dialogue, celebrating milestones, and reminding everyone that this learning will build their capabilities.

Her parting advice for aspiring HR leaders includes seeking complex assignments, cultivating sponsorship, networking with peers, and bringing passion and kindness to make a positive impact.

Episode Highlights

• How Kyndryl is leading culture change in a 90,000 person start-up

• How they have accelerated their transformation strategy to become an employer of choice

• How to solicit employee input early on to articulate cultural values and behaviours

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Recommended Resources

• Follow Maryjo on LinkedIn

• Learn more about Kyndryl

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🎙️ Automatically generated Podcast Transcript

Chris Rainey 0:00

Maryjo, welcome to the show. How are you?

Maryjo 0:02

Great, thanks. Great. Glad to be here, Chris.

Chris Rainey 0:05

It's nice to see you. How are you? First of all, it's just how are things? How's life?

Maryjo 0:09

I'm fabulous. My youngest child turns 20. Today, we're about to come up on the two year anniversary of Kindra. Being a public company, so it's a great time.

Chris Rainey 0:18

Wow. Two years is gone. Really fast.

Maryjo 0:21

Yeah, two years, the beginning of November. We're counting down the days now.

Chris Rainey 0:25

But on a personal note, both of our friends and your husband Stefan has retired from L'Oreal with ch ro. How's that now is he is also doing lazing around the house?

Chris Rainey 0:36

My husband right now?

Chris Rainey 0:40

Yeah. How's it going on? How's he getting on? He's good. He's good. You know, and I think enjoying also life after the CHRO office to amazing, amazing, probably we could give the audience a bit of background, about Kindle and sort of the spin off and how that all happened and your role and why why you kind of found this as an exciting opportunity. Yeah, so let me tell you a little bit about Kindle. We're one of the world's largest startups, we spun off from IBM, just under two years ago, with about 19 billion in revenue and 90,000 employees. So there's just a huge startup and change. And we really decided, as we became a public company, we were going to put culture and people at the centre of our journey, and really focus on that. So you asked me what attracted me to Kindle because I joined right before the spin to be the CHRO. And we'll probably talk a lot about this. I love you know, transformational assignments. So it was a spin, we have our challenges as a business, that's all a public record. And so the chance to do kind of a turnaround, as well as really be the centre of a sort of people focus cultural journey was just, you know, my type of transformational assignment. And that's what brought me to Kendra. It doesn't get much bigger than that does it?

Chris Rainey 2:05

Let me start, let me jump in. Yeah, it's funny, because what gives you energy and what's excites you other situations I speak to that's the idea of a nightmare. That would terrify

Chris Rainey 2:20

the holidays came early. Sign me up.

Chris Rainey 2:23

When When did you figure out in your career? Or how that what you were good at? And the direction that you wanted to take? Yeah, look,

Maryjo 2:31

I love being in an HR. You know, I always say, you know, I described my job. As you know, there are three types of problems I solve in my job, right math problems, people problems, and word problems. The people problems are always the challenging, but I like solving puzzles. And so this job is continuously interesting and challenging, as it's, I think some of the most complicated challenges any organisation faces. I think along the way, I started my HR career really sort of fundamentally in an HR training programme and an insurance company and then came to PepsiCo where I spent 13 years in HR in almost every division. And my first big assignment, there was a plant that was a turnaround, free FRITO lay at the time had 40 manufacturing facilities. And this one was the bottom of the rack and stacks every week cost quality service safety. And I think that was where I got my first turn around chat. Because we went from being the bottom of the pack, when I left to being in the upper third of the plants. And, and a real lesson around what it takes to really change, change the business dynamics change how people work together to produce a better outcome. And then from there, I became the head of change management. And that was when there were a lot we're going to talk about change ma nagement. And from there I went on to do, Pepsi bought Quaker and I was in charge of Canada where we integrated Quaker the business into a lot of the other the rest of PepsiCo. So I would say the first three really, really big assignments were all about leading change in pressured situations that were time bound. And I don't know if I liked it, it probably is partly my personalities. I really love a good challenge and then partly good at it. You know, when I give people career advice, you know, one of my sayings is seek the heat. Go to the places that are hot. It is often where executives focus on the problems of what's wrong in the business. They are filled with complicated people math and word problems. And they often offer sort of like fabulous accelerated learning but also fabulous accelerated visibility to get sponsorship and an HR career. And so that's probably you know, where you ask me kind of where the roots of this are and lessons from those days I still carry with me,

Chris Rainey 4:55

would you say like across all of those different transformations. The challenges are similar Under principles that you've taken to each organisation and its function,

Maryjo 5:04

the principles of change, management don't really change from situation to situation, the situation itself is different, and the personalities and the business pressures as I've moved, you know, at Kindle, this is my third Chr. O assignment. I've been a public company CHRO now for 15 years in three different industries and on two continents. So there are differences as you cross industries and certain business challenges. But I think how to do change well, doesn't change so much from from culture, to culture, business to business. And we can talk about some of the things that I've learned along the way that started in those early years that that I've brought with me sort of packed, packed in my bags as I've travelled,

Chris Rainey 5:47

what I love to hear from you is we hear a lot about transformation. And the culture change, which comes with that. How do you describe culture change?

Maryjo 5:56

So we believe that culture is the messages we spent send, both that are spoken and unspoken, about the behaviour that gets encouraged, tolerated, or discouraged? Right. So let me say that, again, it's about the messages you send to the leadership team around behaviour that is tolerated, discouraged, or encouraged. And that tends to manifest in three different ways. One, what you say about leadership versus how you act? So how, how much resonance is there between the spoken culture you want and the behaviour you tolerate? To systems think about your HR systems, who gets promoted, how do you make pay decisions? But also how do you budget? How do you allocate capital, those are also important systems in a culture that sent in a business that send lots of message culturally, and then symbols who gets the corner office who gets invited to the executive event? What gets said when someone gets promotion promoted? What are the Meaningful Moments around how an organisation celebrates or doesn't celebrate progress? Right? So it's about those behaviours, and then how they manifest in systems symbols, and what your what your stated set of behaviours are that you want to create. So when we formed Kendra, and we were working on, hey, we really want to put culture and yet we had this big HR change to do in addition to the cultural change, you know, my vision for the HR team was, hey, let's, as every we began to change everything in HR, let's have it be the proof point on the culture change, right? We want to do it in the way we change it as a proof point. And we want the ultimate change to be the Proofpoint. So you're thinking through, I'm always thinking through, how are we doing it? And then what are we doing as well?

Chris Rainey 7:51

I can tell us that the first time you've said that. I've definitely done a lot of transformations. You know, most of what most of the time I asked that question, he would not have an answer. I clearly defined answer the way that you described it very clear. And very, I love that, by the way. And I love the fact that you mentioned a spoken and unspoken, which sometimes the unspoken moment, speak louder. And then pick one pick the spoken ones, if that makes sense,

Chris Rainey 8:20

right. And I think it's really important if you can't express the culture, really clearly, it's hard to change to it right. And I'll tell you our culture, it's, I'll tell you it in six words, it happens to spell something which is an easy to remember. So read, that's our colour. That's what I have it on today for the show. Restless, empathetic and devoted. Those aren't the words you hear every day in someone's you know, corporate values, posters. So we're restless to learn, innovate and grow. We are empathetic and to serve with trust and transparency. And all we do and devoted to shared success, shared success with our employees, our customers, our investors in the communities in which we live and operate. And then how we organise our work and work together flat, fast and focused. And that's about empowering teams simple processes is we have the licence now to reinvent ourselves. In a post spin world and focus focused on customer services, we're the largest, you know, IT professional services firm in the world, we take what we do in the service to our customers very seriously, because we run the hearts and lungs, they trust us with their most trusted IT infrastructure. And so you know, being focused on serving our customers has a big implication when you say that on a value statement, you have to be willing to swallow it in HR. You have to be willing to say Well, look, then we have to have a focus because we want the internal service quality to be at or better than the external quality. We're asking our employees to deliver to our customers. Yeah,

Chris Rainey 9:59

you got Practice what you preach. Walk us through the journey, you know 90,000 startup, I like the way you say that it's kind of just saying that it just is crazy to think about, where did you start? Where do you even start? When something like this, you come into the organisation? Kind of what what was the first thing you're focusing on? Where do you start?

Chris Rainey 10:23

Well, look, personally, I always think the job starts before the job starts. So even before I'm on payroll, I am saying, Hey, if you can, I'll sign the NDA, send me the business plan, send me the engagement results, send me everything I can read, and I start talking to people. So I, I generally already hit the front doors, having collected a lot of information. But I think on that cultural journey, we actually started asking, you know, our employees, hey, if you could decide how to shape the culture, what do you want to keep toss evolve. So we had a pretty researched benchmark perspective on that, and then that fed into working with our executive team, but okay, let's write those words down, you know, the restless, empathetic, devoted five facet is didn't fall out of the sky. That was, you know, a series of ongoing conversations right at the beginning, you know, and we had a lot of other business and spin implications to take time with an executive team. So you know, we're going to talk about how we want to behave in this new place, we're going to talk about we want the customer experience to be and then how does that change what we want the employee experience to be, then we kind of got a draft of, of, of those values and behaviours and principles. And we took it out to all 90,000 Kid drills, and what we call a cultural exchange, and we blogged with them over a two day period to let them have input helped shape it roughly figured out, we were on the right path, because we'd already shaped it based on their feedback. And then from there, very early on, we got our top 800 leaders together. And I think what we did was make a real pivot from the past and say, Okay, we're gonna spend half the time talking about culture, and half the time about what these behaviours mean, and what they mean about how we interact with each other and what they mean about how we interact with the customer. And then we stayed on it, we gave leaders tools to take it to their team, we trained all managers within the first I think nine months of spin, we trained know, most 890 5% of all people managers in them to the point that a year after our spin, when we ask the question, Does your manager behave consistent with the Kyndra away with 72% of employees participate in the survey and a 78% score on that. So we got all the way down from I can, I'm aware and I know that they are to my manager behaves consistent with them. In a fairly short order of time, what was that

Chris Rainey 12:49

like kind of combination of online, mainly online, like online webinars, Learning Town Halls,

Maryjo 12:55

every possible way we pack them in. And then as we began our HR transformational journey, as we changed each core HR process, we used, we designed each core HR process with those behaviours in mind. And then the rollout itself reinforced that messaging and architecture.

Chris Rainey 13:15

So it all starts with the behaviours and principles and you kind of work backwards from there and build in thinking through

Maryjo 13:21

okay, what those are the behaviours? How do I bring them about in every system and symbol change I make?

Chris Rainey 13:28

How was it managing that entire transformation? How did you manage the transformation while still delivering it on the day to day?

Maryjo 13:35

Um, you know, look, I, I have found in my HR career that you know, you can organise HR any different number of ways. You know, no matter how you organise your HR business partners, your countries, your shared services group your COEs, there's lots of different ways to do it. What really sits at the heart of the success is what's the governance model? What's the operating rhythm and routine you run HR with? And I don't always know we spend enough time talking about that in the HR function of like, how do you govern the HR function?

Chris Rainey 14:08

Let me give an example what it looks like. Yeah, so

Maryjo 14:10

let's talk about that. So and how do you govern change in the organisation because those two things have to come together. So first, you run a fairly rigorous project management office, and that everything you're doing has a review process to it so that you bring all the stakeholders to the table in the design. We run that process through scrums up to what we call a programme design authority, which is a lot of our CEOs and senior leaders review what's coming in from all the teams and then programme board and on programme board that's where we have finance the CIO organisation procurement everyone who's got to be involved to help us drive a big change in the organisation and I sit on programme board to see all the change that's coming through the system. What are the choices we're making, not making, and then the HR LT right that plays a really important role in that governance model we meet every two weeks. And there we're both socialising the the change that's coming through programme board before we approve it and looking at how it's going afterwards. And then I meet with all of the country teams and our COA teams once a month, so that they have a chance to have direct access to me to say, look, it's working as we designed or it's not working. It's working in this geography, it's not working in that geography. So we're always having, again, back to that culture of empathy devoted to shared success and restlessness. And flat, right, we're actually using the HR governance model to again, shape behaviour and HR budget behaviour out of HR so that we are in a continuous loop on always having a real shared understanding of how something is going on. And that's probably going to Chris, the, you know, I learned along the way, you know, back from the early days we were talking about is, you need to really have that feedback loop about is the change sticking? Is it working on the ground like you intended it? Because oftentimes, we can get ourselves infatuated with our own PowerPoint, and not understand what's really going on with managers and employees.

Chris Rainey 16:15

But also you've got the right people involved in the conversations often

Maryjo 16:18

exactly, which creates buy in enthusiasm, and clarity of purpose.

Chris Rainey 16:24

Something you said last time we spoke, and it stuck to me, it kind of relates to this is how do you create a culture change? That creates a strategic seat? For HR? Yeah, a lot of what you just said does speak to that. But could you just elaborate a little bit more on that?

Maryjo 16:39

Yeah. Look, that's about you know, we've talked about how do we govern change in HR, let's talk about how do you manage change when you're moving out of HR. And you really want to anchor what you're doing in the business agenda. And then you want to anchor the sponsorship. Because I think it no matter where I've gone in in the world, and where I've travelled on my HR journey, leaders want to hear about change first manager second, and they all want to hear it before you roll it to employees, you need to be fairly systematic about how you go about doing that. So change is kind of simple. We've gotten it down to a pretty simple recipe, you know, first, I never take anything to our CEO and our group President that the HR LT hasn't had a chance to vet. Right. That's what we're doing in HR. lt is, you know, I won't go unless you're behind me. So what I'm saying to the HR LC, right. So by the time I take it in, I know I know kind of what the HR leadership team thinks to Martinelli, if they're pretty, if they're supportive, we go to our top 40. Leaders, we have that conversation there. Then we created something we call x power, we talked to all of our executives once a month about the changes we're rolling out and what we've been doing, we then roll into something we call Empower, which is all 7100 people managers, we talk to you in a month. And then we roll it out to what I call K Power, which is all of our kin rolls around the world. So we're pretty systematic, we can get through that process in about six weeks and get the feedback loop back up and eight. So that we have a pretty good sense of how things are working, maybe not perfect, some things we know more than others. But we're pretty consistent as an HR team. And that level of alignment, that consistency of message that clarity of with every rollout, we also learn as an HR team to ask us different levels of questions. We're like, Oh, we got that one. We don't have that one. So the HR team gets smarter through the cycle about what the different stakeholders are going to ask us. And they have a chance because often, if you go factory direct out to employees, and you haven't really spent time with executives, or managers vetting that change, you end up with everybody's questions at the end.

Chris Rainey 18:54

I feel like a lot of what you're saying is based on previous mistakes. Like, okay, we've got a process now, I feel like

Chris Rainey 19:07

if you do enough transformation, yeah. As a skill set, and you learn from it, and and I think the other thing we've been able to do is teach other shared services, functions, a good recipe for it, right? So that, that and that success, because that helps an HR team when they're doing a big change. And we've had to change almost every single process as we've had to disconnect from our former parent. And so, you know, it's been really, really fun to do everything all at once for the first time.

Chris Rainey 19:44

That wants to be really exciting. Again, I love the fact that you created very clearly defined recipes for everything we've been talking about for this conversation so far. But you've also been you spent the time to create a brand around each thing, even those each of those stages that you described. People, if you ask, I'm sure if I asked someone in your team, they would immediately be able to tell me the exact level that you're at right now. And the brand as well, which is super important, and you're not missing any anything on the way down. Either as well, you've led so many transformations now. And there's going to be leaders listening to either in it right now, or will be in it one day, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you made? Early on that you've learned from that you can share?

Maryjo 20:27

In my first CHRO assignment? When I left PepsiCo, and I joined Broadridge, I don't think I knew the recipe as well as I knew it now to get it systematically through the system. And so we had done a big HR transformation and at the end, and it really happens, it happens a lot in HR transformations, which is, hey, you have manager saying, Why did I just end up doing a bunch of hrs work. And I don't think I was as thoughtful as we needed to be about how to anchor what HR is doing first in the business agenda and create a lot of buy in and executive sponsorship, I don't think I was with in this job, we have a great comms team. And that tight partnership with comms and marketing that helps shape the messages around what you're doing, and gives every leader a script so that you train them in the script of the why behind it that helps them amplify the message. I think I got better. We got better at that. Over time. It manifests in big and small things like I don't let my employees say things like, well, we're going to implement employee shared services, who likes to serve themselves. I always say, Do you want to go to a cafeteria where you take your tray and you serve yourself? Or do you want to go to a restaurant, right? So we talked about things like manager direct access versus manager self service, because everybody likes to have direct access to the information, no one likes to serve themselves. So the words shape the culture shaped behaviour, those are some of the things that are important that I would say, get the agenda anchored at the top of the house in the business agenda, make sure and test you've got the real sponsorship and script ready to go. And then be really thoughtful about the word Chase choices, the packaging, and create that continuous feedback loop. So when it's not resonating in the organisation, or when you really haven't thought through how something is going to work for the business, you have a change to you have a chance to fix it. It's all the way done.

Chris Rainey 22:32

So I love that. And I think an important thing I always seen the mistakes that I made is is is not creating that common language, that people can have conversations because as soon as you create a common language, people know what that means in and you can then start to dialogue and conversation. But to your point, also not just common language, but you will be super intentional about what about what words you use. And you gave a great example of that as well. And we've seen that sort of intersection of HR marketing and comms, get closer and closer and closer together, right? We saw it during the pandemic, right? If there was ever a time where you needed to be a good communicator, and a good at marketing, it was during, you know,

Maryjo 23:16

when we talk about managing culture change, we use that same group, we call it the culture crew. And so the head of marketing head of comms the head of our culture transformational group, and I work really closely in our teams together to think about, Hey, what is that change? How do we want to message it? How do we want to bring it to life for the organisation, and all of us who play a key role in that orchestration amplification effort, are in lockstep along the way and we meet with our CEO every month on that,

Chris Rainey 23:48

one of the things that are thinking about is that is quite rare that you have also have the opportunity to build your tech stack from the ground upwards. Normally, you come into an organisation and it's just a tangled mess of systems in place. Now, you had the opportunity to do that. What steps did you take? What approach did you take in terms of building the technology layers in your organisation?

Maryjo 24:11

Yeah, I would say we inherited 100 And something 60 HR systems that that all did some little piece part of the HR value chain. And we already had workday. So that was our transactional system of record. So we said hey, we're gonna build off of it. And you know, one of the things we were hearing in that cultural change was processes are too complicated. The organization's process focus not outcome focused, people processes are really complicated. So, you know, we went on a simplification journey, that's often not always enabled by collapsing systems and tools for for employees and managers. And so first, you know, you got to build a good roadmap with in partnership with your IT, partners to figure out you know, inventory Do what you have figure out what is the right value path forward. In our case, if you've ever done a spin, as I like to say you don't get to pack your suitcase, you only get to unpack your suitcase. So you get systems, helpfully or unhelpfully, all packed in your suitcase is a little like going on a vacation, you know, to the beach, and you realise you've, you have a bathing suit, but no flip flops, and four pairs of snow boots, don't always get back in the suitcase, everything you need for the for the vacation you think you're going on. So it's really important to inventory that process and then create again, use that same change management process we've been talking about to create buy in in where you place your your future bets, and then be very public about it. You know, I was saying that HR transformations don't go on for forever, but they feel like they do while they do, because it can be very exhausting to the business, we will have changed almost every core HR process in a nine month period. So it's a lot of change for the organisation to absorb rapidly. And it's, it's important to lay that out at the beginning. So that you can manage expectations during and afterwards, we've been very focused on like, we're going to be minimally viable product, we're going to get all the other systems dispositioned help reduce our cost base in HR. But that means a whole lot of change at once. It also creates freedom of independence from our past and allows her new culture to be enabled and to flourish. But it will also mean an era of continuous improvement even after we're done.

Chris Rainey 26:36

Again, you knew that coming in, right? You know, that's something you'd already been planning from day one, you already you already knew you had that suitcase, you just had to open it at some point. What we're working with, so essentially, you're gonna keep what day is the sort of main base foundation and build,

Maryjo 26:56

I mean, one of the things that's really important in any HR transformation is making sure you have a really good we call it the global skill and career framework. It's one of the most important kind of underpinning. So it's not just the system, it's the data, and the structures that go into communicating how you want. So one of the things we heard from employees at Kindle is, Hey, am I still gonna be able to have a career here? What will be the career paths? How do I grow and develop, we inherited packed in the suitcase for different Scoble kind of career job architectures. So it was really hard for the HR team to do their work, because what any employee was coded as changed as you went from system to system. So one of the early things we did was say, Okay, we have to solve that if we're going to collapse everything, we couldn't use what was in Workday, it was also out of date from the market titles route a date. So we map 90,000 jobs to a new career framework, what sort of pay ranges that went with that to bring them up to market the titles, attached competencies and skills to the job. So now any employee can look or manager can look into workday and see updated jobs, jobs have updated titles, but they also have the expected competencies and skills now tied with them. So imagine, and we did that a couple of months after our first birthday, you know, the the focus and structure it takes to do that well, and you know, have that well received by the organisation.

Chris Rainey 28:26

And that's something is super important in order to become a skills based organisation, but also empower your teams and your employees so they can take charge of their careers, right, and see where they go

Chris Rainey 28:37

exactly in our in our second big release, we really wanted to rethink how we talked about performance management, because that's obviously important when you're doing a business turnaround, because let's just say that, while we've been doing all of this, we've also been helping support a business turnaround. Um, so we call that that performance management process, your compass, and it's the compass to our shared success, right, we all have to get someplace similar, but you may want to put different things in your backpack along the journey. And in your compass, you're gonna want to share your map with us what you're good at where you want to go. As we as we all travelled together. So you can see even in that language, you hear the empathy, you hear the devotion to shared success. So not only were we changing the tech stack, not only were we simplifying the performance management process to focus on fewer things, the language we were using to describe it reinforces the culture that we wanted.

Chris Rainey 29:35

One of the things I was thinking about is, throughout this whole conversation is it's a lot of demand for your team. It's a lot right. How do you manage to keep the wind in the sails of your HR team, your own team keep them motivated when they're juggling? So much. I tell

Maryjo 29:54

them it doesn't last forever. Important thing to think about, and hey look, we also do but these are the fundamental skills that build an HR career. Now, you have to know how your technology runs in HR, right now you get a chance to be a part of a huge successful change, those then and of itself are just really good skill building. Learning how to live in an integrated platform and understanding your data and the analytics you can get out of that are really important HR skills. And the other thing is, we have open dialogue during this time, you know, partly I've talked about in that in that governance framework, meeting with our field, HR teams, and country teams to hear what's working and what what they're experiencing is pressure of things they can't get to during this time. So we're keeping the list of Okay, next up on our playlist is going to be these things because we know, we know we maybe haven't gotten to them as well as we all wanted to. So so having an honest dialogue, and then really celebrating I think we do a reasonably good job in our town halls and with our local teams of making sure people's effort and contributions get recognised and celebrated. And we really take time to what we call mark the moment when we get something big done.

Chris Rainey 31:10

That's important. I don't do a great job of that. Sounds a lot like running in a direction 100 miles an hour, don't stop to appreciate how far we've come and celebrate those. Yeah, so it's important that we do that.

Chris Rainey 31:22

Yeah, we had her you know, we'd have a you know, in a spin, there's really interesting HR work, we had to change 63 Country payrolls to be running. versus our former parent, helpfully, running them for us, you know, but after we did each one, we took time as an HR team, with the payroll and HR leadership, you with the payroll teams around the world, just a 15 minute call to mark the moment I have a tradition I can show you, you know, we ring the bell. When we get something big done, so we try, we try to really recognise because these are, they are a lot of wear and tear on an HR team. And but I think HR teams, you know, I joke sometimes that I went into HR for the food and the parties was truly a joke. But but you know, it is a part of that human element of what we do. And we have to remind, take care of ourselves on that front.

Chris Rainey 32:17

But personally, what are some of the things that you do to recharge you know,

Chris Rainey 32:21

I think work life balance is a one size fits one solution. So my definition of balance won't be anyone else's. Okay. But you know, some of the things that I do is I'm pretty intentional and get a lot of work done during the week. So I leave myself some some free time on the weekends. My husband and I, who you know, Chris, we love to hike, we love to bike. So we're almost always outdoors, doing something and then you know, the family time. We have five children, so there's always something going on. And it's great to spend time with the family.

Chris Rainey 32:55

I made a joke called fab. I'm asked you can ask you the question. How is it to be married to a CFO

Chris Rainey 33:02

is a now retired CHR Oh, look at these can be really lonely jobs. Horribly lonely job. So I would say one, I'm just one I'm married to the most wonderful man in the world who happens to be a chro. And makes makes both the lifetime personal journey and the professional journey fun and not so lonely. We did have a couple of rules, which was no chef talk after nine o'clock. Professional day like never good. And then the other one was sometimes like, Okay, if we're going to switch into professional mode, can you cue mix, we'll be talking about the kids and then somebody to ask a question about work. And it's kind of like, Wait, what are we working on? So like, I have a professional question is the cue of like, Okay, we're gonna switch gears. Or they're really funny moments. Like when we were home together in the pandemic, we were working right next to each other in two different rooms in the house, and I would, I would leave my office and pass his in the house. I'd be like, Oh my god, I just had that meeting, like practically word for word. So I, you know, I think it's great to have a wonderful partner in life. And it's been wonderful to have a great partner life who understands what your, like personal journey, but your professional journey is like to

Chris Rainey 34:14

Yeah, that's quite rare. Isn't it really something special for you, that you you have someone that's truly living and breathing what you do every day? You know, I'm sure it can be equally stressful. But also having someone to talk to who really gets it, it must be amazing.

Maryjo 34:31

I don't think it's ever been. I mean, I think what's been stressful is having five kids and too busy to get mattered that we were CHR

Chris Rainey 34:40

Oh, that is a very I can only deal with one kid right now. So fair play to you. I'm sure you've created a great support system around you, which is part of the success of that. Right.

Chris Rainey 34:49

Absolutely. And you know, real clarity of what Stephen and I wanted, the culture of the family to be the purpose is to be and we spend a lot of time on that early on. As we created life together,

Chris Rainey 35:02

I'm not surprised that you have a process and support and principles. And a vision, I'm sure, no one's listening right now we're surprised after the beginning of this conversation. And before I let you go, I do want to jump into some other quickfire round questions. Yeah, we're talking about hobbies and passions. And we're just talking about what it's like to be married to sit or whatever was gonna ask if you could cut your fingers and change one thing about HR today, what would you change, I think

Chris Rainey 35:30

there's never been more and more exciting time to be in HR. And, and so I would just encourage everyone, it can be very stressful, and it can be very lonely, and it can be very exhausting. So one, learn how to put your own oxygen mask on first. And don't miss the opportunity to be part of probably the next 20 years in HR gonna be, you know, just fabulously exciting. And so I would say, I wish I wish I could click our fingers. And we were already sort of in the future of hey, how are is AI? How is, you know, technology? How is analytics really going to change the people function? How do we know more about our truly most important asset in much more database ways than we do now? So I would say, you know, I give everyone a seat belt for strapping on for the journey.

Chris Rainey 36:24

If you don't like transformation, you shouldn't be an HR, we spoke about the kids and family, what what legacy Do you want to leave behind?

Chris Rainey 36:30

That's really an everyday dinner conversation. Every week, Sunday, we have super steak Sunday. At our house, I don't need steak for the rest of the family does. It's been a tradition where it's the it's the one meal of the week, we all really try to gather for as the kids were growing up and talking about what's really important to you. And I think we are have an obligation to leave the world a better place than we found that one of the ways you do that is obviously raising great families. But another way to do that is being kind and passionate and in the workplace. And you know, we spend a lot of time there. So I think thinking about, you know, with our kids, what is the thing in life that brings you joy and energy? And is it something you can motivate yourself to as you look behind each assignment that you have saying, hey, it's better because I was there I left, I left something and I left a legacy behind.

Chris Rainey 37:25

No, I love that. And then last question, I'll ask you, you've already given so much advice, but what advice would you give to those HR leaders tomorrow, that will be sitting in your seat one day,

Maryjo 37:36

again, seek the heat, I mean, really go where the problems are? Go where it's tough to cultivate sponsorship. You know, a lot of people ask for mentors, you can't ask for a sponsor, you probably have a look back in my career. I've had wonderful people who sponsored me and fought for me to get that next assignment who said, Hey, she's really good at solving problems, we got an even bigger problem that needs needs to get solved. So cultivate sponsorship and build good networks. You know, I was really fortunate enough to grow up in PepsiCo that was just chock full of great HR people. But if you're not in a big company that doesn't kind of come with a network built in. Because a lot of the HR communities in smaller places, do try to set aside maybe twice a month, a way to get out and meet other HR people. And listen to your podcast, which is flexible. And when people can do it. That's really important. It's more and more important as you come up to the HR career path, that you have sounding boards and you have a sense of what's going on in your own function that is helpful in shaping your thinking. So those would be my three pieces of advice. Well, listen,

Chris Rainey 38:45

I could talk to you forever. You've got transformation to get on with. I appreciate you taking the time out. There is no show without people like you that take time to give back and share that journey. So I appreciate you and

Chris Rainey 39:00

well, thanks for all you do for community. Chris. I think you bring a lot to it. And hopefully, you know in your next journey to New York, you and I and Stefan will have a chance to connect again

Chris Rainey 39:10

100% Which would invest into next week.

Chris Rainey 39:13

Okay, like okay, bye

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