Profile Magazine Q1/21

Unshakable

Michele C. Lee has never let being underestimated stop her. Having accrued expertise at global law firms and the Department of Justice, she now guides her litigation team through Twitter’s unique global challenges. P88

Lifetime Leader

Brian

One Step Ahead

Donna Ross takes a proactive approach to protect Radian Group and the well-being of her security team

Success Starts with People

Andrew Block shares why a people-first approach is foundational to success 47

Accounting Titan

Amy Evans improves Titan International’s financial strength as its chief accounting officer

Joe Holdsworth (MOD Pizza), Ken Levy (Ross)

A Pandemic Won’t Stop Transformation

Mark Vaupel leads his IT team to redefine the capabilities of the 129-year-old Hormel Foods through Project Orion 60

Transformation Without Turbulence

How CIO May Huneidi returned to Hollander Sleep Products and led a structural reorganization to align IT with business goals and strategy

120

The Business of HR

David Malfitano and his HR team create tangible initiatives to support Wayne Farms employees

123

Future Planning at Its Finest

Count on Community

At Virginia Community College System, Randall Ellis crafts narrative from data to enable students’ success across the state

126

How to Make a Great Accountant

RoundPoint Mortgage’s Robert Leist shares three keys to his success in accounting: analytical thinking, communication, and tech 130

How KPMG’s Brian Higgins (top) and Sanjay Sehgal (bottom) aided Hormel Foods in an organization-wide technology implementation

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New Year, Renewed Hope

Before March 2020, I thought I would never be able to go fully remote.

Me, an introvert.

The commute rarely bothered me (unless I had to wait thirty-plus minutes for a bus that only had standing room). In the office, brainstorming headline and section design ideas is more productive and engaging. And then there are those late afternoon moments when Slack conversations get so funny that you laugh out loud, and your director sighs before telling you to get back to work.

Those were the days. While I am very thankful to be working from my studio apartment, I miss seeing my coworkers five days a week. Zoom and Slack don’t quite cut it.

Overnight, many went from a daily office commute to setting up a workstation at home. Leaders had to pivot and adjust as COVID-19 spread across the world. What does it take to lead a company through a crisis? The global pandemic isn’t the first and certainly won’t be the last.

Our Focus section this issue features two HR executives providing their insights on how to lean into transformation during a crisis (p.7). As David’s Bridal retail locations closed due to their nonessential business status, Terri Leitgeb emphasized positivity and clear communication to all employees. The conversations and adaptations driven by the pandemic, she says, can offer silver linings and motivators for lasting change.

Coty Inc.’s Kristi Reinholz recalls her previous crisis management experiences after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, noting that transparency and protecting people are most important. “People will always remember how they were treated during a crisis,” she says, “and this will pay dividends when business returns to normal operations.”

What will normal operations look like? It’s hard to say what the world will look like as you read this letter, but one thing is certain: people are a priority. Our special feature section takes a look at how to foster a company culture that encourages employees to bring their whole selves to work (p.86). Twitter’s Michele C. Lee shares that one of her biggest responsibilities is to understand her team members’ motivations and challenge them to grow in their careers. Kathi Moore champions a culture where Motorola Solutions employees are given limitless opportunities to grow. And at HighRadius, Stella Tran emphasizes communication to ensure cultural success across a global, remote workforce.

After a year that seemed impossible at so many turns, I hope you are able to discover the expertise, guidance, and optimism necessary to start 2021 on a hopeful note.

Facebook: @gh.profilemagazine

LinkedIn: @Profile_ExecMag

Twitter: @Profile

Frannie Sprouls Managing Editor

Gillian Fry

FOCUS: CRISIS MANAGEMENT

How to lead your company through life-changing circumstances

ADAPTABLE AND AGILE

Terri Leitgeb leaned on her transformation expertise to ensure both David’s Bridal employees and customers were

care of during the COVID-19 pandemic

By SARA VERDI

Terri Leitgeb has had quite the cosmopolitan HR career. Before arriving in her current role as chief people officer at David’s Bridal, Leitgeb held various HR-focused roles with Tesco, the renowned British global retailer, that took her all around the world. In addition to her positions at Tesco, Leitgeb has also worked for esteemed organizations throughout both the US and the UK, including Dunnhumby and Novartis.

While her territory may have varied, Leitgeb’s career has had an ironically consistent defining factor: change. “I have been really fortunate to be part of organizations that were going through change, transformation, and growth, and I feel that has really defined my career,” she says. “It’s helped me build a particular skill set, or expertise, in being a business-minded, commercially minded HR leader who supports companies throughout shaping their turnaround strategy.”

This professional familiarity with change has certainly prepared Leitgeb for a variety of situa -

taken

tions, especially ones that require both adaptability and agility. In early 2020, Leitgeb had to put these skills to use when the COVID-19 pandemic rocked the global retail economy. With the arrival of the novel coronavirus and government-suggested social distancing in the US, employees were asked to work from home, stores were closed, and special events across the country were being postponed or canceled altogether.

This landed a heavy blow to many trades—in Leitgeb’s case, the wedding retail industry. With many

TERRI LEITGEB CHIEF PEOPLE OFFICER

BRIDAL

couples forced to cancel their big day and David’s Bridal retail locations closed due to the company’s status as a nonessential business, Leitgeb had to kick into high gear to make sure both employees and customers were being taken care of.

As chief people officer, Leitgeb is responsible for all HR operations across the business, including the retail field, distribution centers, and corporate offices—and her “people plan” emphasizes investing in the people who make up the workforce of David’s Bridal. “The focus of my role has been one of trying

to create stability and cohesiveness, as well as to determine how we can maintain as much consistency and continuity for our people,” she explains.

Leitgeb strove to maintain this plan throughout the uncertain period of the pandemic by emphasizing positivity and clear communication. “We had to build on what we had done before by keeping things positive, with an acute focus on communications and transparency. Now more than ever, we needed to ensure trust between the leadership team and the rest of our company,” Leitgeb says. “With every obstacle comes a thoughtful strategy, an adjusted set of business directives, a new set of goals. We had to focus on the immediate actions but also the future of the company and our people.”

Along with intentional and amplified communications, Leitgeb knew that having the courage to ask

“With every obstacle comes a thoughtful strategy, an adjusted set of business directives, a new set of goals. We had to focus on the immediate actions but also the future of the company and our people.”

difficult questions was vital to addressing pandemic plans. “This pandemic has been a really polarizing event,” she says in her May 2020 interview. “We have engaged in lively debates to make sure that we are balancing the needs of our employees, whose health and safety is of utmost importance, and the long-term financial health of our organization as well.

“This is not simple by any means because most importantly we want everyone to be comfortable, and it has pushed us to be overly thoughtful,” she adds. “Leaders need to have the courage to make the tough calls and stand by them.”

Leitgeb’s efforts have had to toe the line between being empathetic to customers—who have had to cancel or rearrange plans for one of the most momentous occasions of their lives—and protecting her workforce. It is not particularly an easy balance, but once again, that is where agility and adaptability step in.

David’s Bridal rolled out new tech features that would accommodate customers and be in line with employee safety and social distancing guidelines. “We had to make some difficult policy changes, but we also implemented virtual appointments. This has really been a time of innovation for us,” she says. “We had to adapt, pivot, and make changes so that we could help our customers through this difficult time. Our goal was to come up with solutions that not only would solve immediate needs during COVID-19 closures but would stand the test of time and continue to serve customers in the future.”

As Leitgeb is no stranger to change, she believes that the conversations and adaptations ignited during the pandemic can offer silver linings and motivators for lasting change across the business. “We did some amazing things in this short period of time. This prompted us to find new and unique ways to communicate, engage, and serve our customers. And our employees—I have never worked with a more inspiring and hardworking group who care so deeply about making sure our customers have a special wedding day,” she says. “My hope is that this continues to build.”

“Leaders need to have the courage to make the tough calls and stand by them.”

GUIDE TEAMS WITH STRENGTH

Kristi Reinholz’s first lesson in managing a crisis began while at a sales conference in Orlando, Florida. She remembers walking through the hotel lobby when the news flashed on the lobby TV that an airplane had flown into the World Trade Center, close to her New York headquarters. Reinholz learned firsthand that during a crisis like 9/11, “the most important things are to remain calm, support your people by bringing them together, demonstrate strong leadership, and share transparently both what you know and what is unknown.”

HR is the “business of people,” and leadership teams look to her and the HR community to lead through a crisis by quickly bringing the right people together to develop action plans, align the right people to drive these plans, and ensure clear, ongoing communications. A focus on leading the company, managing, and remaining intent on what needs to be done is essential.

By CORA BERG

“First and foremost, make decisions that focus on the health and safety of your people and business, and control what you can control,” Reinholz advises. “People will always remember how they were treated during a crisis, and this will pay dividends when business returns to normal operations.”

With twenty-five years of HR expertise, Kristi Reinholz breaks down silos to not only manage crises but also plan for the future

Another example Reinholz cites is the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Her HR and business teams partnered using multiple forms of communication, including door-to-door searches and regrouping in parking lots, to confirm employees’ safety. Within twenty-four hours, everyone was accounted for and relief plans were put into place.

Perhaps most importantly, HR can lead crossteam collaboration and communication, ensuring that nothing is lost to misinterpretation during times of crisis and transformation. There were many of these situations during Reinholz’s twenty-four years at Pfizer Inc., and she sees them again now in her role as senior vice president of HR for the Americas and Asia regions at Coty Inc., one of the world’s largest beauty companies.

“It’s key to identify what we communicate globally as a company,” Reinholz says. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she guided her team to build a tool kit with global guidance, including preparation for various scenarios. Through briefings and other communications, she breaks down silos, remembering that transparency and protecting people are most important.

Keeping impacted staff at the center of the response, she and her team asked for flexibility

KRISTI REINHOLZ SVP OF HR, AMERICAS & ASIA COTY INC.

and openness, developing new company principles and offering resilience support. As the COVID-19 pandemic spread, her lead China team’s work to handle what was then a local crisis became the benchmark for the global team as they quickly pivoted to manage the ongoing crisis. Reinholz reinforces that the team was quick to focus on putting people first in closing offices, knowing from her experience with the China team that it would be possible to deliver work in new ways even in an environment that seemed nearly impossible.

This work to break down silos is not simply a crisis response. It is work Reinholz began at Pfizer, from starting in an entry-level HR role through her last position as global vice president of HR. All these roles prepared Reinholz for the work she does at Coty today.

Since Coty’s founding in 1904, the company remains ever changing. Now twenty thousand employees strong, Coty innovates vegan and crueltyfree lines while continuing to create world-renowned fragrances. Since arriving in 2018, Reinholz has been continuing the work of transformation as she leads strategic workforce design for more than eight thousand people through nineteen Asia Pacific countries as well as North and South America.

This transformation includes huge shifts in the executive leadership teams as well as moving to a regional structure; rebuilding organizations; creating new operating models, roles, ways of working, and talent plans; and making choices about divestments and acquisitions. As she helps build strategies based on business perspectives, it is her role to develop and integrate people and talent plans.

In her first few weeks at Coty, it was clear a new approach was required. Reinholz launched an initiative to centralize workforce planning, asking for collective budget ownership and unifying hiring and talent plans with the intention to improve fixed-cost forecasting, especially around hiring and turnover. These efforts, in collaboration with the global president and CFO, led to $25 million in savings, but more importantly established a new level of rigor in cost management that was adopted across the company.

Through the whirlwind of her year and half with multiple business leadership changes, three CEOs, and COVID-19, Reinholz remains steady. Central to creating a new functional model, Reinholz believes, is leading the HR team to drive greater connectedness across HR and the newly aligned business teams.

Looking forward, Reinholz focuses on talent needs to continue to drive greater business results. Post-COVID-19, she remarks that she and her team “will need to engage with talent differently, identify new opportunities to work, and learn global perspectives, as the workforce will be forever changed by this pandemic. We must continue our work to enable talent to gain new experiences, enhance diversity within teams, and deliver a better business.

“Our people are the heart of our company,” she continues. “When we focus on our people first, the payback is evident in their creativity, resilience, and commitment to delivery.”

Reinholz is energized and excited for the future, as she remarks, “We have amazing brands and great talent, and with that combination, anything is possible.”

“People will always remember how they were treated during a crisis, and this will pay dividends when business returns to normal operations.”

We unlock the potential of those who advance the world

Boston Consulting Group is the world’s leading advisor on business strategy. Our purpose is to have the eye to see potential where few others can, the brainpower to solve for the way forward, and the heart to help you get there. Because unlocking the world’s potential begins with unlocking yours.

Lifetime Leader

CFO Brian Slagle on cultivating a leadership philosophy that ensures success at Lifetime Products

By KEITH LORIA Photos by BRAXTON WILHELMSEN

“Leadership is a very variable process,” says Brian Slagle, CFO at Lifetime Products. “I don’t think people should have a leadership style but be variable to their audience. At the end of the day, it’s about being the best to the people you’re leading— not being the best leader.”

Throughout his twenty-four-year career in various accounting roles and serving in the US Army, Slagle has crafted a leadership philosophy that allows him to help his team and Lifetime Products overcome any challenges.

Brian Slagle CFO

Lifetime Products

BUILDING EXPERIENCE

When Slagle started college, he decided not to declare for a specific major right away. He had seen people waste a lot of time and money going for a career they never pursued.

“I took a lot more math and business classes, and I was thinking about going into engineering,” he explains. “My aunt was a tax accountant for Deloitte, and she mentored me to look at tax accounting. I transferred to the University of Southern California (USC) because it was a top-five school for that and started on my journey.”

After graduating from the Leventhal School of Accounting at USC, he went to work at Deloitte in Orange County, California, and found he enjoyed the business side of accounting more than the tax compliance side. So when his family moved to Utah, Slagle transferred to Deloitte’s Salt Lake City office and switched from tax to the financial auditing department.

“People get picked up from audit in the big firms and you can get into controller jobs, so I wanted to make this switch before I got too far into my career and too specialized,” he says. After a couple busy seasons at the Salt Lake City office, Slagle was recruited by friends at Deseret Management Corporation (DMC) as an internal auditor.

On paper, he spent four years at DMC, but in the end, his tenure totaled about a year and a half. Slagle was a member of the US Army Reserves, and, after officer training, he was deployed to Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, and Egypt.

“When I came back from my Iraqi Freedom tour, I had some time to reflect, and I knew I needed to get out of auditing if I wanted to be in corporate accounting someday,” says Slagle, who currently serves as a Finance Corps instructor for the Army Financial Management School at the Soldier Support Institute in Fort Jackson, South Carolina.

LEADERS LISTEN

In 2005, Slagle joined Lifetime Products, the world’s leading manufacturer of folding tables and chairs, as director of finance and accounting. He then rose to become CFO of the company in 2013. Just a year into his role as CFO, Slagle was honored as one of Utah

Business Magazine ’s Forty Under 40. The role encompasses all accounting, finance, expenses, cash management, and treasury. Forty people are in his accounting department, including two directors who report to him directly.

Leaders should shift their leadership approach depending on the team, Slagle notes, as every group requires a different leadership style based on objective and skill level.

“Everything is different—your discipline level, your need-to-know, how much you are managing or overmanaging,” Slagle says. “I’d like to think that people would say I listen. I know I may not have all the best ideas, and the people I work with are smart and experts at what they do. As a team, we are going to come up with the best courses of action and solutions.”

For example, when COVID-19 created challenges in 2020, everyone worked together to come up with ways to keep the company moving in the right direction. Challenges can come at any time, he says,

and it’s important to maneuver and follow a strategic plan together.

“Listening to everyone and getting input is important, and then it’s up to me to make the decision,” Slagle says. “Leaders can’t just leave it all out there. They need to be able to decide what’s happening and go with it. Maybe that decision is wrong because things change or you didn’t have all the right information, but you shouldn’t be afraid to own that mistake. I think that’s important as well.”

Slagle thinks back to some valuable lessons he’s learned in the Army and says the experience has definitely changed him as a person and how he deals with others.

“Being in the military has given me confidence in life that I can accomplish things. But also at the same time, I know you can’t really accomplish anything without relying on others, and that’s how you truly get more done,” Slagle says. “Leadership is volume. That’s a lesson I have lived by.”

“Listening to everyone and getting input is important, and then it’s up to me to make the decision.”

BRIAN SLAGLE

Risk vs. Reward

By ZACH BALIVA

Adventure is part of Sara Trapp’s DNA. The tax pro and working mom loves hiking, skiing, and any other activity that gives her an excuse to explore the great outdoors with her family. Trapp, who pushes her kids and herself to learn new skills, approaches her career in the same way. She’s made a series of calculated risks that have taken her to a top seat in one of the nation’s largest and most iconic companies.

In early 2020, Trapp stepped in as United Airlines’ chief tax officer. Her journey to the corporate headquarters in Chicago is one filled with career-defining turning points. At each turn, Trapp made the decision she

thought would take her to the next level. “I’ve always had a drive to improve and master something new, and I’m always up for a challenge,” she explains. “Growth happens best when you’re willing to stretch yourself or put yourself in a new environment.”

The Michigan native started her career at BDO USA in Grand Rapids. She built relationships with several mentors and was struck at how purposefully each one managed their own career. “My mentors had training in different areas of taxation, and I saw how their wide expertise was an undeniable asset,” Trapp says. She then decided to diversify and acquire new professional skills.

That decision led Trapp to research opportunities. She ultimately found an

Sara Trapp is a leading tax pro, but she didn’t get there by playing it safe. A series of daring moves took her from entry-level associate to United Airlines’ chief tax officer.

Sara Trapp Chief Tax Officer United Airlines

opening at KPMG. Joining one of the Big Four professional services firms would afford Trapp the opportunity to add corporate tax accounting, compliance, and planning to her toolkit. But the job was in Denver. To accept, she would have to leave her hometown, exit her job of ten years, and say goodbye to her extended family. It was a hard decision, but one Trapp’s husband encouraged her to make. In 2014, they left their beloved home state for Colorado.

Trapp knew that personal and professional success would depend on her ability to build new relationships. At work, she volunteered to assist on projects and learned the key players in town. At home, she took extra carpool shifts and engaged with teachers and coaches. Soon, with her family well acclimated, Trapp was rebuilding her professional network and applying her experience from BDO in new ways by working for public companies and a larger corporate network.

After three years, Trapp was working on bigger and more complex issues as a managing director. When a Denver airline needed

tax planning strategies, she volunteered to take the account. She organized a team to help drive down the company’s effective tax rate and reduce cash taxes. Trapp didn’t let the fact that she had never worked in excise tax stop her—she sought out KPMG’s internal experts, who agreed to help provide the necessary training. The airline company

became one of Trapp’s larger clients as she mastered industry codes, instructions, and case law.

Additionally, Trapp led the region’s accounting methods and credit services group and was included in the Denver Business Journal ’s 2019 Who’s Who in Accounting report. Six years after leaving

the safety and security of her ten-year job in Michigan, Trapp had built a new client base and a professional network in a new city.

One day, Trapp received an email that set her on a new path. A lead tax partner in Chicago sent a note to a small group of people: the chief tax officer role at United was available—did anyone know a good candidate? Trapp suggested someone: herself.

It was a bold move. Trapp was up for partner at KPMG, and chief tax officer was a big step up. But she had become passionate about the airline industry. Furthermore, the successful move to Denver and the experiences that followed had given her the background and the confidence to raise her hand and ask for a chance to interview for the rare United opening.

She asked her colleague to pass her name and résumé to the leadership team at United. Trapp landed the job and now leads the company’s entire tax department.

In her first ninety days, Trapp devised a plan to streamline United’s tax compliance process. “My main objective is to build the right tax strategy that will mitigate risk in a nuanced and high-volume industry,” she says. It’s no simple task. Every sale creates a complex transaction in which taxes are imposed on different parties at

different rates. Dealing with air transportation tax requires the right people and the right technology.

Thus, Trapp dedicated a portion of her first quarter in the role to completing an evaluative process designed to help her understand what skills and human resources were already in place. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, she expects United to spend less money on tax consultants and asks her team to perform additional duties. In response, she plans to provide cross-functional training so no one person is the exclusive holder of all knowledge.

“Sara adds immense value to United Airlines,” says Damon Chronis, president of US operations at Ryan LLC. “Her approach showcases the strategic role that a tax function can deliver for any company, extending well beyond the compliance function. Ryan is honored to partner with Sara and her team.”

Trapp is also working to make sure her family is thriving after its move back east. Her children, like their parents, have learned that taking risks can yield dramatic results. While in Colorado, the Trapp family completed an eight-mile hike to Grays and Torreys Peak. It requires ample preparation and a lot of hard work—but the view from the top makes the effort worthwhile.

“My mentors had training in different areas of taxation, and I saw how their wide expertise was an undeniable asset.”

SARA TRAPP

“All for One”

How Tim Hatsukari forged his own career path in IT and finance and now empowers his Synoptek team to make connections and solve problems

By JEREMY BORDEN

Years ago, a college-aged Tim Hatsukari sat down with his father in their home in Tokyo. His family was clear with him: he wouldn’t inherit his father’s real estate business, which was struggling along with the entire sector at the time. Hatsukari needed to find his own path.

A seed was planted. Hatsukari blazed his own trail by moving abroad and developing a

career in IT and finance, eventually becoming vice president of finance and accounting at fast-growing IT firm Synoptek.

Remembering an infectious energy that he experienced during a number of international travels, Hatsukari decided to move to San Diego, where he knew only one person. Later, he enrolled in business school at the University of California at Riverside. He recalls that serious commitment with his family to seek his own

path as a trigger for everything that has come after.

“For me to think, ‘Hey, I should get outside of my own country’—it was a bold move, but I wasn’t thinking about the consequences at the time,” he says. “I thought I’d jump off the ship and see what happens.”

What he found when he got to California surprised him. That infectious energy was everywhere, as well as a diverse world where people were driven and hungry to see their

vision come to fruition. “People came here with passion, and I came here for a reason. I was surrounded by people with so much energy, and that was so inspirational. That drove me to grow,” he says.

First, he had to figure out what his new path would be. He may not have known many people, but what he did have was some IT experience and a natural ability with numbers. He started with business and finance, first landing various roles within a large digital storage media distributor, touching almost every facet of the business.

That experience would soon help in what has become something of a dream role as CFO, Hatsukari says. “The CFO role is identifying the dots, connecting the dots, and creating a path. You have so many business opportunities as well as problems every single day,” he explains. “It means understanding and communicating the landscape to investors, leadership teams, customers, and employees, and leading the organization to move forward within the dynamic playing field.”

Hatsukari sees his team leader role as a chance to empower others to make connections and solve problems. While Hatsukari’s jump to the US without a safety net was a bold leap, experience has taught him that adhering to a strong leadership philosophy and meticulous planning are everything.

He sums up both his individual and team philosophies succinctly with the three Hs— humility, harmony, and humor—with his wife and two children as a daily reminder of what’s important. As for his team, he seeks to lead in a way that showcases both individuality and a team purpose, which he describes as “one for one, one for all, and all for one.”

At the center of it all isn’t metrics. It’s people. Those relationships, he says, are key to both personal and team success.

Hatsukari manages a far-flung team of more than twenty at Synoptek, with nearly every position a remote one across different time zones and as far away as India. Synoptek has grown by leaps and bounds, which means new team members who are “very talented, very dedicated” with a lot to offer the Val

Tim Hatsukari VP of Finance & Accounting

Synoptek

company. “The challenge,” he says, “is it gets fragmented over time.”

The “all for one” philosophies get translated into the company’s culture by two relatively simple tactics, he says: constant communication and instilling in others the belief that failures shouldn’t be swept under the rug.

“I don’t want my team to be afraid of making mistakes,” Hatsukari says. “Mistakes represent an opportunity to learn and grow, and if you have a strong team, you can always come up with a Plan B.”

That kind of thinking means many team members naturally began to fully explore their own potential and problem-solve without kicking up much dust. During the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, several members of his team had young children who were home when daycares and schools were closed.

Despite both the personal and business challenges, he witnessed individual team members seamlessly stepping up, supporting one another, and uniting as one team to achieve remarkable business

milestones. Some team members put forth significant efforts behind the scenes, adjusting their work schedules to ensure tasks were completed without putting additional stress on colleagues. “The materialization of ‘real teamwork’ is incredibly powerful and brings about an infectiously positive energy across the organization,” he says.

And that is what Hatsukari hopes to achieve at Synoptek, putting his “all” and H principles into place, focusing on himself so that he can be better for his team and they for him. He views it as a lifelong pursuit— blazing his own path as a finance expert and helping lead a growing IT company.

As some businesses grow larger, with varied team members, their bosses become more faceless. Hatsukari says he wants to ensure that doesn’t happen at Synoptek. “I will always strive to be a people-driven CFO,” he says. “That’s my passion and my journey.”

Editor’s Note: At the time of press, Tim Hatsukari accepted a new position as CFO at Accelalpha.

“I don’t want my team to be afraid of making mistakes. Mistakes represent an opportunity to learn and grow, and if you have a strong team, you can always come up with a Plan B.”

TIM HATSUKARI

It’s About You, Not Me

VP of Tax Scott Cockrell puts his team front and center at Sabre Corporation

By SARA DEETER

In January 2020, Sabre Corporation’s Scott Cockrell found himself laid up in bed— on his birthday. “I was very, very sick. I had to work from home that whole day,” the vice president of tax recalls. “But that morning, I got an email—it was a video of everyone in the department singing ‘Happy Birthday’ around the cake they had bought for me as a surprise. It was so incredible that people went out of their way to do that for me.”

If you asked any member of Cockrell’s thirty-five-person team at Sabre, they would say that that is how Cockrell himself leads and inspires: by going out of his way to serve, support, and develop everyone around him.

A 1991 graduate of Norwich University, Cockrell has spent the past decade serving in leadership roles across technology, healthcare, telecom, and consulting industries. “I never wanted to pigeonhole myself into one particular discipline or functional area,” Cockrell says of his years at leading companies such as AOL and Premier Inc. “I’ve always been one to look for exposure to a lot of different areas of tax, which is something you need as a well-rounded tax professional and leader.

“But really, I think it’s been about challenging myself,” the VP continues. “How can I continue to grow and learn and develop? What is the next step in my career and how can I continue to push myself?”

But when you are constantly challenging yourself to go beyond anything you’ve done before, Cockrell points out, you have to be extremely comfortable with failure. “No one wants to fail but it can be a great learning experience, and you have to be willing to see that experience for what it is,” he says. “You have to be able to take a step back, self-reflect, and closely examine whatever mistake you made and learn from it moving forward.”

Essentially, Cockrell says, it’s about being comfortable with everything that makes you who you are, whether that’s success or failure. “And in my view, that’s something that a lot of the people in this industry—where there are so many smart and talented people—do struggle with sometimes,” he notes.

And starting a new position—as he did at Sabre in November 2018—is a perfect opportunity to embrace any shortcomings you may have, Cockrell says.

“I have had to accept that I may not know everything that my team knows about the business, which is incredibly complex,” Cockrell says of the global travel technology corporation. “I can’t be afraid to ask the question—why? Why are we doing this? Why are we doing this in this way?

“It’s not only about having the confidence to ask that question but also about not feeling stupid for asking it in the first place,” the VP continues with a chuckle. Fortunately, Cockrell says, his team is composed of incredibly smart and experienced professionals who know what they’re doing and can explain the company’s many complex issues.

“I’ve been doing this for over twenty years, but I have people on my team who have been in the industry for just as long or longer,” Cockrell says. “And they are excellent

at what they do. As VP, I really just try to clear the roadblocks for them and put them in a position to be successful.”

When you have a high-performing team, Cockrell explains, “you’ve got to let go of the reins. You’ve got to have trust in your team and confidence that they can make the decisions that need to be made.

“I don’t ever want to become the bottleneck,” he says. “I’m not going to be invited to every meeting, and my team members aren’t going to tell me about every little thing they’re doing because they are competent, qualified, and know what they’re doing. They’re going to come to me when they need to.”

And according to Cockrell, the greatest area of “need” at Sabre right now is people development.

“We’re trying to build a sustainable tax organization,” he explains. “We know that people aren’t always going to stay here, but we want them to be leaving for the right opportunities—and not because they

couldn’t see a career path here at Sabre. And if people do decide to leave, I want to ensure that we have people ready and able to step up and take on that role.

“But tax is just a microcosm of the broader organization,” Cockrell continues. “As a company, we know that we need to have the right people and right culture in place in order to execute on our strategic imperatives. So throughout the organization, we are continuously reinforcing the importance of leadership skills and development.”

And when the people around you see that you are supporting them, that you know it’s “not about you, but really about them,” you’ll see the success you’ve been searching for, Cockrell asserts.

“As a leader, you have a direct impact on people’s lives, not just their careers,” he says. “You touch people’s lives more than you’ll ever really know, and I’ve come to appreciate that more than I would have ever imagined.”

“As a leader, you have a direct impact on people’s lives, not just their careers. You touch people’s lives more than you’ll ever really know.”

SCOTT COCKRELL

Top Talent Enables Company Success

By CLINT WORTHINGTON

Knowles Corporation is the world’s leading provider of audio and precision device solutions, making miniature microphones and speakers for consumer devices. For the past twenty-three years, Ray Cabrera has been an integral part of Knowles’ journey, driving the people and organization strategy that has turned what was a small, family-founded company into a global leader in audio technology and precision device solutions.

As Cabrera is fond of noting, it’s very difficult to find a consumer device that Knowles Corporation is not part of. Knowles devices are used by millions of people every day, whether they realize it or not.

Cabrera’s worked in human resources for nearly all of his career. A lifetime Chicagoan, he started his career at a Fortune 500 financial services company as part of their management rotation program, which exposed him to a wide array of organizational functions including HR. “I valued the opportunity to learn about the various

As one of Knowles Corporation’s chief change officers, Ray Cabrera aligns the company’s people strategy with its business strategy

organizational functions and the broad perspective,” he explains.

He joined Knowles in 1997 as a HR manager and was later promoted to roles with increasing responsibility leading to his current position as senior vice president of HR. In 2014 Knowles became a publicly traded company and a leading provider of audio tech and precision device solutions for a number of industries, and one of the remaining public tech companies in the Chicagoland area.

Cabrera, who is also chief administrative officer, prides himself on being a change agent at Knowles. “Companies need to continuously evolve especially for a company like Knowles, founded in 1946 and started by

supplying acoustic components to hearing aids. We’ve been very successful in entering new markets and evolving our strategy, but that business transformation only comes by having talented employees.” As such, Cabrera considers himself in a very fortuitous position to be one of the company’s chief change officers, marrying Knowles’ people with its business transformation.

These changes have come in a number of different forms, many of which in the last twenty-five years as Knowles has worked to keep up with a rapidly expanding world. “As the company evolved and changed,” Cabrera notes, “so did my role, as I worked to align our people strategy [with our new goals].”

Entering new markets and globalization led

Knowles to grow its manufacturing footprint in Asia and expand its design centers throughout the world.

Because of this, one of Cabrera’s major goals was to recruit an employee base with proven experience in the high-tech, mobile, and consumer market (e.g., cell phones). Cabrera helped drive Knowles’ people strategy to attract candidates more specifically geared to this new market and augmented its leadership group to align its corporate strategy with its people strategy.

Knowles also prides itself as being an “Employer of Choice” for women in engineering and is highly committed to advancing the growth of women in the workplace and gender diversity in engineering careers.

Ray Cabrera

SVP of HR and Chief Administrative Officer Knowles Corporation

“You can’t drive a company’s talent strategy without a strong understanding of how the business succeeds.”

RAY CABRERA

“We believe that a diverse workforce fuels innovation, and we are passionate about increasing the representation of women in the engineering community and their presence in leadership roles,” Cabrera explains.

Knowles has partnered with the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), advancing opportunities for young women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Knowles serves as a perennial sponsor to the UIC Women in Engineering Summer Program (WIESP), which gives female high school students a firsthand look at careers in engineering. As part of the program, Knowles hosts an annual event at its headquarters where students get a hands-on view of the company and a day-in-the-life experience as an engineer. Knowles also provides academic scholarships to women engineering students.

Despite all of these changes to both Knowles and the global marketplace, Cabrera argues that the HR function has the same basic function it always has. “You see a lot of literature about HR taking a seat at the table, but that’s always been the case at Knowles,” he asserts.

However, the future does carry its own set of challenges for HR professionals. The key, Cabrera asserts, is to create and sustain an agile workforce that can adjust to changing business strategies and seismic global events like the COVID-19 pandemic. “Every company faced mobility restrictions, and as a global company, we faced them in every single region,” he explains.

Despite that, Knowles was quickly able to adjust to working from home, and Cabrera says they maintained a high level of productivity as their pre-pandemic selves. “For a global company of approximately eight thousand employees to be able to maintain that high productivity level is a real testament to our employees and their resolve,” he says proudly.

What would Cabrera say to new HR leaders coming into the industry? “The number one thing I would recommend is to understand the business strategy and the key drivers,” he stresses. While many incoming HR professionals pride themselves on their knowledge of people, he asserts that “you can’t drive a company’s talent strategy without a strong understanding of how the business succeeds.”

“We believe that a diverse workforce fuels innovation, and we are passionate about increasing the representation of women in the engineering community and their presence in leadership roles.”

RAY CABRERA

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois is proud to recognize Ray Cabrera with Knowles Corporation as an HR leader.

All of us at Blue Cross and Blue Shield appreciate you and our partnership.

A Division of Health Care Service Corporation, a Mutual Legal Reserve Company, an Independent Lincensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association

Congratulations, Ray Cabrera, for bringing it every day.

Inspirational. Performance.

Steel Resolve and an Empathetic Heart

By BILLY YOST

Pamela Helman VP of Legal MOD Pizza

The prospect of returning to work following a maternity or paternity leave can be incredibly challenging— not just from the point of view of a parent having to spend time away from their child, but also the weeks or months that one is removed from the hectic day-to-day of the workplace can make for a bumpy readjustment. Pamela Helman, vice president of legal at MOD Pizza, had already made this readjustment twice before in her career, so why not make the third time interesting?

In her absence, the MOD Pizza general counsel had given notice to take a role at a different company, and Helman was tapped to step in as interim general counsel in 2019 during the company’s search for a permanent replacement. It’s not exactly a “Welcome Back” banner and baby shower, but fortunately Helman’s employment expertise is just one set of a much broader

Pamela Helman returned from maternity leave and shortly after took over temporary GC duties at MOD Pizza. Now she’s helping the company face down a pandemic.

bevy of legal leadership skills that allowed the returning mother to bridge the GC gap and amass new experiences that will serve her well in the long run.

“It was obviously a challenge having a young baby and two elementary-aged children at home,” Helman says. “We were very fortunate that my husband was able to take some paternity leave as well, so I was able to devote energy to deal with the learning curve. Everyone was very supportive and knew I was stepping into areas that were outside of my area of expertise.”

Once the six-month interim role was done, Helman’s experience was rewarded and recognized with a promotion to her current role as vice president of legal.

The VP offers a piece of advice for anyone looking to fill shoes that they may not have felt ready for. “I think it’s important to admit that you might not have all the answers,” Helman says. “Sometimes you have to be willing to say, ‘I don’t know, but I’ll find out,’ and don’t be shy to ask questions either.”

A crisis, the attorney believes, can actually wind up the ideal time for a new career, a new role, or a new set of experiences that serve as defining moments in a

career journey. “I am full of gratitude for the development opportunities this interim role provided to me,” Helman notes.

Crisis became more of a normal state in 2020 across the world in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The MOD Pizza legal team, along with every other function at the company has had to shift gears in an unprecedented and challenging time for every business. “We had our day jobs to do, but frankly, a lot of that had to temporarily go on the back burner,” Helman explains in her July 2020 interview. “All of the projects that were looking to the future needed to pause as we worked to re-establish right now.”

The focus at MOD Pizza is to ensure that come what may, the company is poised to move forward safely, securely, prioritizing its people, and with growth in mind. “And it’s about what it looks like for us to move into the future because that isn’t an assumption that can be made as it was in the past,” Helman says of the circumstance many companies have had to face in rethinking exactly what the new reality means for business.

Helman handles litigation as well as employment at MOD, which meant efforts to keep employees safe has been a significant

“We are not just a pizza store. We’re an organization that exists to serve people, and we believe in people before pizza in the communities in which we serve.”

PAMELA HELMAN

Laura Swimmer

We are proud to partner with her in the exponential growth of MOD Pizza in 2019 and beyond in 2020. Her cross-functional collaboration to ensure successful ongoing expansion is inspiring. We look forward to supporting her in many more successful initiatives.

portion of her day-to-day. “It was very important that we did everything possible to keep our squad safe, not just to comply with OSHA standards but because of how much we care about our squad and customers and the impact that we have on the world,” Helman says. “We are not just a pizza store, we’re an organization that exists to serve people and we believe in people before pizza in the communities in which we serve.”

Christian Rowley Partner Labor and Employment (415) 544-1001

crowley@seyfarth.com

That includes sending countless meals to nearby healthcare workers at no cost as a way of saying thanks to the frontline staff helping keep communities safe. MOD also partnered with the City of San Jose to quickly support their efforts to feed those who were home-bound at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’ve also told all of our squad that if they don’t feel comfortable working right now, that your job will be here when you get back,” Helman says. “We’re doing everything we can right now to just make sure that our squad is safe and comfortable.”

Helman’s ease of transition into such a trying time is enabled by a strong sense of empathy, both personally and professionally, with the clients she interacts with every day. “As part of the legal team, I am put in the position where I need to point out risks, and sometimes that can slow down a business unit,” the VP says. “In those scenarios, there’s inherent tension, and it’s so helpful to have good trust and personal relationships with my peers. I try to have empathy and understanding for what they’re trying to accomplish.”

The mother of three and die-hard Pittsburgh Steelers fan isn’t averse to a challenge, and she says the Steel City imbued her with an inherent grit to overcome difficult circumstances. In a time that will be reflected on as one of the most challenging periods of modern American history, MOD Pizza can rest assured they’ve got the best of both worlds in their legal department: a steel resolve with an empathetic heart.

We congratulate Pamela Helman, VP of Legal at MOD Pizza.

“All of the projects that were looking to the future needed to pause as we worked to re-establish right now.”

PAMELA HELMAN

The Protective Knight

Combining his passion for teaching, faith, philosophy, and law, Associate General Counsel Brian Gedicks strengthens the Knights of Columbus’ Safe Environment Program

By KEITH LORIA

For Brian Gedicks, one of the joys of working for the Knights of Columbus is to sleep well at night knowing that the mission of his client aligns with his Catholic faith and exists as a force for good in today’s world.

“I am so genuinely happy, honored really, to be working for an organization that does so much good not only in the United States but around the world,” says the associate general counsel. “I am grateful to my general counsel for taking the chance to hire me ten years ago to work for such a terrific client. There are not many attorneys who have the privilege of attending daily mass in their office building.”

In his role as associate general counsel, Gedicks is responsible for litigation management, tax, insurance coverage, risk management, council governance and fraternal issues, and general legal matters.

“Music was my first love, and I had a simple desire to be a teacher,” he says. “I had taken some basic philosophy courses while in college and that passion never really went away. My wife noticed I was spending more time reading and working on philosophy than I was on music.”

After five years teaching at a private school in suburban Washington, DC, Gedicks decided to go to grad school to study philosophy and law, a unique dual-degree program offered at the Catholic University. Upon graduating, Gedicks clerked for the Chief Judge of the Connecticut Appellate Court for a year and then worked in insurance coverage and appellate practice in private practice at Halloran & Sage before being approached by the Knights of Columbus to work in-house.

Brian Gedicks Associate General Counsel Knights of Columbus

His journey to the organization wasn’t a straight shot. Gedicks joined the US Navy straight out of high school and eventually headed to the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, to study music education.

“I was classmates with a Brother Knight of Columbus during law school who went on to work at the Department of Justice. There he worked with our current general counsel, John Marrella, who was just making the transition to the Knights of Columbus,” Gedicks explains. “John was looking to hire someone, and my classmate made mentioned my name. That was in 2009.

Celebrating over 20 years of Insurance Litigation and Risk Management Strategy

I am so grateful that he thought of me at that moment!”

Gedicks believes his teaching background has helped him communicate better on the job, as he’s able to display a certain passion and excitement about what he’s talking about. His philosophy background helps him with deep analysis and concepts, while the law melds those two worlds together.

“You need to have a good understanding of how the law works, and you need to communicate that understanding, while at the same time being persuasive and an effective advocate for your client—no small challenge!” he explains. “Having a background as a law clerk helped prepare me for my role as associate general counsel and brought many aspects of my background together. Everything in my life that I’ve ever done, including my military experience, has prepared me well for my career at the Knights of Columbus.”

He calls his role “a dream job that I never knew existed.”

The initiative Gedicks is most proud of during his ten years with the Knights is taking on the task of updating and strengthening the organization’s safe environment program by improving the rigor of the training and improving the background check process on key leaders in the organization.

“Ultimately, that led to me being asked to form a new, unified Office of Youth Protection for the Knights of Columbus, which started in 2016,” says Gedicks, who serves as the director. “That’s been really terrific, and we’ve been doing a lot of things to teach our members, their families, and other young people how to be aware of the risks of abuse and was to reduce that risk. It was a vision that our Supreme Knight Carl Anderson had

in wanting to better communicate to our members the risk of child abuse and inform them of learning behaviors predators use to trick them.”

Through the program, Gedicks has also helped produce a set of videos called “Protecting Our Children.” A son of one of the Knights had experienced abuse at the hands of a family friend, and his parents turned the situation into an opportunity to tell their story so other families could also be aware, Gedicks explains.

“A lot of similar programs hardly focus on family-to-family abuse,” he explains. “These videos educate parents on what they should be aware of. I am so honored and grateful that the Supreme Knight entrusted this significant project to me—his vision for this program was its driving force.

The videos are available through the Knights of Columbus website, in addition to online training. Looking at the months ahead, Gedicks’s goals are to complete the Protecting Our Children program and additional online training, then roll it out to as many people as possible.

“I’d love to share this with the Catholic dioceses, other community organizations, and anyone who wants to help families and get the word out about this important information on how to protect the children in their lives,” he shares. “This project has been inspirational and gratifying.”

Above all else, Gedicks values the privilege of working with amazing people at the Knights of Columbus. “I am so happy to work with colleagues I genuinely respect and look up to,” Gedicks says. “They constantly inspire me to demand more from myself to ensure that I am giving my best.”

“Brian is a great team leader: decisive with a gentle touch, an inquisitive mind, and a philosophical nature. We’ve worked on many complex insurance coverage matters together since 2011. Brian uses his great intelligence and excellent interpersonal skills to collaboratively come up with an achievable goal, a cost-effective strategy, and effective tactics.”

Tracy Alan Saxe Policyholder Lawyer, Saxe Doernberger & Vita, P.C.

“I am so happy to work with colleagues I genuinely respect and look up to. They constantly inspire me to demand more from myself to ensure that I am giving my best.”

BRIAN GEDICKS

STRATEGY

Security That’s One Step Ahead

By CORA BERG

Donna Ross, the chief information security officer (CISO) for Radian (NYSE: RDN), is a proponent of risk-based approaches. If an organization is not continually looking forward and using metrics to understand possible security concerns, she explains, the organization ends up solely treating symptoms and putting out fires. “Plus, being proactive is much more fun,” she says. “You get to spend time with your family and not work nights and weekends. I guess some people like to run on adrenaline, but I think that gets old.”

This proactive style matches Radian’s own attitude toward security. The company says it is “committed to home ownership” and offers services that span the real estate spectrum. Four years ago, the company, which holds nearly $7 billion in assets, gauged that it needed more information security. While many companies come to this realization only after a breach, Ross

As CISO, Donna Ross leads proactively to protect Radian Group and the well-being of her security team

Donna Ross CISO Radian Group

Ken Levy

notes, Radian “saw security was important before it had to be.”

Ross was honored to be hired as Radian’s very first CISO and believes deeply in the value of her role. “When you don’t have an officer, you are just buying tools and throwing money at security,” she says. With a CISO comes strategy.

“We are responsible to protect information entrusted to us,” Ross says. The way she enacts that responsibility is less about individual tools and more about services: the technology, people, processes, and metrics that create an evolving system. For example, she explains, a tool might be antivirus software. Her team’s services, on the other hand, include software along with entities like partners, procedures, protocols, staff, and other technology. Analytics power Radian’s model. “Protecting the data that powers the analytics is critical,” she notes.

“Knowing that data protection is top of mind for Donna, and her security program has made Netskope’s partnership with Radian successful,” says Jason Clark, chief strategy officer for Netskope. “Together with Donna, we’ve helped Radian achieve compliance while extending into the cloud.”

Along with systems strategies, the CISO role involves administrative duties around budget, planning, performance, and ongoing investments. It also includes team leadership. Ross has a clear strategy for building great teams: hire people smarter than you, look in nontraditional spaces for people,

provide great culture and training, be flexible and make a place that is welcoming, and, most importantly, have fun.

Within security teams, Ross also emphasizes the importance of diversity. “To solve problems, you can’t all think the same. You must be able to come to different solutions,” she says. “Everyone needs to have a voice.”

Looking through different lenses means more complex perspectives and, thus, better security. Following her own advice, Ross has built a diverse team located around the country. She also works to create partnerships that feed new ideas. For example, Ross says that the team works with new firms every few years to help with penetration testing. Superiority of one company or another does not drive the changes. They come from Ross’s commitment to new experiences and tools.

At Radian, the CISO also participates in a larger ecosystem. “My mission is to protect Radian,” she says. “If I can expand that to think about protecting the larger financial industry, that’s good. I can take lessons and share them broadly.

“To enable the business, I must understand it,” she continues, highlighting her goal to constantly gain new insights. Ross sees her role as business focused and integrates her team into the overall model at Radian. She underlines a core tenet of her methods: “Security should not be the bestkept secret in the company. Our job is to be at

the forefront and not be invisible.” Instead, she asks for transparency and feedback.

To best support and inform the business at large, along with integration, Ross tries to answer questions with sentences that begin with, “Yes, but . . .” She wants everyone to grasp possible outcomes in terms of financial realities. As she proactively identifies concerns, she responds with whole-system approaches that include staff training and focused hiring. “All products tie back to one overall corporate strategy,” she notes.

Ross, who is active in women in tech organizations and still coaches former reports from previous jobs, is always happy to offer advice to individuals not yet in security and is excited to have more people join the field. She notes that there are many positions in security and not every employee needs to be technical. While “tech skills can be taught,” she suggests building soft skills like communication and listening. Finally,

she says, “Find a mentor and advisor, and don’t underestimate the power of getting a volunteer or intern position.”

For people already in the industry, Ross cautions the importance of self-care. “Mission is important. Health is important,” she says, championing, once again, a proactive model that has enabled her to enjoy a successful career in security while also being a mother and grandmother.

The job of a CISO never ends. “We just keep doing what we do every day,” she says, boiling down the massive complexity of what she does every day to a simple idea. “I keep good people from doing bad things.”

CompuGain congratulates Donna Ross on this very well-deserved recognition. Her deep understanding and leadership in information security, technology, and risk mitigation makes her an invaluable asset to Radian. CompuGain is proud to be a Radian partner, sharing a common vision of innovation, IT enablement, and modern application and platform delivery.

“Security should not be the best-kept secret in the company. Our job is to be at the forefront and not be invisible.”

DONNA ROSS

Culture Reinforced through Compliance

By CLINT WORTHINGTON

When Arienne Brint stepped into the role of chief compliance officer for advanced materials and specialty chemicals company Solvay two years ago, she immediately saw areas of engagement she could improve on. “Compliance wasn’t as much of a part of the dialogue as I wanted it to be,” she explains. ”I really envisioned compliance being a priority topic, akin to safety.”

But in January 2020, at the direction of the new CEO Dr. Ilham Kadri, Solvay rolled out a new corporate purpose, along with a new strategy and key behaviors for employees that are reinforced by the company’s Code of Business Integrity, developed by

Brint and her team. The corporate purpose centers on ethics and accountability as fundamental tenets of Solvay’s corporate philosophy. Kadri challenged Brint to update Solvay’s Code, to have all employees acknowledge that they have read the Code and to create a new digital learning course on the Code—all within a six-month period. Brint and her team gladly accepted the challenge. Following that plan, Brint has already increased awareness and visibility for Solvay’s “Speak Up” compliance function for its more than twenty-four thousand employees.

Before moving into compliance, Brint got her feet wet at Solvay as vice president of government affairs for ten years, building the government affairs program for the

Solvay’s Arienne Brint puts the company’s “Speak Up” culture into practice, giving employees a chance to speak out against discrimination and ethical breaches

Arienne Brint Chief Compliance Officer Solvay

company’s North American division. After the previous chief compliance officer announced her retirement, executives approached Brint about taking on the role. “I liked being able to put my stamp on something and make it a gold-standard program,” she says.

When Brint started in the compliance department, there were four compliance officers—one for each major region Solvay operates in. However, they only did compliance work part-time because they also had to concentrate on Solvay’s broader legal work. Now, three of those officers are full-time, and Brint has hired a full-time investigator to follow up on ethics claims.

Working with her team, Brint strives to be a communicative, collaborative leader.

“When I took over the role, I brought a fresh set of eyes because I wasn’t someone who had been doing compliance for ten years,” she asserts. “I could look at our work from a different perspective.” As such, she relied heavily on the expertise of her team to identify trends in compliance work.

That said, she feels her work in government affairs has come in handy in Solvay’s compliance function. In particular, Solvay’s Antibribery Anticorruption program hews closely to a lot of the work she did in her earlier role, using her experience to examine these functions from a broader, global point of view. “I have knowledge as to what doing business with government officials looks like, so I know what we need to put

in place to meet our legal requirements as well,” she explains.

Much of Brint’s work involves implementing Solvay’s new conception of their Speak Up culture, which allows employees to feel comfortable raising violations of the company code with the help of an anonymous hotline and transparent communication with management. When these changes took effect, Brint supervised a comprehensive online training program for all employees, and her team has begun integrating digital solutions into their broader compliance functions.

Since implementing these new compliance rules, there’s been a 70 percent increase in cases, which Brint feels is a sign of growth

and transparency. “We’re really proud of that percentage,” she says, “because we feel like it really demonstrates that people are more aware of our Speak Up hotline and are more comfortable using it.”

While the Code of Business Integrity is new, Brint argues that Solvay has always taken to heart its central purpose: to “bond people, ideas, and elements to reinvent progress.” For all 150 years of the company’s existence, Solvay has held principles of innovation and progress close to its heart. This extends to Solvay’s corporate culture as well; the company was one of the first to offer employees paid vacations, for instance. “We’ve always had a really strong culture, but we hadn’t solidified it, for lack of a better word,” Brint explains.

Now, Solvay builds its principles upon seven fundamental behaviors: caring and collaboration; being ‘customer-obsessed’; making it happen; going ‘beyond’ the call of duty; leading with purpose, heart, and mind;

passionately coaching people to their potential; and always being willing to unlearn and relearn behaviors.

At the end of the day, Speak Up is about more than just cultivating an ethical workplace that acts with integrity; Brint is confident it will make Solvay more successful and competitive in the marketplace. “If you are harassed or discriminated against at work, it makes you unsettled and unbalanced, and consequently you can’t focus on the job you’re doing,” Brint argues. “It hurts our employees, but it hurts the company too.”

In cementing Solvay’s new ethical framework, Brint feels like she and her team are playing a crucial role in maintaining the principles of innovation and fairness that the company was founded on. “We feel like our work really goes hand in hand with developing Solvay’s culture and being driven by our purpose,” Brint says. “It really does go back to the fact that we want to make this a better place for employees to work.”

“It really does go back to the fact that we want to make this a better place for employees to work.”

ARIENNE BRINT

Success Starts with People

By SARA VERDI

Andrew Block, executive vice president and chief human resources officer at ABM Industries, has had an impressively diverse career history. With a celebrated twenty-five-year professional tenure, Block has worked in industries such as banking, restaurants, professional services, tech, and more, garnering valuable CHRO experience along the way. Prior to joining ABM, Block served in other large-scale companies such as Buffalo Wild Wings, C.H. Robinson, and Wells Fargo, where he developed the skills to establish and lead sizable teams to success.

Block’s HR expertise not only makes him an experienced leader but also a knowledgeable one. Over the years, he has identified the critical components of attracting and retaining top talent as well as the importance of talent planning and organizational effectiveness.

Profile magazine spoke with Block about his efforts at ABM and how a people-first approach is imperative to an organization’s

success, now more than ever in the midst of the pandemic and racial injustices.

What brought you to ABM?

When CEO Scott Salmirs and I first discussed the need to evolve ABM, I was very excited at the prospect of helping to improve the experience and culture for our 140,000 team members. The need to improve ABM’s processes, data, and infrastructure was apparent, and, as a people-focused business, the need to ensure a culture that prioritized our team members was tremendously apparent, too. So, the organization itself and the opportunities it presented were very appealing.

Though I am only two years into my journey with ABM, I am excited about the progress we have made, and it is reflected in our results. At the end of FY2019, we reported that we grew revenue by more than 30 percent organically and acquisitively, expanded our margins by almost 40 percent, and increased earnings by nearly 30 percent. Just as importantly, our

overall team member and client satisfaction has shown marked improvements.

What are some key initiatives you and your team have spearheaded?

It’s hard not to mention our efforts in response to COVID-19 and racial injustices, as they have naturally taken priority for ABM and companies around the world. The impact of the pandemic on our clients and team members has been substantial. As a leading provider of facility solutions, the services our team members provide has been elevated to be mission critical. It used to be that much of our workforce was invisible, but today we are visibly on the frontlines helping to ensure a clean, safe environment in the spaces where you work, shop, and learn.

Ensuring our team members’ safety has always been our number one focus, but it has taken on even more importance during the pandemic. Last year, we had implemented a new HR operating model that enabled efficiencies and allowed us to put a greater emphasis on our frontline

CHRO Andrew Block on why a people-first approach is foundational to ABM Industries’ success and team member experience

Andrew Block EVP and CHRO ABM Industries

team members. This has translated to improved processes, team member training and empowerment and has been critical throughout COVID-19.

Diversity and cultural inclusion have also always been an important part of the ABM story. But this is not enough. The racial injustices that have been played out on a global stage have made us take a hard look at what more we can do. We have done listening sessions, stood up a Culture and Inclusion Council, and are identifying

champions to develop organizational priorities that nurture an inclusive workplace.

What is a people-first approach and how is it paramount to the success of any organization?

What we do is deploy a highly skilled workforce to take care of the people, places, and spaces that matter to our clients and their customers. Every person is critical, and we need to be able to enable a very large and growing workforce. Our people-first

approach is the cornerstone of what we do and provides a foundational approach on how we treat our team members.

Our people are a big part of our competitive advantage. People need to feel that what they do is important and critical, and our philosophy goes beyond the basics. This comes to life through our mission: to make a difference every person, every day. I believe any organization, ultimately, will provide better customer experiences, and deliver stronger returns for shareholders, with a people-first approach.

Why should HR leaders focus on people?

In 2019 the Business Roundtable released a revised statement that corporate purpose should fundamentally support all stakeholders. The goal was to affirm that employees, clients, and communities are critical stakeholders as well. By ensuring that you consider the needs of those stakeholders, you will have a healthier organization and, by default, improved growth and profitability.

Over the past few years, Harvard and other universities published reports that analyzed the financial performance of companies with a purpose-based philosophy. The results clearly show those that do perform better in the longterm and provide greater shareholder value. In my view, it all starts with our team members.

The AI Advocate

CFO Christopher Greiner uses AI technology to help Zeta Global control costs on its way to a bigger future

By KEITH LORIA

With more than two decades of experience working for medium and large public companies within the technology sector, the opportunity to join Zeta Global as CFO in March 2020 was a no-brainer for Christopher Greiner.

“For me, Zeta Global was at the intersection of what I’ve been doing for the past ten years, being focused on both artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics,” Greiner

says. “While I was at IBM around 2012, the last role I had there was as CFO and COO of the analytics division, and this was when Watson was being born.”

Greiner joined Zeta Global with the mission of transforming the finance organization through big data and AI, similarly to how the company does through its leading marketing platform for enterprise brands.

“For me, AI is not just a predictor of intent; it can automate things in the back end,” he explains. “As a financial

professional, the more I begin to look deeper into what the teams are doing in the office of finance and accounting, the more I realize a lot of work is highly transactional. I think about what we can do to bring AI into the back office of an organization. That’s an incredibly exciting thing.”

Greiner has had exposure to the power of AI since his IBM Watson days. Prior to Zeta Global, Greiner helped take healthcare-tech company Inovalon public in February 2015. During his five-year tenure at the company,

Humanizing Data for Purposeful Change

he served as chief product and operating officer, held leadership roles in sales and customer success, and ultimately served as Inovalon’s chief financial officer from 2017 to 2018.

He continued down the path of finance while serving as chief financial officer of LivePerson, a publicly held technology company that is a leader in AI messaging for Enterprise brands. During his two-year tenure, he played a crucial role in significantly expanding the company’s valuation—between March 2018 and February 2020, the market cap increased from $900 million to $2.8 billion.

In living out his mission at Zeta Global, Greiner also encourages his team to think beyond the traditional guise of finance and lean into innovation. “I believe it’s not as simple as just writing code,” he says, “It’s about a philosophical and cultural pivot in the mission of finance. I challenge my team to ‘repaint the lines’ to see if there’s a new or better way of doing something. Are we obsessing over our customer and their needs? How can we best serve them?” By leaning on automation for transactional work, his team can focus on being a true strategic partner to the business.

Greiner joined Zeta Global at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, which accelerated his other mandate: to rapidly evolve the company’s financial capabilities and business model.

“Sometimes, the badge of honor of CFOs is how quickly they can take costs out, and you can imagine how many medals are being awarded at times like this,” Greiner says. However, Greiner believes that the goal of cost take-out should be approached from an entirely different angle. This unique vantage point comes from multiple years outside of finance, being responsible for building product, and selling to customers.

“Lasting organizational efficiency comes from the pursuit of quality and speed, not at the sacrifice of it,” Greiner says.

By leaning on automation, his team can pursue this quality by running real-time metrics and simulations on business outcomes, such as stress-testing the profit and loss, managing cash, and measuring sales velocity.

There’s no doubt Greiner is up to the challenge of transforming Zeta Global’s finance organization, especially during times of crisis. “For me,” he says, “it’s all about making Zeta Global emerge stronger from this pandemic.”

“Lasting organizational efficiency comes from the pursuit of quality and speed, not at the sacrifice of it.”

CHRISTOPHER GREINER

Accounting Titan

By KEITH LORIA

When Amy Evans started college at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Gies College of Business, she decided to study accounting—she liked the subject, and she knew it was a field where she’d be able to get a job.

Since earning her accounting degree, Evans has built her expertise across eleven roles within the accounting function, and she’s now currently the vice president and chief accounting officer at Titan International.

She began her career at what was then Price Waterhouse, where she gained valuable professional accounting and audit experience. After three years, Evans wanted to move on from the audit world and began her eleven-year tenure at Sara Lee, where she held management roles in general accounting and financial reporting and planning before working in the specialty markets division.

She also lent her expertise to a variety of companies such as Eby-Brown, RR

Donnelley, HSBC, Slalom Consulting, and Navigant. Then she held interim positions through Tatum—which places senior-level talent on interim and project basis in finance and accounting—and returned to RR Donnelley as interim chief accounting officer.

“It was very easy for me to jump into that role,” Evans remembers. “I knew the business, some of the people I had worked with and who worked with me were still there; they were still using the system I had implemented.”

All of those positions have provided Evans with experience that have helped her become the leader she is today at Titan International, the Chicago-based firm that is a leader of Titan and Goodyear Farm Tire brands and provides wheels, tires, and undercarriage products for a wide variety of off-road equipment.

“I have takeaways from every role I’ve held,” says the chief accounting officer. “Even at Price Waterhouse, which taught me the discipline that I still use today in how I prepare some of my support for our SEC reporting and how I’ve had to teach that

How Amy Evans built a successful career in finance and now improves Titan International’s financial strength as its chief accounting officer

to some of my employees who don’t have a public accounting background.”

Among the initiatives she is working on is improving the company’s financial strength and establishing the right mix of talent at offices in Chicago and Quincy, Illinois.

“I’ve known that I was short-staffed because I’ve had certain people doing way too many things to the point that there are control risks. In finance, it’s extremely important that people have segregation of duty,” Evans explains. “When you have one person handling multiple tasks, tasks that should be handled by different individuals, you know you have a control risk. I literally had to design my organizational chart to ensure that all the different functions in accounting and finance are appropriately staffed and staffed at the right level.”

Another goal of hers is to encourage career opportunities for her team members.

“You want to make sure that there’s room for people to grow and room for them to develop, move on, and move up,” notes Evans, who oversees a 175-person team.

Another of her missions is to improve internal reports so that timely and effective insights can be easily provided. “That’s really due to inadequate systems,” Evans comments. “Transforming those critical systems is an important initiative to me, and

I am in the final stages of implementing a new consolidation system, which will enable us to provide better data analytics and dashboard-enhanced financial reporting.”

That involves Titan partnering with Huron Consulting in the implementation of a new consolidation system, Oracle Fusion FCCS.

“It’s not just about implementing a new system, we’re also implementing new processes around this system,” Evans says. “You can’t just throw a system at someone and say, ‘Here, do it.’ You need to change the process. In our case, it’s also the monthly close process that is affected by the change in the system. We are enhancing that to make it more efficient, effective, and timely.”

Scott Leshinski, managing director at Huron Consulting Group, notes the transformation leadership he’s seen from Evans throughout their partnership. “As the chief accounting officer of a publicly traded, global organization, Amy combines accounting expertise with the strategic vision to transform the business,” he says. “Amy recognizes that successful transformation isn’t one dimensional, and that successful transformation requires the synchronization across business processes, technology solutions, people, organizational design, and change management.”

Titan’s business is 55 percent international, and that means people from around the world, who are all on different systems, are going to be asked to do things they haven’t done before with the implementation of the Oracle Fusion FCCS system.

“It’s a cultural change for them, and many of them are resistant to that change, having been at Titan for a number of years,” Evans explains. “For example, we just had our first town hall to introduce the larger objective and vision for the system and what the expectations are, what they can expect to see, and how we are going to communicate with them going forward.”

No doubt Evans is qualified to meet that challenge because of the different environments she’s worked in and the different viewpoints and perspectives she’s encountered throughout her career.

“The opportunities that I’ve had to work among different teams, different industries, and different cultures have provided me with a lot of variety and depth,” she notes. “These experiences have made me very adaptable and insightful. I have exceptional focus on my communication and leadership styles in order to better serve the company and develop high performing teams.”

And that will lead to a successful future for Evans and Titan.

“It’s not just about implementing a new system, we’re also implementing new processes around this system. You can’t just throw a system at someone and say, ‘Here, do it.’ You need to change the process.”

AMY EVANS

The Future of Oil & Gas

Industry veteran Kevin Cunningham on three challenges US legal leaders are facing in the industry

By KEITH LORIA

Kevin Cunningham has seen a lot during his nearly forty years in the oil and gas industry. He has lent his expertise to such firms as Pennzoil, El Paso Corporation, and Chesapeake Energy, and has worked for Cabot Oil & Gas in Houston for a dozen years, eleven as its vice president and general counsel. But in his opinion, the industry’s legal leaders are dealing with challenges few could have imagined a short while ago.

CHALLENGE NUMBER 1: LEAN TEAMS

Cunningham notes that even the strongest energy companies are facing the immediate challenge of keeping or creating a lean in-house legal environment and team, which translates into cost reduction and control. His team’s general charge is to manage legal risk, and there’s a direct cost to that.

“Many US shale oil and gas producers are often measured by how well they manage that cost relative to providing first-class legal services to the company,”

he says. “I know quite a few peer companies have been reducing staff, and certainly many of the private law firms right now are severely reducing staff.”

And one of Cunningham’s key observations is that he doesn’t believe those cost reductions are short-term.

“I think that this current negative environment in the industry is a washout, and I do not think that oil and gas managers are going to enthusiastically ramp back up in-house legal services in the future,” he observes. “They’ll make a good economic decision, but I think this could have a longterm effect both in-house and with outside firms on how many folks are engaged in an energy practice.”

He draws that conclusion from having experienced previous downturns and low-price environments. “This one is so dramatic that I would expect folks that do have alternative practices and who can make the transition out of energy may do that,” he adds. “If you lose your job, you need work and you’re going to take

Kevin Cunningham VP and General Counsel Cabot Oil & Gas Robert Seale

whatever work you can find. So, there may be a talent drain due to the current industry.”

CHALLENGE NUMBER 2: PLUNGING PRICES

He points out that in the past ten to twelve years, a number of oil and gas operators have taken on high debt and are now faced with fixed debt payments and operating cost and plunging revenue. Moreover, traditional financing source for drilling capital have dried up.

“Recently, the United States became, for the first time in its history, independent of foreign oil shipments,” he explains. “The country has produced more oil and gas here than it imported, and actually I think the US was headed towards being a net exporter.”

That represented a huge change because the US had always been dependent on foreign oil.

“There’s been a boom in the economy over the past ten years in the US, and stock markets have soared and, of course, set records in the improvement of America’s economy and quality of life, not to mention national security,” Cunningham remarks. “One big driver has been the increase in production and purchase of North

American-produced oil and gas instead of buying from foreign producers.”

Furthermore, he shares, if that concept is applied to the North American oil and gas production, that represents a huge infusion into the economy. But then a flooding of the world market with oil production by Russia and OPEC was followed by the coronavirus pandemic and a drastic reduction of the use of oil and gas.

“It plunged so dramatically, nobody that I know in my forty years of energy industry work would ever have foreseen the precipitous decrease in demand while there was so much supply on the market,” Cunningham says. “It was a perfect storm, if you will, and what happened to North American oil and gas producers was simply that the price went down for the commodity and the debt didn’t go down.”

In his opinion, those high-debt companies will lose market share while strong companies that can increase production as prices increase will step in and absorb that market share.

He predicts that this will eventually result in a more consolidated oil and gas industry, one that is likely more financially healthy. “Cabot has remained strong throughout these crises because

we operate a lean organization from top to bottom,” Cunningham explains. “We have relatively low debt, we generate our own capital, and we have seen improvement in natural gas prices.”

But the big question he poses is whether Russia and OPEC will allow surviving North American producers to operate at levels equal to those of the past decade.

“Or are oil and gas producers headed back to the ’70s, ’80s, and early ’90s, when America is dependent on foreign oil sources?” he asks. “What happens when you send so many dollars overseas? A lot of those dollars go to people who don’t particularly like us.”

CHALLENGE NUMBER 3: GOING GREEN

Another challenge in the industry is the green movement, which has led to litigation and ensuing costs, project delays, and outright bans on development of fossil fuels in many areas of the US and around the world.

Cunningham believes that an honest, science-based dialogue is needed between the industry and those who oppose fossil fuels. “There is, I think, a misunderstanding about how long and how material fossil fuels need to be part of our energy future until the more—and I call it

“It was a perfect storm, if you will, and what happened to North American oil and gas producers was simply that the price went down for the commodity and the debt didn’t go down.”

KEVIN CUNNINGHAM

Pierce & O’Neill, LLP is proud to congratulate Kevin Cunningham of Cabot Oil & Gas Corporation

For his outstanding achievements and leadership.

Pierce & O'Neill, LLP is a Houston-based civil litigation rm specializing in the trial and appeal of complex business and energy litigation cases in Texas and throughout the United States.

e attorneys at Pierce & O’Neill bring with them the extensive experience, knowledge, resources and sophistication required to prosecute or defend civil litigation matters, regardless of their size or complexity. Attorney at Pierce & O’Neill have been recognized to e Best Lawyers in America®, Chambers USA, Super Lawyers, Litigation Counsel of America and are Martindale-Hubbell® "AV Preeminent" rated.

speculative—alternative energy sources prove themselves,” he says. “We’ve seen a lot of windmills go up, we’ve seen a lot of solar panels go up, we certainly have heard about efficient electric vehicles and efficient electric trucks for transport.”

He explains that too often, the dialogue is conducted through the media and that there needs to be a dialogue between the industry and anti-fossil fuel organizations.

“I would call it energy diplomacy, it’s much like what nations do, even warring nations,” Cunningham says. “They maintain their sides aggressively but there are diplomats that sit down at a table and they go, ‘What’s really happening here and how can we work through this together on a fact-based foundation?’ Get the emotion and get the mythology out of it, on both sides. And that’s hard work.”

Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney is a national law firm with a proven reputation for industry-leading legal, business, regulatory and government relations advice. We represent some of the highest profile companies in the nation, helping them to see around corners to protect, defend and advance their businesses. www.BIPC.com

CUNNINGHAM , Vice President and General Counsel at Cabot Oil & Gas, for your recognition in Profile.

“Recently, the United States became, for the first time in its history, independent of foreign oil shipments.”

KEVIN CUNNINGHAM

A Pandemic Won’t Stop Transformation

Champion of change Mark Vaupel leads his IT team to redefine the capabilities of the 129-year-old Hormel Foods through Project Orion

By BILLY YOST

There is a fifty-year connection between Mark Vaupel and Hormel Foods. The vice president of IT services at the Austin, Minnesota-headquartered company grew up on a family farm twenty-five miles outside of town. The Vaupel family raised grain, poultry, and livestock.

“I remember, as a relatively young child, loading up hogs into the back of our pickup truck and bringing them into the Hormel plant,” Vaupel recalls. “I understood at an early age that our family was connected to this business, but I didn’t expect that I would have the opportunity to become part of this Fortune 500 company years later.”

Vaupel has spent nearly twenty-five years at Hormel Foods, but it’s not a tenure one expects to hear by the tenor of Vaupel’s voice. The VP speaks rapidly and eloquently, with the passion of a new hire. And his team has just undertaken their most substantive

project to date: a company-wide ERP overhaul in the middle of a pandemic.

The scale and overall success of the operation, in collaboration with partners KPMG and Oracle, is redefining the capabilities of a 129-year-old company that continues finding ways to innovate and evolve in an ever-changing marketplace.

DEPLOYING PROJECT ORION

“People would sometimes say, ‘We’ve been successful for so long, why would we want to change it now?’” Vaupel says. “I think the answer is that we need to continue to evolve. We need to make sure that we’re able to continue to meet the changing expectations of our customers and consumers, the people to whom we are delivering what I consider to be some of the greatest food products in the world.”

Vaupel says that “Project Orion,” while qualifying as an IT transformation to a cloud-based suite that consolidates systems

under a single data model, is also so much more. “This is a transformation of business processes for a global-branded food company,” Vaupel explains. “An even bigger portion of that is change management and getting people comfortable with the new way of working within this new model.”

KPMG’s Sanjay Sehgal notes the transformation he has seen through the partnership with Vaupel. “Project Orion is reinventing the way Hormel operates their business, not only from a technology perspective but from a people and process standpoint as well,” says Sehgal, KPMG’s finance transformation partner (p.64). “This has been one of the most exciting projects of my career—Mark and the Hormel team have been amazing to work with.”

The scope of the project—which includes enterprise resource planning, human capital management, supply chain management, and enterprise performance management—wasn’t just significant for Hormel Foods. “I think this is one of the larger implementations that KPMG and maybe even Oracle has been involved with,” Vaupel says. “We broke the project into different components in order to manage the risk of deploying these new solutions.”

Risk mitigation played a huge role. “We really had to take the time to understand the business processes and what we

Mark Vaupel VP of IT Services Hormel Foods

Courtesy of Hormel Foods

were looking to evolve,” Vaupel says. “We also had team members explicitly focused on change management as we engaged with KPMG, making sure that what we were thinking about executing and delivering was aligned with worldclass capabilities and best-in-class change management approaches.”

Vaupel was all too familiar with ERP implementations that went live over a weekend and rained down chaos on Monday morning.

PERSISTING IN A PANDEMIC

As the HR and payroll systems went online in January 2020, things were progressing as planned. The finance and source-to-settle systems were expected to go live at the end of April. Then March came, bringing with it a worldwide pandemic. And yet, IT persisted.

“We made the decision to push our go-live to June 1,” Vaupel says. “Our leadership mantra all along has been to do this right. We’re not going to go fast just to hit a date.”

Despite a pandemic, they only lost a few steps on the overall implementation. “One of the most interesting things is that some of our peers and competitors in the market have taken ERP-type projects off the table,

if not entirely, for six months or so,” he says. “We were able to apply our agility and adaptability to changing environments in ways that, frankly, still impress me.”

Finance successfully went live, and the Orion team has moved on to testing supply chain capabilities to be rolled out in August 2020.

The IT team was concurrently able to transition many of the company’s team members working from an office to working remotely within a week. This involved providing remote access as well as communication and collaboration capabilities in a safe and secure manner for almost four thousand team members.

“We had already rolled out some of the Microsoft Office 365 suite to allow for improved collaboration, so the timing couldn’t have been better,” Vaupel says. “I’m so proud of the fact that the IT team had the forethought to recognize these are capabilities this company is going to need going into the future. These tools and the capabilities they provide have been instrumental in the success of our ability to continue to effectively and efficiently work in this environment.”

Those improved collaboration capabilities are an obvious passion point for

Vaupel. “The lemonade we’ve been able to make from all of these lemons of the past few months is that I feel the use of technologies that we delivered probably evolved and matured three to four years in a month,” Vaupel explains. “We were forced to use it, and I’m extremely proud of how the overall Hormel Foods team has really taken advantage of these tools.”

Vaupel foresees these tools becoming the norm, regardless of the eventual pandemic outcome. “We’re never going back to the way business was done in December or January,” Vaupel says. “I think many of the new capabilities we’ve introduced will carry forward to make our new normal an even better experience.”

The ERP implementation, and the rest of Project Orion, continues its rollout at Hormel Foods, and there may not be a bigger champion of change than Vaupel. The VP still has his eyes on the future, such as continued investments in e-commerce, digital marketing, and more.

“We’re a food company; it’s in our name. We’re not a tech company,” he says. “But we will use technology to impact every facet of this company to support our business.”

“I think many of the new capabilities we’ve introduced will carry forward to make our new normal an even better experience.”

MARK VAUPEL

Rapid progress. Digital prowess.

Leap into the future with digital transformation

At KPMG, we work with organizations to drive better business outcomes through digital transformation. Whether it’s cloud migration, better financial forecasting, or improved supply chain visibility, we can help you leap into the future with new technology.

Learn more at read.kpmg.us/oracle kpmg.com

Future Planning at Its Finest

How KPMG aided Hormel Foods in an organization-wide technology implementation without letting a global pandemic get in the way

By WILL GRANT

Back in the halcyon days of 2019, Hormel Foods (p.60), the Fortune 500 company with a strong 125-plus year history, embarked on a sweeping digital transformation project in partnership with KPMG.

Code-named “Project Orion,” it was designed

to update and streamline many of the core functions of Hormel’s disparate business units that could be cumbersome to navigate for both customers and employees, including its supply chain, finance, and HR systems and processes. Scheduled for rollout in 2020, everything was right on track.

Then came COVID-19.

In Washington, DC, hundreds of miles away from Hormel’s Minnesota headquarters, the words “supply chain” were mentioned some two dozen times during the now famous White House coronavirus press briefings as the nation, and the world, began to adapt to a new reality. Suddenly, the reliability of critical supply chains was on everyone’s minds.

“COVID-19 really exposed fault lines that have been in place for a long time,” said Brian Higgins, KPMG supply chain lead partner on the Hormel project. “If companies aren’t acknowledging that these fault lines are in place, creating serious cost, performance, and customer service issues, they’re kidding themselves.”

One might think in the middle of this disruption that Project Orion would suffer. But due largely to the vision of Hormel’s executive team and its commitment to overhauling a loose set of disparate systems and structures in favor of a more unified and streamlined organization, the project continued with minimal delay and indeed a new sense of urgency. Despite the pandemic, KPMG was able to help its client go live with the majority of the finance function and huge swaths of the supply chain function even after it required an entirely new virtual launch model mid-launch.

Effective remote collaboration became a mission-critical priority and the cloud a foundational element for the virtual work environment. Because of its investment in Project Orion, Hormel was able to quickly scale and pivot its teams. While technology was absolutely essential to the project’s success, it alone was not sufficient.

“There is far more to KPMG’s approach to transformation than technology implementation,” explained KPMG finance lead Sanjay Sehgal. “Beyond helping to implement Oracle Cloud, what we offered here was KPMG’s leading finance, HR, and supply chain practices

and the change management required to take a project of this size from conception to life.

“The secret sauce was KPMG’s team,” Sehgal added. “I think Hormel would say KPMG really gelled with their leadership team.”

The Hormel Orion project is one of many examples of KPMG’s ability to successfully transform businesses on a massive scale. To truly transform with cloud, businesses need more than technology. They need leadership support, a change management strategy to ensure adoption, and the right partner who has the industry and technology experience to guide them on the journey.

From KPMG’s perspective, the Hormel project was an opportunity to put a number of tailored solutions to work all at once. Revamping HR, finance, and supply chain processes in one project is a tremendous undertaking. The transition from Hormel’s on-premise systems to the Oracle Cloud platform was also an opportunity to streamline its back-office operations by adopting leading practices. The KPMG Powered Enterprise approach allowed Hormel to tap straight into advanced organizational design, leading technology, processes, and operating models to accelerate its implementation of Oracle Cloud.

“We are one of the top consulting firms in the consumer and retail space, and when you add our ideas on where the future of food companies is headed, it made a great combination for the Hormel project,” Sehgal said. “Hormel was looking to address not only its internal employees from an HR and talent perspective but also the way that its external customers, retailers, and grocers interacted with the company.”

“Prior to this project, the ‘One Hormel’ principle the company was looking to embody didn’t always feel that way to its customers,” Higgins explained. “The same customer could get multiple communications from different business segments or divisions. They might have orders show up on separate trucks just hours apart. Unifying these makes a better customer service experience—it’s more streamlined, and the economic benefits are obvious as well.”

That relationship is essential for KPMG to understand how to tailor its services

to ensure success. “I think that’s really in KPMG’s DNA,” Sehgal said. “Instead of coming in with a ‘we know best’ attitude, we want to listen to the client and align and understand what they want to accomplish.

“The world changed a lot in the first four months after COVID-19,” added Sehgal, who spoke with Profile in early July 2020. “The pandemic has forced leaders to figure out how their business must evolve to serve their customers in a more efficient and cost-effective environment.”

Higgins concurred. “Companies have got to start thinking about their own transformational journey to bulletproof

“If companies aren’t acknowledging that these fault lines are in place, creating serious cost, performance, and customer service issues, they’re kidding themselves.”

BRIAN HIGGINS

US SUPPLY CHAIN & OPERATIONS PRINCIPAL KPMG

Andrew Collings

their supply chains and other functions,” he said. “Hormel was a company that had the foresight to have put this process in motion almost two years ago, and now it has an obvious strategic advantage going forward.”

Amidst the COVID chaos, the only real certainty is that the nature of work has been redefined in a very short period of time. And it seems that companies willing to acknowledge that reality will be far better prepared to adapt as the changes keep coming. KPMG remains out at the front of the pack, ready for the next company to get serious about the new realities of work and how to streamline and transform its business.

“The pandemic has forced leaders to figure out how their business must evolve to serve their customers in a more efficient and cost-effective environment.”

SANJAY SEHGAL US COMMERCIAL LINE OF BUSINESS CONSULTING PRINCIPAL KPMG

Looking to the Future? Bank on Him.

By CLINT WORTHINGTON

As a vice president of enterprise real estate for TD Bank, Scott Wishna oversees the transactional work for nearly half of its US retail locations, from the New York City to the Philadelphia metropolitan areas. It’s a lot of ground to cover, but Wishna leverages more than twenty years of knowledge and expertise to both manage the transactions for these locations and help TD Bank plan its future in the banking space.

Before Wishna joined TD Bank, his career in real estate first started at Sprint. In 2000, he joined Sprint as a retail finance manager, and in the course of seven years, he ascended through various positions. Eventually, he had responsibility for the retail channel's capital management and retail distribution strategy. He then spent a year at Polo Ralph Lauren, which he considers a bit of a layover: “Like changing planes in

my career path,” Wishna explains. He later moved to commercial real estate outfit CBRE in 2008, handling retail transaction work for AT&T. Eventually, though, Wishna yearned for something new, shifting to TD Bank in 2013 to handle new store acquisitions and expand their existing footprint.

His role has evolved quite a bit since that time. Today, Wishna handles a variety of functions within his assigned area— essentially what amounts to a stretch from southern Connecticut through southeastern Pennsylvania. Encompassing nearly 600 of the 1,250 locations TD Bank boasts nationwide, the region is benefited by Wishna’s spending much of his time amending existing leases in the TD Bank portfolio or disposing of real estate it no longer needs by selling or terminating leases or facilitating subleases.

“That wasn’t something that I or my counterparts handled, historically,” he

Scott Wishna VP of Enterprise Real Estate TD Bank

Scott Wishna leverages twenty years of expertise in the real estate space to help TD Bank build a prototype for banking in the 21st century

Jennifer Wishna

explains in regard to his disposition work. “It’s a different set of skills, quite frankly— how to handle that aspect of the portfolio versus acquisition.”

The main lesson Wishna has learned from his decades of real estate experience is that you have to be able to wear a lot of different hats simultaneously. During his time at Sprint, the company was dogged in growing its retail footprint. “I’d spend the majority of my time working on new store analyses and letters of intent for new retail stores,” he says. That is, until he learned that Sprint was working on a merger with Nextel (bringing a thousand-store portfolio with them).

From there, Wishna had to pivot from acquisition to distribution strategy—cutting down on redundant distribution points and finding where their portfolios overlapped. “I had to learn a new set of skills and be able to implement that plan in a very short period of time,” explains Wishna. That experience taught him that real estate can be a rollercoaster ride: “While you might be flying high one minute, the next you could descend pretty rapidly,” he explains.

A high level of flexibility is important when you’re overseeing such a wide swath of a company’s locations, as Wishna does with TD Bank. “It sounds daunting as far as volume goes, but for many of them, once

TD BANK AT A GLANCE

Headquarters: Cherry Hill, NJ

Founded: 1852

Locations: 1,301 across 15 states and DC

Employees: 27,000

Lines of business: retail, commercial, wealth management, auto finance, corporate & specialty

Source: TD Bank

“One of the things that’s really important is to make sure that we’re working together as a team. They’re an extension of the bank to the external real estate community.”

SCOTT WISHNA

TOP TALENT. MARKET INTELLIGENCE. INDUSTRY LEADERSHIP.

At CBRE, we leverage top talent, market intelligence and industry leadership to deliver expert retail property solutions for our clients. We are proud to enjoy a longstanding strategic relationship with TD Bank and Scott Wishna.

they’re built, there’s nothing for me to do for fifteen years,” he says. “But a third of those locations have some activity I have to manage.”

Wishna has worked on some of them every single day for the last five years. To that end, he has to find ways to prioritize his work, getting the tasks he needs to manage out of the way so he can focus on more proactive efforts to rightsize TD Bank’s retail real estate portfolio and minimize real estate operating expenses.

Part of Wishna’s work includes collaborating with his previous employer CBRE as an external vested partner. His history with them gives him a valuable perspective on working with real estate transactions from both an occupier's and a service provider's perspective. “One of the things that’s really important is to make sure that we’re working together as a team. They’re an extension of the bank to the external real estate community,” he explains.

For more information, visit cbre.us/NYCretail

Ultimately, all this effort contributes to TD Bank’s mission statement to build a bank of the future, which Wishna takes very seriously in his transactional work. “Historically, banks were big,” he says. “They represented safety for people’s money. Some of them were built like fortresses. And that’s not necessarily the size

they need to be or how they need to be built going forward.”

To build a bank of the future, though, Wishna has to help TD Bank adapt and cater to a banking experience in which technology results in less foot traffic. “Many of the branch locations we have throughout our portfolio don’t meet the footprint of the future,” he explains.

Some bank branches command areas as large five thousand square feet, and TD Bank just can’t justify spaces of that size any longer. Sometimes, this results in demising larger spaces and repurposing them, reducing the square footage and cutting rental costs by surrendering that additional space to a landlord. Other times, it means surrendering the lease entirely and relocating the branch to a more space-efficient location that still serves the trade area.

For Wishna, all these changes mean juggling new transactions and lease terms— while consistently searching for new places in which to realize TD Bank’s vision.

“Historically, banks were big. They represented safety for people’s money. Some of them were built like fortresses. And that’s not necessarily the size they need to be or how they need to be built going forward.”

SCOTT WISHNA

CBRE congratulates Scott Wishna, vice president of enterprise real estate at TD Bank, on his leadership and accomplishments. Scott is a consummate real estate executive, with profound expertise across all essential disciplines. We deeply value our strategic partnership, creating competitive advantage through successful real estate solutions.

More Than Four Walls and a Bed

CFO Cade Scholl instills a customer service mindset with his team to ensure the best communication and care possible at Spectrum Retirement Communities

By BILLY YOST

Cade Scholl grew up professionally in real estate, drawn to the industry’s fluid nature. “While it had its ups and downs, it wasn’t as cyclical as other areas like the tech industry,” says Scholl, who is currently CFO at Spectrum Retirement

Communities. “I really enjoyed the tangible nature of the work I was doing.”

While serving as head of internal auditing at KB Homes, Scholl had what he considers a pivotal experience that helped define his leadership, management, and connection to his staff and customers. Scholl was frequently on the road, meeting

with the various companies under the KB umbrella and sitting in on staff meetings across the country.

“Home building is a very cut-anddry industry,” Scholl says. “Usually, it’s a lot of reporting and facts, not a lot of emotion. But I remember a manager in Raleigh, North Carolina, who opened up

a meeting by asking, ‘How is everybody feeling today?’”

Scholl says that at the time, it threw him completely off guard. “I was used to meetings that were very straightforward,” the CFO says. “We would cover what we needed to accomplish and why and talk about the next steps. I didn’t understand why this person wanted to know how everyone was feeling rather than focusing on next steps to move the business forward.”

The CFO now realizes that, in fact, that manager was asking the right question to move the business forward, which is one of the reasons why that particular subsidiary continually outperformed its peers. “I realized that this manager was really dialed in to her people and to each team member,” Scholl says. “You have to really care about your team, how they feel, and how they’re reacting to the work they have in front of them. That was a pivotal moment for me.”

The people aspect of accounting, Scholl says, can often be unaccounted for. That’s

Cade Scholl CFO Spectrum Retirement Communities

doubly important at Spectrum, where simply accounting for general living costs is only a small part of what his team does.

“We don’t just provide our residents with four walls and a bed,” Scholl says. “We provide lifestyle enrichment, including food, entertainment and programming, transportation, and assistance with daily care needs. We help take care of many aspects of their lives, and that means our department has to continually interact with others to ensure the best possible customer service—it’s not just about collecting rent.”

The idea of customer service isn’t one inherently found in the accounting function, but it’s one Scholl believes in strongly. “Spectrum is a customer service company that just happens to own senior living communities,” the CFO says. “When I got here, it seemed like those communication channels within the accounting department may have been a bit fragmented, so it was something I wanted to focus on. I thought there was an opportunity to understand all facets of the business so that communication, and

“It’s one of the first lessons you learn in school: if you can’t measure it, don’t bother trying to get better at it.”

CADE SCHOLL

Courtesy of Spectrum Retirement Communities

therefore customer service, could improve throughout our department.”

Scholl has only been at Spectrum since July 2019, but he believes valuable inroads have been made. “One of the things that I think I’ve been able to do well is to go out and meet my peers where they’re at,” Scholl explains. “I work hard to understand their needs and get information that will help our corporate team support our communities, and therefore the residents they serve, as successfully as possible.”

One of the most important norms he has been working toward is finding continually more efficient and precise ways to gauge progress and outcomes. “You’ve got to be able to measure how you’re doing,” Scholl says. “It’s one of the first lessons you learn in school: if you can’t measure it, don’t bother trying to get better at it.”

Scholl has also had to come to terms with a steep learning curve in a business that touches many different areas. Across Spectrum’s fortyeight communities, each one has a dining room that functions as an upscale restaurant.

“When I first got here, I kept hearing ‘front of house’ and ‘back of house’ and didn’t know what that meant. Different lingo was used, and it was important for me to have the humility to ask questions and seek clarification,” says Scholl, who credits his customer service background with his ability to ask those questions. “Understand ing exactly what services we are providing has not only helped my team and me to pro vide better service but also to measure and improve our outcomes.”

We provide physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, and wellness services.

We provide our services on-site in assisted living, independent living communities, CCRCs, and skilled nursing facilities across the nation.

Our clinical programs are available 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

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Legacy

“You have to really care about your team, how they feel, and how they’re reacting to the work they have in front of them.”

CADE SCHOLL

Healthcare Services is therapist-driven provider of physical therapy, occupational therapy, speechlanguage pathology, and wellness services. Our clinical programs are provided on-site within assisted and independent living communities, CCRCS, and skilled nursing facilities. We currently provide services in twentyplus states—offered eight hours a day, five days a week.

Someone to Believe In

By ZAYVELLE WILLIAMSON

Wetteny Joseph sees any challenge that comes his way in a positive light, something he attributes to having grown up in Haiti before immigrating to the US. The ninth of ten children, Joseph left home at the age of twelve while his parents stayed behind in Haiti.

Wetteny Joseph makes it a priority to advocate for the next generation of diverse leaders as CFO at Catalent and new member of the Executive Leadership Council

Wetteny Joseph

SVP and CFO

Catalent Inc.

Paul Zalewski

“Often, folks hear about my beginnings and say, ‘Wow, that is quite a bit of adversity you went through; what a difficult time it must have been,’” he says. “Even at such a young age, I appreciated how much of an opportunity it was to come to the United States. I appreciated how much my parents gave me in terms of work ethic and focus.”

When he arrived in the US, Joseph was fortunate enough to encounter people who were willing to advocate for him, people who could see his talent—even when he couldn’t see it himself. It was this belief that helped him build a successful career within finance and eventually become senior vice president and CFO at Catalent.

Known across the world as a prominent provider of leading-edge health products,

Catalent is really a “service company,” says Joseph, whose initial role was vice president and corporate controller. “Our aspiration is to help people live better, healthier lives. When we partner with a customer, we’re going to do everything we can to help develop their candidate drugs and therapies to get them in the hands of patients who really need them.”

Joseph has been at Catalent for almost twelve years now, serving in several different roles before securing his current role as SVP and CFO. And for him, that role can be explained in one world: enabling. “The finance function is an enabling function,” Joseph stresses. “We are stewards of capital. If the company’s objectives are to grow and perform faster than the market, it’s our

responsibility to ensure that we have the capital to make that happen.”

As CFO, Joseph drives a “cash culture” so Catalent can better understand how to manage and evaluate new opportunities. It is vital for those in finance to understand what customers really need and what value the company brings to a customer.

“I encourage any finance person to get out of the finance-specific processes and spend time on the front end as much as they can,” Joseph notes. “Even if you don’t move to running a business, you can really be inquisitive about the customer and what they’re looking for.

“At the end of the day,” he adds, “what value are we adding to the process or the product? If you understand that well

“Throughout my time at Catalent, wherever I have been within the company, I have felt like I belonged. I have felt like what I have to say matters and is valued. We want to give everyone that kind of platform so that they can be themselves.”

WETTENY JOSEPH

enough, you will be a much better finance person because you will be in a better position when you are evaluating what the company might want to invest in.”

Joseph also works hand in hand with the company’s project managers and business leaders to help them articulate what they’re trying to accomplish, what their challenges are, and what they may need from the finance teams.

“We’re trying to develop more products and better solutions for our customers, and do all that reliably,” Joseph says. But to do that, the CFO notes, a robust finance function is only the beginning.

“To perform at a level that outperforms the market, we need our people’s performance to be top-notch,” he emphasizes. “And it is well proven that if you have an inclusive environment and recruit and attract a diverse set of people, you’re going to deliver better results.

“Throughout my time at Catalent, wherever I have been within the company, I have felt like I belonged,” Joseph continues. “I have felt like what I have to say matters and is valued. We want to give everyone that kind of platform so that they can be themselves.”

Joseph currently serves on Catalent’s Diversity and Inclusion Council and was recently inducted into the Executive Leadership Council (ELC), an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting Black professionals across the country and the world.

“I want to establish Catalent as a household name for diverse candidates just coming out of school, as well as experienced professionals,” Joseph says of his

first goal for his membership with the ELC. “Our brand is well established within the industry, and I think a lot of people resonate with our mission. Who wouldn’t want to be part of a company that could potentially help develop a response to a disease like COVID-19?”

His second objective is personal. Joseph knows the importance of executives sharing their stories and empowering others. He attended a conference where Ken Chenault, the former CEO of America Express, and Dick Parsons, the former head of Time Warner, presented their inspiring journeys.

“We all have a story, and if you are willing to share that story with others, someone will identify with it, which is what happened to me when I saw those gentlemen on stage,” Joseph wrote in a Black History Month post for Catalent in 2020. “Connecting with people’s stories is a very powerful thing. It is the best way to learn, be inspired, and even understand ourselves.

“The stories of the Black experience in America are helping the world become more aware of the greater societal need for fairness and justice, just as storytelling may help companies foster a more inclusive environment,” he added.

He notes that he has never been shy about learning anything and that being part of the ELC is a way to further his own learning and growth while advocating for other Black professionals. “I am excited to be able to advocate for others as people did for me,” the CFO explains. “If anyone out there is struggling with their career, I just hope my story helps give them some encouragement, even if it’s in the smallest of ways.”

“If you have an inclusive environment and recruit and attract a diverse set of people, you’re going to deliver better results.”

WETTENY JOSEPH

Putting People First

By KEITH LORIA

Priscilla Messir, chief human resources officer at RGIS, was doing HR work before she really knew what HR was all about. Double majoring in marketing and management at Florida International University, Messir knew she was interested in business administration but didn’t want to limit herself to a particular field. However, the courses she enjoyed the most were HR focused: organizational behavior, recruitment, and staffing.

While in school, she worked at Express (Limited Brands), which entailed a great deal of “people” work such as hiring, coaching, and training. Even before she understood

the HR skills she was building, she knew she enjoyed the interaction and the ability to solve problems.

“My division of responsibility was talent,” she explains. “Motivating people to perform really excited me, and the excitement was contagious; people performed better and wanted to learn and do more. It quickly became clear to me that a career in human resources was perfectly suited for me and something I would pursue.”

Messir also immersed herself in leadership roles throughout college, one of which was vice president of membership for the business fraternity, Alpha Kappa Psi—a life-changing role. “The experience really

Priscilla Messir, chief human resources officer at RGIS, transformed the HR department from a backseat role to one that sits side-by-side with the business leaders

ignited my passion to influence and engage people to rally around a common purpose.”

Messir next took a career-changing internship with Burger King Corporation in Miami, where she would witness the foundation of HR applied in a global organization. In her six-plus years at Burger King, Messir enjoyed a solid and steady career progression, plunging herself into special projects and stretch assignments, as well as volunteer work with the company’s corporate social responsibility program. As her experience grew, so did her skills and her passion to be an HR leader.

In 2011, Messir joined Nielsen as an HR generalist, further cementing her dedication as a business partner first and foremost. She operated in the HR business partner (HRBP) capacity, initially supporting 1,600 employees in North America before increasing to more than 14,000 across one hundred-plus countries. Messir credits her seven years at Nielsen with teaching her the importance of focusing not on title or money but on the passion to drive results; the importance of diversity and inclusion, specifically diversity

Priscilla Messir CHRO RGIS

“We can’t say our people are first if our actions don’t truly exhibit that.”

PRISCILLA MESSIR

of thought; and learning that a one-size-fitsall approach rarely works.

Then, in 2018, Messir was asked to serve in one of the most important roles of her career and one that would allow her to truly shape and position HR as a powerful and equitable business partner. Messir joined RGIS, an inventory management services company based in Michigan, as its CHRO.

This is the role of a lifetime for Messir, who applies every ounce of her passion, hard work, and experience to the organization. Messir spent most of 2019 setting the stage for a strong HR foundation. Prior to her tenure, HR was in the backseat and served in a reactive capacity, which presented a challenge she was well prepared and well suited for.

Messir was charged with leading the large-scale transformation of HR for RGIS, which started as a family-owned business more than sixty years ago. When Siegfried De Smedt came on board as CEO of the US and Canada in 2018, he launched a People

Service Profit (PSP) philosophy where the company would put its people first, with the aim to deliver better service that results in better profits. He also launched the Transformation Journey, which consists of key initiatives that transform the work and how it is done across the US and Canada.

It was up to Messir to define the people strategy and transform HR to best support the business. She organized the people strategy around organization, roles, and talent. It starts, she explains, with ensuring the structure is organized in the best possible way to deliver on the company’s priorities, clearly defining roles and responsibilities along with clear success measures and ensuring the right talent is in the right roles.

Some of the initiatives included implementing a performance management approach, redesigning the company-wide organizational structure at all levels, implementing a pay structure, and outsourcing recruitment for hourly and field management

“The journey towards transformation requires us to think big-picture strategy, provide sustainable business solutions, and influence change at all levels of the organization while creating a meaningful culture that resonates throughout.”

PRISCILLA MESSIR

positions. “The expectation is the HR Centers of Excellence see the HRBPs as their key client,” Messir explains, “and the HRBPs see the business they support as their key client.”

The actions have proved to be an immediate success. One thing she is proud of is the performance management approach. “We can’t say our people are first if our actions don’t truly exhibit that,” Messir states. “The performance management approach ensures we have a consistent and fair way of assessing our talent, putting proper action plans in place to improve performance, and ensuring there is a focus on proper succession planning, not just names in boxes.”

But she says she’s most proud of the fact that HR has shifted from the backseat role to one that sits side-by-side with the business leaders in driving the people strategy for the company.

“Aside from knowing the business, the journey towards transformation requires us to think big-picture strategy, provide sustainable business solutions, and influence change at all levels of the organization while creating a meaningful culture that resonates throughout,” the CHRO shares. “A key ingredient in enabling that is building and earning the trust and credibility of the organization. In my opinion, this is the only way HR can truly be viewed as a strategic business partner and operate as such.”

Looking ahead, Messir’s main goal is to focus on the normalization of all of the initiatives launched last year, ensuring the continued emphasis of putting people first is fully ingrained in the company’s DNA.

Our firm has a passion for designing dynamic Total Reward Solutions that link to our Client’s Business Mission to guide the market-based compensation investment in their most important resource, their employees.

TCDS is proud to be the strategic partner with Priscilla Messir and RGIS in the design and development of a New Base Pay Structure and Career Architecture Job Evaluation System to form a “Total Rewards” Solution that links market-based pay to career development options for its employees.

truly understands how Human Resources can best serve the business mission by maximizing employee engagement levels through such dynamic approaches.

Priscilla

One partner to manage your entire Employee Benefits Program COMPANY 81 PROFILE Q1/21

Passion On and Off the Ice

TJ LaMendola leads his passionate finance team to support the Columbus Blue Jackets, no matter what

By FRANNIE SPROULS

TJ LaMendola has been with the Columbus Blue Jackets since 1999, when the Ohio city was selected as one of four for an expansion National Hockey League team. He joined the front office as the finance director right after graduating from Miami University with his accounting degree. By 2001, he was named CFO.

“The best part of my job is I get to come to work and watch hockey,” LaMendola told Columbus Business First as a 2019 C-Suite Awards honoree. “The people I work with are as passionate in their jobs as I have ever seen.”

While his role oversees the financial department, LaMendola was in charge of building operations up until 2012, when they started solely focusing on the team side of finances. Some of his early 2020 initiatives focused on ticket sales, promotion and branding, and playoff budgeting—a tricky thing to account for given the team could play anywhere.

On March 11, 2020, in response to the upcoming COVID-19 restrictions on mass

BLUE JACKETS HOCKEY HIGHLIGHTS

Five Stanley Cup Playoff appearances: 2009, 2014, 2017, 2018, and 2019

Own the second-longest winning streak in NHL history: 16 games from November 29, 2017, to January 3, 2018

Average 16,000+ fans per game (regular season and playoffs) since 2000

Source: Columbus Blue Jackets

gatherings, the Blue Jackets made the unprecedented move for home games to be played without the general public in Nationwide Arena.

“We’re used to playing in front of a really loud crowd here especially, but if you ask anybody, we just want to play,” Blue Jackets captain Nick Foligno told the Jackets Insider “We’re just excited about getting an opportunity to continue this playoff hunt that we’re on.”

But on March 12, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman announced that the 201920 regular season would be paused with 189 games remaining. “Our goal is to resume play as soon as it is appropriate and prudent, so that we will be able to complete the season and award the Stanley Cup,” Bettman said in a statement.

While COVID-19 paused the Blue Jackets’ chance at the playoffs, the Blue Jackets Foundation continues to make an impact on the Columbus community. The foundation, which LaMendola works closely with, is dedicated to the health and wellness of children in central Ohio. Since the team’s inception, the foundation has provided more than

$11.4 million to organizations making a difference in pediatric cancer, reading, fitness through play, and the growth and development of amateur hockey.

Public address announcer Greg Murray started to record videos for fans through the website Cameo, donating the proceeds to the foundation. “We were very unceremoniously and very quickly cut off from each other a couple of weeks ago, and it’s just like, man, there’s something missing,” Murray told the Jackets Insider. “I thought, what a great way to connect with fans when we can’t really connect. . . . The fans in this city, they are the best fans you could ever ask for. They are so passionate about this team.”

That passion is something LaMendola looks for whenever he is hiring new members for his finance team. His favorite question to ask is, why do you want to work for the Columbus Blue Jackets? “It tells me if the candidate is truly a fan of the team and the sport of hockey or is just looking at this job opportunity as a stepping-stone into something else in sports,” he tells Columbus Business First. “I’m looking for a good mix of both a professional and a fan.”

On July 10, 2020, the NHL Board of Governors and NHL Players Association announced that the league and its players ratified the proposed return-to-play plan to pave the way for a summer battle for the Stanley Cup Playoffs. As part of the NHL’s phased plan, Blue Jackets players returned to the ice in early June for voluntary workouts, and then thirty-three players rejoined training by early July. At press time, the Blue Jackets were set to start a playoff series against the Toronto Maple Leafs on August 2. LaMendola and his finance team will be ready.

CULTURE PROFILE 86 Q1/21

People Are the Priority

How seven exemplary executives drive company culture and foster a workplace where employees can bring their whole selves to work

Illustrations by Melody Pohla

Michele C. Lee, Twitter P88

Deborah Johnston, Los Angeles Angels P96

Lisa J. Paschal, Ryan Specialty Group P99

Kathi Moore, Motorola Solutions P102

Christina Dewey, Plastic Omnium P109

Amanda Wiles, Enspire P113

Stella Tran, HighRadius P116

Verified Leadership

By Billy Yost • Portraits by Winni Wintermeyer

T here are public-facing companies. Then there is Twitter.

When the “microblogging” company launched in 2007, it was seen as a new and novel way to update followers with the last movie you saw or your weekend plans. It seems like a lifetime ago and an entirely different world. In the last decade-plus, Twitter

As head of litigation, regulatory, and competition, Michele C. Lee helps her team overcome legal challenges through unshakable guidance

has exploded to over 166 million monetizable daily active users, has been credited with aiding the Arab Spring uprising in 2011, and has become the de facto method of communication for the President of the United States. For many companies and influencers, if it hasn’t been posted on Twitter, it doesn’t exist.

Michele C. Lee has watched the company become a household name, having arrived in 2015 as a senior litigation counsel. After several years in the ranks, Lee is now senior director, associate general counsel, and head of global litigation, regulatory, and competition at the San Francisco-based social media company.

Twitter is a constant talking point on cable news, in opinion pieces, and on the platform itself. Despite the many legal challenges the company faces around the world, Lee’s steely demeanor radiates confidence and the thick skin developed over years of battling adversaries in the courtroom and at the negotiating table.

“Michele Lee is an immensely talented and thoughtful lawyer,” says Jon Youngwood, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett partner and global cochair of the firm’s litigation department. “She is committed to excellence in representing her client and sets a high bar for the industry. I’ve learned a great deal from working with her.”

Lee seems unshakable, because her record does all the talking.

On Behalf of the United States Lee grew up in New Jersey and spent most of her childhood at her dad’s corner deli in

Harrison, a blue-collar town neighboring Newark, New Jersey. During summers, when school was out, Lee and her sister would spend the days sweeping floors, snacking on giant Italian sub rolls, and watching episodes of Matlock on a small black and white television. It was during those long summers that Lee hatched a plan to become a lawyer, so that she too could one day take on just causes, just like Matlock on the grainy TV.

The ten-year-old who hatched that plan had no inkling of the career path that was in store. One of Lee’s earliest memories from her legal career was when, as a new attorney, she attended the law firm White & Case’s training program for new associates. One of the sessions was etiquette training, where Lee learned the nuances of identifying what fork to eat with, and where the bread and drink plates were placed. For the daughter of first-generation immigrant parents, who had grown up eating with chopsticks and had never had a meal with more than one fork, it was eye-opening.

After several years of working at global law firms—all the while managing not to accidentally eat someone else’s bread at formal dinners with partners and clients— Lee went to work for the United States Department of Justice, prosecuting cases against companies that committed civil fraud against the government. The work spanned a number of industries, from government contracts to for-profit education and healthcare.

“There will be days when you want to give up because you have to work twice as hard to get half the recognition, praise, or advancement opportunities.

Don’t give up.”

Michele C. Lee

Senior Director, Associate General Counsel, and Head of Global Litigation, Regulatory & Competition

For Lee, it was an opportunity of a lifetime. “The attorneys in the Justice Department are some of the smartest and most honorable attorneys I’ve ever met,” she says. “A highlight of my career was having the opportunity to stand up in court and state, ‘I’m Michele Lee, and I represent the United States of America.’”

But even as an attorney for the government, Lee sometimes felt like an outsider. When she was at the DOJ, she recalls interviewing a subject in a government contracts fraud case, and the interviewee drew a distinction between his fasteners and “cheap Chinese imports.” He followed his statement by locking eyes with Lee, and saying, “sorry.”

“At that moment, I was there representing the US government, which is about as American as it gets,” she says. “This interviewee reminded me that no matter how American I considered myself to be, many would always view me as a foreigner.”

After working at the Department of Justice, Lee returned to the private sector in in-house company roles. In these roles, Lee faced the same challenges that many women of color in her profession have faced.

“There’s a calculation that happens when you enter a meeting, particularly with

opposing parties,” she says. “People scan the room to identify those who are in power and those who are in the junior roles. Time and time again, people would turn to my white male colleagues and assume they were the senior-most attorneys in the room, who were making the decisions.”

But being underestimated was a challenge that wouldn’t stop her.

Staying

on Track in the Spotlight

As Twitter has grown, so has its reputation and the complexity of the legal issues it faces. “When I first started, we had maybe a dozen lawsuits in the US,” Lee says. “That has increased significantly as the company has grown.”

The senior director says that leading a team whose company is constantly in the news presents a unique set of challenges. Twitter’s global reach means that lawsuits or outreach from government regulators can arise at any hour of the day. With a small team, Lee needed to carefully develop team processes to ensure that incoming matters were handled efficiently.

Lee believes that her team’s success has stemmed from an understanding of each

“For a job like this, where people believe in Twitter’s mission to encourage conversation in the world, people bring their whole selves to work.

One of my biggest responsibilities is . . . challenging them to grow in their careers.”

Simpson Thacher Congratulates

Michele Lee

Senior Director and Associate General Counsel, Head of Global Litigation, Regulatory, & Competition of Twitter

We Applaud Michele on Her Vision and Industry Leadership

team members’ individual working styles and how the people on the team complement each other. For her, it has also been critical to understand the lives of the people on her team outside of the office.

“For a job like this, where people believe in Twitter’s mission to encourage conversation in the world, people bring their whole selves to work,” Lee says. “One of my biggest responsibilities is understanding their motivations and challenging them to grow in their careers.”

In reflecting on her experience at law firms, Lee says she realized that one driver of law firm associate attrition is that there are not many women, especially women of color, at the top ranks of law firm partnership. She has encouraged her team at Twitter to focus on hiring diverse outside counsel as one step in changing this dynamic.

“In-house counsel have the ability to make an impact and increase the number of women and people of color at law firms by providing business to diverse partners and to law firms that prioritize diversity,” she explains.

While there has been progress in the legal profession, it’s far from the “post-racial” society many like to imagine the world has evolved into. For up-and-coming female lawyers of color, Lee has this advice: “There will be days when you want to give up because you have to work twice as hard to get half the recognition, praise, or advancement opportunities. Don’t give up.” ~

Morgan Samuels: A Different Kind of Executive Search Firm

As diverse as the clients we serve, our expert team doesn’t just search for candidates We immerse ourselves into organizations to determine the exact talent needs to define and transform your company’s future state. Morgan Samuel's re-defines executive search. A veteran led company with an 85% diversity rate, our disciplined and expansive approach shows not only in our work but in our remote workforce with a team spanning 22 cities.

Rather than simply filling roles, Morgan Samuels pinpoints a client’s specific needs and leverages our vast network to scour the entire talent market Using our proprietary assessment tools, we deliver candidates who are both a great business and cultural fit for the organization and it is reflective in our results, with 82% of our business originating from current or previous clients.

Monica Bua, Managing Director is a thought leader and a proven partner who helps world-class companies navigate even the most challenging times in innovation and an ever-evolving talent landscape She works at the cutting-edge, specializing in Emerging Products, Digital Media, B2B & B2C Technology, Ecommerce

The impact is huge — both for candidates and clients, in terms of helping executives define their careers, and companies shift strategies or experience major growth because of a placement. The exposure we have to top global boards and CEOs is extremely invigorating. I am also constantly wowed by our team. They are ninjas and relentless and really do recruit the best talent on the planet.

The Front-Office Advantage

By Zach Baliva

Southern California native Deborah Johnston grew up going to games at Angel Stadium. Today, instead of watching her favorite team compete on the diamond, she’s helping build its high-performing front office staff and one of the best workplace cultures in Major League Baseball.

Johnston has worked in HR for more than twenty years. Roles in various industries such as advertising, land development, and risk management have helped her develop expertise in employee relations, compliance, labor law, recruitment, and organizational development. “I’ve grown to love everything about human resources, and I’ve worked at many great places,” she says. “But for me, a job at the Los Angeles Angels is truly something special.”

The former Division I NCAA athlete earned a psychology degree from Florida State University. She understands the competitive nature of sports and what it takes to build an effective team both on and off the field. “A good softball team has a common goal, and a good workforce has to share a same common goal too,” she says.

Everyone at the Los Angeles Angels is committed to supporting their colleagues, creating a superior fan experience, and helping support baseball operations’ pursuit of the franchise’s first World Series championship since 2002. But that commitment didn’t evolve by chance—Johnston has worked with other executives to carefully craft and implement a corporate culture anchored by

transparency, openness, honesty, and trust. A belief that good ideas come from all levels drives her to create unique opportunities for collaboration.

HR hosts town hall meetings twice a year. Social events like kickball and bowling tournaments facilitate interdepartmental interactions. But most importantly, Johnston and her peers lead by example. She spends many hours in other offices and the stadium asking questions and soliciting feedback from employees, managers, and department heads.

Team president John Carpino is known for walking the Angel Stadium concourse before, during, and after home games. He knows part-time and event-day workers by name, and they feel comfortable approaching him

For Deborah Johnston, creating a great workplace for the Los Angeles Angels means leading by example, promoting diversity, and valuing each and every employee

“Our small size means we have to get recruiting and hiring right.”

with issues, concerns, or ideas, which is central to creating a family-friendly environment for employees and fans. “Amazing things can happen when you actually get to know your employees,” Johnston says. “You build trust, and you learn things that you can use to make your organization better.”

In 2017, Johnston adjusted employee welfare programs based on conversations Carpino and others had with staff members. The talks revealed that many Angels baseball employees had competing needs. While parts of the workforce wanted more health coverage, others preferred lower premiums. In response, the HR department expanded the organization’s high-deductible health plan and started offering a health savings account.

One other factor makes the organization unique: its size. Despite playing in one of MLB’s biggest markets, the Angels have just 1,800 employees. Their National League counterparts, the Los Angeles Dodgers, have 3,000. Johnston supports an 1,800-member workforce with a shockingly small HR department of just four people. This reality brings both challenges and opportunities; each person will get a greater chance to learn and contribute, but HR is under pressure to build the perfect team. “Our small size means we have to get recruiting and hiring right,” Johnston says.

Mayra Castro started working at the Angels after graduating from California State University. She’s grown and developed under Johnston’s leadership and now leads screening

Deborah Johnston Director of HR Los Angeles Angels

and recruiting as an HR manager. Behavioralbased interviews eliminate canned and rehearsed answers and force candidates to demonstrate how they really respond in difficult situations. Johnston has trained Castro and others to identify certain personality traits consistent with the Angels’ culture. She’s also asked managers to increase the number of diverse candidates with inclusive job descriptions and diverse hiring teams.

Today, the Angels are among the league’s leaders when it comes to front office and on-field diversity. Johnston often recruits women and ethnic minorities from her network of collegiate coaches. “The traits that student athletes have translate well to the professional environment, and I know diverse employees give our organization an advantage because we can reach the best results when we attack issues from different viewpoints,” Johnston says.

With new manager and two-time World Series champion Joe Maddon guiding a powerhouse lineup of the game’s best players, the future is bright for the Angels. They’re ready for a run at the playoffs, and Johnston has worked hard to make sure the front office is ready to support that quest. She’s built a friendly, welcoming, authentic environment that people want to be a part of—and that feeling of inclusion translates to game day operations and fans. For seventeen straight seasons, the Los Angeles Angels have drawn more than three million fans to be part of the Angels family. ~

“Amazing things can happen when you actually get to know your employees.

You build trust, and you learn things that you can use to make your organization better.”

Passion for People

As Ryan Specialty Group CHRO, Lisa J. Paschal leads on behalf of the company’s greatest asset: its people

By Keith Loria

At the University of Missouri, Lisa J. Paschal was in a degree program that focused on counseling and human resource services. “I was intrigued by human and organizational psychology—I loved classes in sociology and management principles,” she recounts. “I was fortunate enough to have a number of intern experiences that led me to know I wanted to work in a corporate environment rather than a government setting or clinical setting.”

Paschal also knew she wanted to work on behalf of a company’s greatest asset: its people.

“One of the things I love about HR is that it’s constantly changing,” explains Paschal, who is currently chief human resources officer at Chicago-based Ryan Specialty Group. “From new laws affecting

the workplace to technology and the everevolving employee expectations as the generations evolve through the workforce.”

She began her career in HR in the retail industry with National Convenience Stores before earning her JD at South Texas College of Law in Houston, Texas. Having already worked in HR for five years, she saw law school as a measure to further her career. She only worked in law for a bit because she was told that if you don’t practice right out of school, odds are you’ll never go back.

“I knew I wanted to get back in the corporate environment, but how would I know for sure if I never tried the other?” she shares. “After a couple of years practicing, still true to my interest in the employment space, I just

knew in my heart that a corporate environment was a better fit for me.”

So she returned to the corporate world, managing employee relations for Hess Oil. In the late ’90s, her husband was transferred to the Chicagoland area, so she had her entry into the insurance industry.

Paschal continued padding her HR résumé with experience at Hartford Financial Services and then Argo Group before joining Ryan Specialty Group, an international specialty insurance organization, as its CHRO in 2014.

“The opportunity to work for Pat Ryan, an icon in our industry, as well as the Chicago community was extremely attractive,” Paschal says. She was also drawn to the culture of the

company—one of innovation, client centricity, integrity, and teamwork.

As CHRO, Paschal is responsible for strategy and operations for the global HR function, such as compensation, benefits, talent acquisition, talent management, organizational development, and more. “Because we’re so acquisitive, the HR work that accompanies M&A is a big part of the role,” she adds.

All her experiences have helped frame her leadership style, which she describes as collaborative and approachable in the way she frames and analyzes issues.

“Like anyone who has been in the workplace for a while, my style has evolved over time,” Paschal explains. “The first step is

Lisa J. Paschal CHRO

Ryan Specialty Group

Courtesy of Ryan Specialty Group (Paschal), Ian Dikhtiar (Lion), Barry Neal (Two Prudential Plaza)

building the right team. I have learned over time to hire exceptionally bright people but also those with diverse backgrounds and experiences. It’s through that diversity that we as a team make better and more innovative decisions leading to better outcomes.”

Mentorship is important to Paschal, and she considers herself fortunate to have had wonderful mentors who helped shape her experiences.

“It was suggested to me early on that we all need our personal board of directors—a group of people to provide guidance, advice, and perspective on matters of significance, whether that’s career or personal,” she shares. “I found that to be so helpful in my own journey, life, and career that I am pas sionate to pay it forward.”

Over the course of her career, she’s men tored many young professionals, both within HR and other business functions. And mentor ship doesn’t need to be a formal program, she notes, but something as simple as talks over coffee breaks, lunch meetings, sharing articles of interest, or just being that sounding board outside someone’s normal chain of command.

It makes the challenging times more rewarding.”

We o er expert knowledge and execution of the specialty insurance products that we distribute and underwrite, allowing us to provide winning outcomes for our broker clients.

RSG provides innovative specialty insurance solutions for brokers, agents and carriers.

ryansg.com

Embracing Change through Limitless

Opportunities

Motorola Solutions HR VP Kathi Moore never has a dull moment, adopting a growth mindset while leading multiple HR functions

By Clint Worthington • Portraits by Gillian Fry

Alex Loup (Hand and leaves), Muzammil Soorma (Chicago skyline)

Kathi Moore

VP of HR & Global Rewards Motorola Solutions

Kathi Moore is no stranger to change. With decades of experience in human resources and global compensation, Moore has helped a number of companies navigate through strategic transformations, rebranding efforts, and leadership transitions. Now, as vice president of human resources for Motorola Solutions, she finds herself in the most rewarding position of her career: helping the ninety-one-year-old technology company maintain the flexibility of a start-up.

Moore began in human resources early in her career, accepting an administrative role in HR for a small software company right out of college. As her career progressed, Moore found herself supporting a number of companies during periods that would come to be defined as iconic moments in their history—from Ameritech’s nearly record-breaking acquisition by SBC to McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” campaign, which revolutionized its business.

“It’s becoming more important for people to work for a company with a strong purpose, especially in times of transformation . . . and that’s exactly what you’ll find at Motorola Solutions.”

“Seeing these companies through these significant changes was a fantastic experience for me,” Moore says.

But it wasn’t until Moore joined Motorola that she felt she was able to leverage her experiences for the greater good. Moore joined the company as an individual rewards con -

sultant for one of Motorola’s many business units. Three years later, in 2011, the company split into two separately traded companies. Moore stayed with Motorola Solutions, the public safety spinoff.

After the split, Moore began leading the global compensation team, and four years in, was given additional responsibilities—the role of HR business partner for three of the company’s executive committee members.

“My leader pushed me out of my comfort zone, which I didn’t realize I needed and was ready for,” Moore says. “It's this ‘push’ that makes the Motorola experience so unique. Those who show determination and talent are given limitless opportunities to grow, influence direction, and make an impact.”

Moore acknowledges that the skills she’d acquired throughout her career were instrumental in helping her adapt to this expanded role. “Some view specializing in compensation as a limit to broader opportunities in HR,” Moore says. “But I found that my ability to make data-driven decisions better equipped me to be an HR business partner and talent management leader.”

As she grew into the role, she gained confidence and soon took on even more

We

“People outside the company tell me they’ve never heard of a job quite like mine before. I tell them that’s my favorite part about it.”

Patina delivers innovative solutions – from interim leadership to strategic initiative & project execution, coaching & mentoring, and executive search.

salute Kathi Moore for her passion and vision to maximize talent and strength within Motorola.

Mercer is proud to collaborate with Kathi Moore and Motorola Solutions to elevate the employee experience and enhance business results. Congratulations, Kathi on your meaningful achievements and outstanding leadership. We are honored to be part of your journey and look forward to your continued success. CULTURE

responsibilities—accepting a leadership position in talent management, creating succession plans for key critical roles, and leading her team to create a new framework for succession planning for all executive roles and high-potential talent.

These experiences all led her to where she is today, managing global rewards, including benefits and executive compensation, and serving as the HR business partner for the product and sales organization.

“People outside the company tell me they’ve never heard of a job quite like mine before,” Moore says. “I tell them that’s my favorite part about it. That, and the support and encouragement I’ve had from my leaders to challenge myself and grow.”

Moore sees her multifaceted role as supporting several interconnected pieces of Motorola Solutions’ mission to “help people be their best in the moments that matter.”

“It’s becoming more important for people to work for a company with a strong purpose, especially in times of transformation like we’ve experienced [in 2020]—and that’s exactly what you’ll find at Motorola Solutions,” Moore says.

What makes Motorola Solutions unique, Moore explains, is the actionable solutions

the company develops to make the world a safer place, including providing missioncritical communications for first responders.

Moore is highly aware of the difficulties many women face in the corporate world but says that Motorola Solutions’ commitment to inclusion and diversity made this a nonissue for her. She notes that a key component to developing female leaders is mentorship, and she enthusiastically mentors anyone of any gender at Motorola Solutions who shows potential.

“Every employee offers a unique perspective and is encouraged to have a voice,” Moore says. “Mentoring others—and helping them elevate their voices—is one of the most rewarding parts of my job.”

Moore says the limitless opportunities to grow and to give back, as well as the company’s mission, are what make working for the company so meaningful. “I go to work every day with a sense of purpose,” Moore says. “That’s why I’m proud to be a Motorolan.” ~

At Mercer, we believe in building brighter futures. Together, we’re redefining the world of work, reshaping retirement and investment outcomes, and unlocking real health and well-being. We do this by understanding the data and applying it with a human touch, and by turning ideas into action to spark positive change.

“My leader pushed me out of my comfort zone, which I didn’t realize I needed and was ready for. It’s this ‘push’ that makes the Motorola experience so unique.”

Build Trust to Transform Culture

No stranger to operating within male-dominated environments, Christina Dewey shares her secrets for affecting HR change

By Stephanie Zeilenga

Christina Dewey isn’t afraid of an HR challenge. When she came on board as vice president of human resources at Plastic Omnium, she was tasked with transforming the company’s outdated culture and cultivating a progressive HR team.

As a global leader in automotive equipment, Plastic Omnium has traditionally been

male-dominated. Driving change from within a male-centric environment wasn’t a new challenge for Dewey, however. She spent nearly nine years at Eaton, a multinational electrical and manufacturing company, culminating in a role as HR regional operations leader overseeing employee and labor relations across fourteen manufacturing plants.

Christina Dewey VP of HR, The Americas Plastic Omnium

Dewey learned to employ both evolutionary and revolutionary tactics to get her ideas and projects off the ground at the organization. Although Eaton had strong diversity and inclusion initiatives, she still had to work through unconscious biases to get through to the all-male leadership teams. Growing up in Detroit, dominated by the auto industry, proved a perk, as did her lifelong love for football. “I had to build credibility and rapport with the team,” she says. “Being able to add to conversations around sports definitely helped.”

Dewey also built rapport with workers in the manufacturing plants by making an effort to understand their jobs and getting her

ing all day alongside the production team members. “This helped them feel that HR was part of the team,” she says.

When she wanted to transition two of Eaton’s manufacturing sites to all-salaried workforces, she was able to go to the leadership team with valuable insight into what the production workers thought about the change and how they would manage it. “This allowed leadership to understand this was something employees wanted and would also benefit the organization,” Dewey recollects. This change improved productivity and absenteeism, as well as the overall culture. “Workers felt like leadership supported and trusted them. They came to work with an entirely different philosophy.”

Robert Bruce (Dewey), Dave Adamson (Football), Vlad Kutepov (Leaves)

Dewey moved to Plastic Omnium in 2016, where she had to start from the ground floor building credibility with both leadership and employees. When she joined, HR wasn’t even typically included in the interview process. “It appeared they had never had a progressive HR leader and didn’t understand the true value HR could bring to the organization, so I had to start with the basics,” she says.

First, she demonstrated her team could simply hire people. Then, noticing a dearth of growth opportunities for employees, she began pushing for hiring not just for skill but also for future development, adding behavioral and learning agility questions to the hiring process. “Before, the managers were just looking at who could do the job right now, but I wanted them to look at who could come in knowing 70 percent of the job but also had learning agility—having learning agility meant a candidate would be a high performer and could take on a more senior role in a few years,” Dewey comments.

Managers were resistant to this change in hiring strategy. To persuade them, Dewey

began requiring every candidate to give a presentation of their résumé and a technical problem they’ve solved in a prior role.

“This process shows us a lot about how candidates communicate, how they field questions from groups of people, and how they organize and present their thoughts,” Dewey says. “Managers would see candidates with twenty-five years of experience could not react quickly to unfamiliar situations or communicate with the leaders in the room, as well as the person with five years of experience.”

Once she laid a groundwork of trust with leaders and managers, Dewey began transforming Plastic Omnium’s culture. She brought in the company’s first talent development leader, built a new internship program, started an online recognition program, and implemented talent reviews and talent connections to introduce senior leaders to promising employees. She also rebuilt the majority of the HR team, bringing on board people to promote cultural changes and employee engagement. “We started with little wins, and now we have

“We’ve brought in early talent and built in ways to work crossfunctionally across sites.

People are actually applying for jobs at different locations, whereas before we had to really encourage them to even consider moving.”

a progressive culture that includes summer hours, parental leave, and real growth opportunities for the employees,” Dewey says.

Thanks to Dewey’s persistent work, Plastic Omnium has a much more engaged and collaborative workforce with lower turnover. “We needed to evolve the way we look at talent development; if you worked at a manufacturing site, you would stay there the majority of your career,” Dewey says. “Now we’ve brought in early talent and built in ways to work cross-functionally across sites. People are actually applying for jobs at different locations, whereas before we had to really encourage them to even consider moving.”

Dewey has found a lot of success affecting change in male-dominated industries and has always encouraged other women to join

her in the manufacturing field. For women just getting started, cultivating relationships with female and male advocates and mentors is invaluable—especially if you’re operating in a male-dominated sector. She also notes it’s important to remember HR’s ultimate mission is to advocate success for both the employees and the company.

“If you don’t know what employees are doing or thinking, it will be hard for the HR department to be a real advocate for employees to the leadership team,” she explains. “We need to learn from them, work on the line with them, eat lunch with them. If you take time to build relationships with employees, you’ll have the ability to move the organization to greater heights, because you’ll have employee buy-in, which is just as important as leadership buy-in.” ~

“I wanted [our managers] to look at who could come in knowing 70 percent of the job but also had learning agility.”

Platform for Engagement

Through Enspire’s technology, CEO Amanda Wiles transforms how businesses effectively communicate with employees

By Stephanie Zeilenga

Amanda Wiles founded Enspire, a custom-branded employer application and communications platform, on the belief that people should come first. The company, founded in 2015, has this people-centric philosophy baked into its very name: Enspire means to “inspire everyone.”

“Investing in people is not often talked about in the tech industry—too often the focus moves to what a technology can ‘do’ at the expense of the people who build it or

ignoring the people who would use it,” Wiles says. “My goal is to re-center the conversation around how people use technology to solve problems and deeply invest in the high talent creating solutions. When you put people first, the impact of the technology is much bigger.

“Plus,” she adds, “when you invest in people, your teams are stronger, more supportive, and inspired, which leads to client relationships that are stronger, trusting, and collaborative to drive further success.”

The idea for Enspire came after Wiles spent twenty years working with large employers to attract and retain employees and seeing innovative employee programs repeatedly struggle to address the core problem: employee access. “Enspire took the initiative to improve employee access to all communication by integrating all workforce solutions into one employer app built to empower employees to take action,” she says.

To do this, Enspire’s technology is a codefree platform that is easily customizable for each client. The Enspire Analytics Engine provides sophisticated data analytics to understand employee behavior, identify specific needs, and effectively engage the workforce. Enspire consolidates all employer communications into one app for easier navigation. And, even more, Enspire’s team of engagement experts ensure each client’s digital experiences reflect and communicate their strategic business initiatives.

“Enspire’s combination of technology, analytics, and people creates engagement intelligence to align employee needs and strategic business initiatives,” Wiles says. “Our goal is to drive results with effective communication, not just raise awareness. To achieve this, Enspire designs app experiences that meet both employer and employee needs. Solving employee problems is critical to adoption and utilization.”

Clearly, Wiles solves a problem that employers are eager to address. Enspire has already integrated with more than two thou -

Travis Tank (Wiles), Maria Savenko/Shutterstock.com (Hands holding phone), Roschetzky Photography/Shutterstock.com (Austin skyline)

Amanda Wiles

CEO Enspire

sand vendors. The company has seen consistent exponential growth, increasing its client base by ten times since its founding. “The Enspire platform continues to adapt with each new client’s unique set of use cases,” she says. “Our platforms are built for people. Enspire’s advanced technology and success is a direct result of valuing and investing in the people in our teams and our clients.”

Enspire assigns each client a dedicated creative director who specializes in employee needs and behaviors for their industry and builds digital experiences to achieve their goals. Enspire visual designers, UX and UI designers, and engagement analytics experts provide a supportive team for each client to ensure app experiences inspire employees and drive results.

“Enspire is built on the core value of serving and supporting people,” Wiles says. “Enspire leadership invests in our people and our teams grow our expertise together. When we collaborate with clients, we invest in the people we work with first.

“What drives success? Where are their challenges? What puts them in a position to be successful?” Wiles continues. “We make this our primary objective which allows our clients to focus on their business strategy.”

One of Enspire’s many success stories is its work with Plastic Omnium, an automotive supplier with facilities around the world. Wiles and her team worked closely with Christina Dewey, Plastic Omnium’s vice president of HR, and her teams to customize an employee app that integrates all employee resources at a local level. Plastic Omnium’s app already achieved more than fifty-two thousand app engagements and a 77 percent app download rate with employees.

During COVID-19, Plastic Omnium used the Enspire Platform to give employees real-time updates on how their local offices were responding to the pandemic. “Plastic Omnium was able to reach out to each employee location with leadership updates, facility status, safety training, and benefits—

all consolidated into one app,” Wiles says. “Christina’s team worked hard to identify employee needs during the peak of the pandemic and integrate app experiences for COVID-19 resources.”

Enspire platform personalization was key. Instead of inundating employees with irrelevant information, Plastic Omnium was able to personalize app experiences and send target push notifications by workplace location.

When it was safe to begin bringing employees back to work, Enspire worked with Plastic Omnium to develop a “back to work” app experience that provided safety protocols, training videos, and localized information.

Wiles sees more growth ahead for Enspire as the company continues to advance its crisis management solutions and benefits engagement. “Enspire will continue to inspire everyone,” she says. “We invest in people, technology advancements, and engagement intelligence to drive powerful results as a leading employee communication solution.” ~

“Our platforms are built for people.

Enspire’s advanced technology and success is a direct result of valuing and investing in the people in our teams and our clients.”

Collaborative Communicators

To ensure company and culture success across a global remote workforce, Stella Tran and her team at HighRadius Corporation know that communication is key

By Frederick Jerant

Houston-based HighRadius Corporation is a fintech software-as-a-service company that helps companies automate complex accounts receivable and treasury processes by using autonomous systems based on artificial intelligence. Its global customer base ranges from more than two hundred of the Fortune 1000 companies down to midsize

enterprises. As HighRadius’s vice president of people and culture, Stella Tran finds that collaborative communication in all directions is an essential tool for her team’s success.

“In HR, you have to be agile enough to be a coach, a confidant, or a copilot. Sometimes we’re called upon to be all three in one day. It’s how we become an extension of the

teams we’re supporting,” Tran says. “Because we want to optimize them for success, we always strive for balanced decision-making between the employees and the company. We look for a ‘win’ on both sides.”

It’s no surprise, then, that the hiring process is highly collaborative. A lot of time is invested upfront to define roles, and hiring

“Our leadership principles and core values provide a common language and operating framework that enable success and alignment globally for our ‘one company, one culture’ mentality.”

Stella Tran VP of People & Culture

managers are directly involved in sourcing their own candidates—which increases the response rate to more than 50 percent.

“We look for creative career paths; it doesn’t need to be a straight-line progression as long as we see growth in scope and positions along the way,” Tran explains. “We look across complete past to present life experiences that indicate someone who can be more agile and stretch into different positions and responsibilities. The bigger the track record of success, the less someone has to check all of the qualification boxes on the job description.”

Potential new hires meet a diverse panel of interviewers, who assess the candidate independently and present their individual conclusions in writing with a definitive recommendation to the hiring manager. The hiring manager then synthesizes and evaluates. All the notes from the panelists are shared after everyone has submitted to avoid affecting each other’s recommendations.

Tran adds that the team is empowered to champion candidates who might be slightly disruptive of the status quo or have other distinguishing qualities—but they aren’t brought on to have an immediate

impact. With HighRadius’s new onboarding program, new leaders are encouraged to “be humble before they rumble”—a core value—and adopt the company’s leadership principles and core values.

“It’s a part of our culture to be a student first, and these values and principles will be a significant driver of their future success with us if they can be embedded into everyday practice. It’s problematic to have a bunch of leaders creating cultures of their own,” Tran explains. “Our leadership principles and core values provide a common language and operating framework that enable

HighRadius Corporation

success and alignment globally for our ‘one company, one culture’ mentality.”

Two-way communication starts before they are officially on board and throughout their tenure. A member of Tran’s team checks in on the first day, and new hires are offered an employee playbook that maps all the touchpoints of the employee journey, roundtable discussions, one-on-ones, pulse surveys, quarterly recognition, virtual happy hours, and regular virtual town halls. “We also put Sashi Narahari, our founder and CEO, in the ‘hot seat,’ and he doesn’t shy away from direct questions. It reinforces our core value of ‘being bold and blunt,’” she adds.

Employee performance is reviewed every six months, in terms of KPIs and other established standards. “We are very much a ‘numbers don’t lie’ company,” Tran says. And the reviews are not one-way streets. “Our employees are urged to present feedback to their managers during their reviews. We encourage them to bring solutions, not problems. It’s part of our ‘call BS on the boss’ core value. If you’re thoughtful and pragmatic, you can challenge just about anything.”

The COVID-19 pandemic forced HighRadius to abruptly shift its work-fromhome population in 2020 from just 5 percent of its global workforce to 100 percent, and Tran reports that it was actually a smooth transition overall. “Because we are a global company,” she explains, “we’re already in a

good rhythm in many ways for everyone to stay connected and collaborate remotely on projects. We are flexible to work across time zones to accommodate one another.”

At the beginning of the pandemic, the HighRadius leadership team developed new strategic operating plans and redefined KPIs. To provide transparency, everyone’s vision, goals, and initiatives were published so they could track against KPIs—one way to drive dotOne (one in one thousand) performance and a high-performance culture.

“We’ve found that if people have clear goals and a solid understanding of how the business is operating and how they’re measured, there’ll be few questions about what you need to focus on,” she explains. “We try to be as proactive as possible in communicating changes broadly.”

Despite the ongoing challenges, Tran highlights another core value, which is “bringing the zing!” when directing her team. “Positive attitudes and having a growth mindset are a key part of our culture,” she said, “I don’t think I’ve been to one meeting where I haven’t laughed or exchanged smiles, no matter how intense or crazy it gets. It inspires others to do the same.” ~

Foster LLP: “We are honored to partner with an HR professional as dedicated and exceptional as Stella Tran and her team at HighRadius Corporation. From her business acumen to her strategic HR leadership, Stella deserves any and all well-deserved success that comes her way.” –Helene Dang, Partner

“In HR, you have to be agile enough to be a coach, a confidant, or a copilot.”

Transformation Without Turbulence

How CIO May Huneidi returned to Hollander Sleep Products and led a structural reorganization to align IT with business goals and strategy

By STEPHANIE ZEILENGA

May Huneidi excels at bringing calm to chaos. After two decades in the IT world orchestrating transformational change, she’s earned the reputation.

Huneidi’s career includes stints as chief information officer and other top IT roles for several global organizations with revenues up to $3 billion. She’s currently CIO at Hollander Sleep Products, the largest pillow manufacturer in North America. She originally joined the company in 2012, left in 2016, then rejoined in 2019 after receiving a call from former CEO Chris Baker asking her to help Hollander overcome business challenges from the past four years.

Hollander was going through major growth and transformation that required upgrades and modernization to its business systems and IT infrastructure. “The business had outgrown the legacy custom

business applications,” she explains, “and the IT organization at all levels did not have any expertise in any of the Oracle systems that had been implemented.”

Huneidi quickly assessed the situation, established the strategy, and planned various initiatives to remediate the mediumand long-term challenges. She recruited the needed talent and competency and worked on maintaining a strong team that has been able to eliminate 90 percent of the problematic customizations from the initial Oracle implementation.

“This was a major challenge in so many ways—on both the business and technical sides,” she says. “I continue to be grateful for the opportunity to work with so many of our business and IT teams to align and achieve our goals.”

A lot had happened in the four years Huneidi had been away from Hollander, including the pending integration of an

MAY HUNEIDI

acquisition about three years ago. Within Huneidi’s first month back at the company, she got to work restructuring the IT organization for better alignment with business goals, quickly implementing a critical project that was a key prerequisite to the pending integration.

This was not the first time Huneidi had led a structural reorganization. The work often involves retooling skills and addressing gaps in IT capabilities. “These changes are not easy, especially with organizations that have not had the mindset and culture to continuously adapt to the business impact of technology and market changes,” she says. “It’s difficult when you are trying to go against the water flow, developing the plan and aligning leadership and key teams to ignore forces working against the changes.”

Huneidi also played a key role in Hollander’s financial restructuring following a Chapter 11 filing earlier in 2019. The timeline was aggressive—the company had just 120 days to complete the process. “This was an extensive, involved process that none

of us leaders had gone through before,” Huneidi says. “My role was investigating and researching every available option so Hollander could continue to have a reliable technical foundation and mission-critical business systems at a reduced cost.”

The company’s high-end backend architecture, which had unlimited capacity and resources, was one cost element responsible for the financial trouble. Hollander discovered that the company was only utilizing a very small percentage of the architecture’s capabilities.

She and her team (including key providers Auxis, Gladiium, and Cark Marks) carefully vetted a replacement architecture,

implementing it in about a month—with no negative impact or disruption. “This was a huge risk for anyone that reviewed the scope and timeline, including myself and my team, but it needed to happen,” she says. “In addition to other activities, this resulted in cost reductions in millions.”

That challenge was followed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Huneidi and her team were essential in ensuring business operations ran smoothly during stay-at-home orders as well as in accommodating remote workers. “I had to continue to maintain the technical and systems environment to ensure reliability of the mission-critical business systems, infrastructure, and security while

“To be effective in IT, you need to have solid business and technical experiences and you must maintain a positive, openminded attitude and stay focused on the business goals and strategies to continue your alignment.”

also considering the human challenge of everyone dealing with their personal circumstances,” Huneidi says. “As the CIO, it certainly caused me to be more empathetic with our teams, to support them and give them whatever reassurance I could to minimize their fears of the unknown.

“Hollander has come a long way and is still standing,” she adds. “I’m confident that with our strong leadership with our CEO Thomas Pinnau, we can achieve our goals and a positive return to the Hollander team and Center Lane Partners.”

For other aspiring IT leaders, Huneidi says growing a tough skin and continuing to learn and adapt are important. “You have to take responsibility for your skills

development, and you must love what you do,” she says. “To be effective in IT, you need to have solid business and technical experiences, and you must maintain a positive, open-minded attitude and stay focused on the business goals and strategies to continue your alignment.”

A tough skin can only come from experience and taking on new challenges, Huneidi adds. “When you’re dealing with issues impacting mission-critical business applications and infrastructure, it’s easy to react due to the pressure exerted,” she says. “I’ve learned that emphasizing the factual data, root causes, and critical needs is an essential part of breaking down the chaos to manageable parts.”

“As the CIO, it certainly caused me to be more empathetic with our teams, to support them and give them whatever reassurance I could to minimize their fears of the unknown.”

MAY HUNEIDI

The Business of HR

CHRO David Malfitano and his team create tangible initiatives to support Wayne Farms employees’ well-being while contributing to the company’s mission

By LUCY CAVANAGH

For the past seventeen years, David Malfitano has followed David Ulrich’s guidance and vision for human resources: HR should be ensuring the business is successful so that, in turn, its people can be taken care of. It’s what helped him transform the HR department with a new “weenie”-free approach when he joined Wayne Farms in 2003.

“I want my CEO to say, ‘Hey, where’s my HR person?’” Malfitano says. “I’m asking as many questions as the other leaders at the

table. It makes you accountable when you do that.”

Since Profile spoke with him in 2012, Malfitano and his team have had plenty to take pride in, given the poultry company’s success. Wayne Farms has consistently been a top performer across all key benchmarking metrics, including profitability, as measured by Agristats, an industry benchmarking service.

This success, combined with his strategic positioning of the HR department, allows Malfitano and his team to funnel that success back to Wayne Farms employees.

DEVELOP YOUR PEOPLE

One of the efforts the HR team has implemented is a quarterly coaching practice, where employees receive frequent feedback and are not tied to a yearly (and therefore often inaccurate) number. This supports Wayne Farms’ culture of leadership, one of the company’s core values.

Malfitano embodies leadership, and in turn, he serves his employees by helping them develop their talent. That means striking a balance between educating them and giving them enough slack to do the jobs they were hired to do. “I may not be warm and

David Malfitano CHRO Wayne Farms

fuzzy; I want results,” he explains. “People do better when you have high standards.”

Wayne Farms values leadership and continuous improvement, but most important, it values the employees themselves. “Our value system starts at the top of the organization and goes all the way down,” Malfitano says. “A great CHRO has to have great credibility with peers, the CEO, and their teams. If you don’t have that credibility, they’re probably not going to want to follow you.”

ADD VALUE

Thanks to Malfitano, Wayne Farms is a founding member of the Health Transformation Alliance (HTA), an employer-sponsored co-op born out of the HR Policy Association that negotiates better healthcare contracts with providers. Wayne Farms is a small fish among the likes of American Express, Coca-Cola, and the other thirty-six founding members, but by making the strategic decision to join when the alliance was first proposed, Malfitano guaranteed an equal seat at the table when it came to negotiations.

“I knew that hooking my wagon to the biggest companies in the country and being a part of this initiative would be a way to better position my company,” he explains.

Wayne Farms now benefits from the HTA’s power and expertise in healthcare, which translates to lower healthcare costs for both the company and its employees. “To accomplish that tall order, we need leaders

Courtesy of Wayne Farms

who are visionaries, who can see what can be done, and experienced HR executives who understand what must be done,” says Rob Andrews, CEO of the HTA. “We are fortunate that David is such a leader.”

Membership in the HTA also allows for a fundamental shift from “fee for service” healthcare to an investment in the actual improvement in health, plus a tremendous reduction of the cost of prescription drugs.

Pulling the trigger to join the HTA was a perfect example of a strategic move that Malfitano made that impacted the company’s bottom line. At the end of the day, that captures his philosophy with HR. “If we are not adding value,” he explains, “we should not exist.”

DON’T REINVENT THE WHEEL

Other efforts bolster the value Wayne Farms sees in its employees.

The company has on-site medical clinics and a deep dedication to “zero-accident safety,” proven by their 1.65 DART (Days Away, Restricted or Transferred) rate, which is below the industry standard of 2.9. Beyond their employees’ physical well-being, Wayne Farms has invested in marketplace chaplains, who provide a support service to help individuals in the workplace and in their personal lives.

But Malfitano does not take credit for what Wayne Farms didn’t innovate and organize; bringing in chaplains was

something Pilgrim’s Pride was doing at its poultry plants. “It is silly to only be inventive,” he explains. “I’m happy to share a good idea and happy to figure out what’s in the best interest for our company. We have a passion for paying attention to things that can help our business and our employees.”

And that passion extends to the external HR associations that Malfitano is part of. As copresident of the Human Resources Leadership Forum of Atlanta, Malfitano is driven by the contributions he can make. At Forum meetings, Malfitano and the other members discuss best practices, share resources, network, and build a community around HR.

“I like to say I hate HR people. They get offended by that, but I like good businesspeople who understand HR,” he explains. “I try to carry that message. When I’m watching people in meetings at associations, when I hear people talking about HR stuff and not how impactful to the business things are, I lose it.”

on this well-deserved honor. We have the privilege of calling David a partner and appreciate the opportunity to support him and the entire Wayne Farms team.

Making our clients’ businesses better.

For over five decades, our clients have depended on our risk management, employee benefits and retirement services expertise, helping them take risks and grow.

“I want my CEO to say, ‘Hey, where’s my HR person?’ I’m asking as many questions as the other leaders at the table. It makes you accountable when you do that.”

DAVID MALFITANO

The food production industry is constantly looking to attract and retain talent. Wayne Farms partnered with Lockton to implement a service model allowing strategy to be driven from the boardroom to the breakroom. Today Wayne Farms has a process to measure and manage consistent employee service levels across eleven locations, while improving ROI on benefit investments. To learn more about Lockton’s proprietary employee service model, please visit lockton.com/bci

Count on Community

At Virginia Community College System, Randall Ellis crafts narrative from data to enable students’ success across the state

By CORA BERG

Passionate and practical, Randall Ellis is not only interested in numbers but also wants to understand the stories those numbers tell.

“What we do really means something,” says Ellis, controller and chief accounting officer for Virginia Community College System (VCCS).

Ellis oversees twenty-three community colleges as well as a Shared Services Center and the system office—a total of twenty-five integrated agencies serving tens of thousands of students. Ellis’s team acts as a support hub for transactions with the state and regulations enforcement. He responds to questions from all corners of Virginia

about reporting and accounting issues and pushing out state funding, looking at factors like enrollment and class numbers to determine allocations.

As much as he participates with schools as individual entities, Ellis also assesses VCCS as a unified structure. To enable students’ success throughout the state, larger schools often help provide for smaller schools through allocation sharing. “We have never had complaints about equity issues from larger schools,” he says, happy to be a part of a system geared toward the whole.

Ellis’s passion shows when he talks about the impact his work has on individuals throughout Virginia. He speaks of adult learners who return to school, earn

Randall Ellis Controller and Chief Accounting Officer Virginia Community College System

certificates, and massively increase their wages. He speaks of students who finish prerequisite classes at a fraction of a four-year school’s cost before transferring to finish a degree.

Ellis knows that attending a community college can carry a stigma. However, as a father to a child who attended community college before transferring to a four-year institution, he knows the choice is economically savvy. For the practical accountant, there is no contest. “I don’t see students every day,” Ellis says. “But when students come in to share their stories, it’s rewarding.”

VCCS means unique access to opportunities in depressed regions, especially in Virginia’s coal country. “The word

VIRGINIA COMMUNITY COLLEGE SYSTEM BY THE NUMBERS

32,617 degrees, diplomas, and certificates earned 2018-2019

23 colleges

40 campuses

44% minority students, 13% military-related students, and 18% first-generation students

23,100 high school students received career coaching

45,486 high school students earned college credit through dual enrollment

Source: Virginia Community College System

‘community’ really means a lot around some of our campuses, especially in rural areas,” Ellis says.

The colleges are integral civic supporters, offering community financial growth as well as community-based faculty. Ellis describes a new, state-of-the-art building that recently opened way out on the eastern shore of Virginia. “You should have seen the number of people that came to the ribbon cutting,” he says. “We are making things work with not much money.”

Ellis’s own educational experience helps him appreciate what community colleges offer. A first-generation college student from a Virginia town of two thousand people, he ended up at the University of Maryland. “There were more students there than people in my entire county,” he says. “I had to figure it out on my own.” He did, a love of

math and business guiding him to accounting, though he knows many first-generation college students do not make it and community colleges offer important support to that population.

He spent seventeen years as a CPA at a public accounting firm, but he never wanted to be on the partner track. Ellis liked the interactions with small business and other clients. This time and experience laid excellent foundations for transferring to higher education. When Ellis took an opportunity at University of Virginia (UVA), he found himself the only CPA on staff. Beyond tax issues, he had deep knowledge of governmental accounting, including higher education, having audited them for years. He could synthesize key information for the university.

At UVA, he expanded his skill set as associate controller from number crunching to

analysis, making narratives and conclusions from data. Now he applies this expertise to spending consistencies across different schools, determining best practices and procedures. “I step back and analyze,” he says. “I help the ‘business’ to help it better educate students.”

Ellis also helps build relationships between the state’s four-year schools and VCCS. As these relationships flourish, he connects with community college systems in other states. Ellis serves on the executive board of the Southern Association of College and University Business Officers, where he fosters interactions that improve his impact in Virginia.

One of Ellis’s recent projects involved a massive effort to enact the Governor’s G3 program: get educated, get a job, give back. Passed in February 2020, the initiative’s

intent is at no additional cost to students. This will help bridge the gap by funding tuition not covered by other aid, Ellis explains.

Two months later, G3 went on hold. “We were ready for financial aid awards to go out, and then COVID-19 hit,” he says in an April 2020 interview, but he remains hopeful that the program will move forward in the future.

Though the G3 program had an uncertain trajectory because of COVID-19, Ellis continues to help colleges focus on the future. He maintains constant communication with the schools, offering weekly updates and turning information around quickly so schools can remain responsive.

“We don’t have the fallback money and financial cushion schools with large endowments have,” he says. “We must look at the bottom line, and we have to balance things.”

Based on the narrative previous data tells, Ellis says economic downturns correlate with enrollment increases. It is his job to be prepared. No matter what comes, Ellis will continue to leverage funds to help get all students to graduation.

While crunching numbers and data, he appreciates his role’s complexities. “I help ease fears,” he says, leaning on his passion and practicality through everchanging times.

Payment technology for a smarter campus

“From powerful payment technology to account managers you can trust and rely on, you’ll find working with Nelnet Campus Commerce to be unlike anything else.

Each institution we work with has unique needs. We tailor our entire customer experience to meet the needs of our partners. Because that’s what a partner does – and that’s what a partner deserves.”

– JENNI FRIESEN, MANAGER, HIGHER ED ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT

“The word

‘community’ really means a lot around some of our campuses, especially in rural areas.”

RANDALL ELLIS

JENNI FRIESEN MANAGER, HIGHER ED ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT Nelnet Campus Commerce

How to Make a Great Accountant

RoundPoint Mortgage’s Robert Leist shares three keys to his success in accounting: analytical thinking, communication, and tech

By CORA BERG

Robert Leist’s job is to look both forward and backward. As chief accounting officer for RoundPoint Mortgage Servicing Corporation, his responsibilities include overseeing the company’s accounting group, treasury operations, cashiering, and investor reporting. That means everything from recording and assessing the numbers to getting monthly receipts to mortgage owners and posting loan payments.

To successfully orchestrate this array of functions, Leist reviews monthly financials and agreements, looking at the realities of what has already happened while, at the same time, keeping an eye on

emerging reporting mandates and other industry shifts. He imagines into the future to design long-term strategies and possible platform integrations.

As the business and the world change, he continually asks and answers the question, “How do we respond and architect the solution?”

Leist came to RoundPoint, a company primarily focused on servicing loans and securities sold by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae, as a veteran in the field with a deep philosophical love of his craft.

“People think you must be good at math to be an accountant,” he says. A huge advocate of the liberal arts, he credits his bachelor’s degree in English, not his later

master’s degree in accounting or any math chops, with the core of his skills. “In an English program, you learn to take principles and then evaluate themes and concepts against them,” he explains. “You articulate ideas and conclusions and justify them.”

Analysis, not necessarily arithmetic, is the key. For Leist, accounting is asking what the principles are, what the facts of the transaction are, and then how to measure the transaction using the principles. Comparing his literature classes to his current position, he says that “the only difference is that the outcomes are numbers instead of theory papers.”

Along with analytical thinking, Leist developed another pillar of his career during

his college years: clear communication. While many accountants are not trained in writing, he says he sees his ability to clearly convey complex ideas as invaluable.

During a tenure at JPMorgan & Co., one of the largest banks in the world at the time, Leist remembers that “every time there were new rules, we had to create strategies and communicate them across sixteen countries. Being a good writer is critical.” Now, as he guides managers of four teams for RoundPoint, communication continues to be a hallmark of success.

Leist stumbled into accounting after he took a postundergrad back-office job at a brokerage firm, thinking to pay bills while he applied to law school. He started doing some accounting and fell for the profession. Eleven years at Arthur Andersen taught him the profession, and then, at JPMorgan, he branched out. His work included designing the tech side of accounting. The company needed a tool to consolidate more than three hundred legal entities on a monthly basis.

When no software on the market fit the bill, Leist took on a user manager role and

Robert Leist Chief Accounting Officer RoundPoint Mortgage Servicing Corporation

Creating opportunities for your company to succeed.

helped create a system. “It ran for more than ten years,” he says. Leist also holds a patent on an electronic billing and payment rules system used to handle complex real estate contracts by, he explains, “filtering everything to make sure terms of orders fulfill rules.” The system, which has since been commercialized, increased efficiency and had a dramatic impact. “Tech does not change principles,” Leist explains. “It changes processes.”

Starting from a clear understanding of what needs to be accomplished, he applies the all-important analysis and communication skills to building and employing tech systems that get his team where they need to go. New systems often offer enhanced analytics, he explains, providing a clear view of problems. According to Leist, much of the value in the tech systems he introduces comes from the fact that, with such systems, “people can spend their time solving problems, not running numbers.”

This engagement with tech continues to be a central characteristic of Leist’s work. When he arrived at RoundPoint in 2014, he came aboard a burgeoning company with a small accounting department that mostly worked manually. Leist implemented many systems to improve capabilities, such as a

treasury system software that sends and receives transactions and reports from all banks, he says. Maturing tech like this means that, while the company has grown substantially, staffing for the accounting department has remained lean. Leist is happy to look at where his department sits and say, “We now have scalable corporate accounting functions.”

Forty-six years into his career, Leist appreciates the tech his team uses, but never underestimates the importance of the people running the tech and analyzing the numbers and the principles. “Human capital is the only asset I have, besides maybe some chairs and tables,” he says with a laugh. “I must manage and develop it, or I don’t have anything.”

For Leist, as he looks forward and backward, a constant goal is that his employees are supported to be better in the future than they were in the past.

BBVA USA ranks among the top twenty-five largest commercial banks in the US based on deposit market share. We are honored to have Bob Leist and RoundPoint Mortgage Servicing Corporation as a commercial client. We look forward to creating more opportunities for their continued success in the years to come.

“Tech does not change principles. It changes processes.”

ROBERT LEIST

Helman, VP of Legal, MOD Pizza 33

REMOTE REVOLUTION

A look at how remote working has evolved in the past fifty years

1973

During the national energy crisis, former NASA engineer Jack Nilles proposes telecommuting as an “alternative to transportation” in his book The TelecommunicationsTransportation Tradeoff

1987

1.5 million Americans are telecommuting and an Electronic Services Unlimited survey estimates that more than 10 million Americans will telecommute by 1990 1

2000

All federal executive agencies are required to establish telecommuting policies 2

2005

Programmer Brad Neuberg creates the first official coworking space in San Francisco 3

2010

59.5 percent of remote workers are employed by private companies  4 and the Telework Enhancement Act requires all federal agencies to create policies for eligible employees to work remotely

2013

8,000 companies signed up for Slack within the first 24 hours of existence 5

2018

Approximately 170 US companies are 100 percent remote, up from 26 companies in 2014 6

2019

50 percent of employees globally are working remote at least 2.5 days a week 7

2020

62 percent of employed adults were working from home in response to the COVID-19 pandemic 8

New vision for tax. Same passion for business.

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