Question: Who is Susan Insley and how did she transform HR?

Having conducted nearly 60 “Faces of HR” interviews, I have spoken with people who came from every imaginable discipline before moving into HR. That’s part of what makes HR so resilient and capable—its people’s diverse backgrounds. Today’s guest comes from internal auditing, and in many ways, that puts her in a unique position to transform her company.

Meet Susan Insley, VP of Human Resources at VMware.

How did you find yourself in HR?

I’ve been in HR for just over four years because I was looking to do something different. After talking to our CFO, CHRO, and other operational leaders, the opportunity to move into HR was really attractive because I could leverage some of the strengths I had built throughout my career in finance and audit. At the same time, I would be able to influence company culture and business outcomes in a completely new and different way.

That’s one of the things I love about VMware. People development is very important. We especially want senior leaders to have knowledge depth and breadth of the business. We also value versatility, which enables people to move around to different kinds of roles in the company.

I’ve spoken to a lot of people who have come into HR from other disciplines, but I think you might be the first who started out doing audits. How long did you do internal audits?

Almost 20 years…

That’s a great starting point to really paint a picture for HR and a great place to expand. Can you talk about that a little bit?

In an internal audit, you have to have a very broad view of the enterprise to be effective. Your job is to identify where the critical areas of risk are for the company and then also evaluate the effectiveness of mitigation strategies in place to protect shareholder value.

In HR, the goal is to use well-architected talent strategies to propel the business. So coming into HR, I was able to take a very broad view of our enterprise, including identifying key risks and assessing the current talent strategies. From there, I could help continue to build our knowledge and use of the different kinds of talent strategies available to drive the business forward.

One of the things we often see in HR that’s challenging is really having depth-and-breadth understanding of the business. Leaders tend to come in and partner with particular organizations, focusing on the piece they know. To some degree, having that broader view helped me because I had a better understanding of the end-to-end business supply chain, for example, how upstream and downstream stakeholders could be impacted by some of the things that various organizations were doing. Knowing all of the pieces helps drive better connections and operational execution.

Averting risk can become an obsession and kind of a roadblock in some cases for innovation. Do you feel like you get too focused on that, or do you feel like you have a healthy balance knowing when sometimes you have to let off a little bit and just let things develop?

When I arrived at VMware to build an internal audit capability, we were a small company. There wasn’t a high level of risk awareness. That was a top objective for our audit function at the time—how do we drive a level of risk awareness into the culture so that company leaders are making educated and informed decisions? If you want to take risks, great, but let’s make sure you understand the intended and unintended consequences. As I transitioned into HR, I had to train some new muscles while keeping the ones I built in audit strong.

It’s like being an athlete. For a period of time, you lean into certain strengths and muscles until you can leverage new muscles. I think supporting the business is understanding the goals and vision, then building skills and capabilities while understanding those things that potentially can prevent you from being successful. Most people can do some things quite easily, but others require muscle building. That gave me confidence and a little bit of air cover while I continued to grow new capabilities.

It’s one of those things where, I guess from an employee perspective, it would be easy to see all these new changes coming in and all these new considerations and be like, “Well, that’s not something we’ve worried about, so why are we worrying about it now?” But I could see a managerial executive level saying, “Well, we’ve set these guidelines in place now; we’ve identified where our footing is, and now we can grow safely.”

One of the things about working in the technology sector is that change is a constant. Because of it, we’ve had to really embed a culture of evaluation and continuous improvement. That’s how we stay away from becoming stagnant and move forward. We don’t say, “Here’s a way of doing this, and this is the only way we’re going to do it.” That’s an impediment. We know that if we want to be a SaaS and subscription company, we’re going to have to continue to change, and we need to discover things we’re going to need to do differently to better support our customers. There are always new ideas, new practices, and new policies in the tech sector, so iteration is important. So is doing it in an intentional fashion, but not having so many constraints that you can’t be agile enough to keep up with the market...

Source: HR Daily Advisor