Dean Carter started as chief people officer of Guild, an education benefits and workforce services provider, in mid-December 2022. In the months since, he’s been a very busy guy.
In an interview with HR Brew, Carter discussed his first 90 days—his onboarding process, how he restructured his department, and what the future holds for HR professionals in today’s fast-changing world.
How was your onboarding at Guild?
Really solid onboarding, I feel like I actually got onboarded twice. I had a formal onboarding at the executive level, but I really wanted to go through the onboarding process that every single employee goes through, so I went through it again, just to understand what it’s like…[Guild has] a complex business model, so I think that having that was super helpful.
[When onboarding for the CHRO role] the first thing I did was understand the expectations of the job, and it’s really two parts. One is leading the people team, and the other 50% of my job is actually just being out and being an evangelist for Guild and for the profession.
And you made a title change as well?
The role that I’m doing is so tied to the purpose of the company that they’re really inseparable. This is how we got to “chief people and purpose officer.”
We came out of [Covid-19] and the role of the chief people officer changed dramatically. People’s expectations from companies and from the head of HR changed. The number one thing that people talk about now is they want to work for purpose-driven companies.
Are there any changes to your department that you made, in line with the title change?
I made some structural changes pretty quick in the organization, some realignment.
Guild talks a lot about first principle design thinking. Let’s take [a task, or job] down to its basic things. Instead of saying, “Here’s a bunch of tools and how do we apply them, typically?” and “How do you put people in those jobs to execute those tools?” it’s “What’s the problem we’re trying to solve and what are the jobs that need to be done?”
We kind of broke the organization down and the very first thing that we did was [create] a chief opportunity officer…He’s making sure that career opportunity and mobility happens inside Guild and he uses that information to learn how to apply those practices outside of Guild.
Next change, we had a group doing analytics and a group that was doing future of work [research], and they were in two separate organizations. I pulled those two together, so that every time we’re doing a future of work kind of program…we would make use of databases designed to understand the impact of every single thing that we do.
What is the motivation behind these kinds of changes?
If we’re a learning company, the learning organization needs to be the strongest one…and it’s not just learning. We’re talking about learning and knowledge management.
We also changed the name of the performance management team. Instead of managing performance, I’m like, what are we actually doing? We’re actually working to better outcomes for people in terms of productivity or career. So, that’s now called the Department of Outcomes.
I think by calling it talent acquisition, you automatically mean that you look outside. If you switch the term to talent curation, you might even have this role thinking about succession planning. What’s the bench and how am I ensuring that I have the right people ready for the right roles?
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We’re really using [first principle design thinking], like what’s the problem we’re solving, and not taking traditional views of these HR roles and really reshaping outcomes, opportunity, learning and knowledge management, future of work, test and learn, and talent curation, all of these we are really trying to rethink.
Have these changes led to any new job types or skill sets that you’re looking for within your HR department?
What I’m really working on is changing mindsets. If I continue to call you talent acquisition, then you think about how to be great at the acquisition of talent. If I call you the talent curation team, then you start to think about, “How do I curate communities? How do I curate internal talent?”
That’s why succession planning may end up in that particular group. Maybe it doesn’t belong in the performance management group, maybe it belongs in the curation group. You would need different capabilities and skills obviously, and if you’re thinking about the curation of talent, we used to call them recruiting coordinators, and now we call them candidate experience. specialists. There’s a difference in mindset.
The shift in mindset is in terms of calling them out for the jobs that they’re doing, and not the classic [or] traditional like recruiting coordinator, recruiter, all these siloes, [goes] back to the jobs that need to be done. People and purpose officer or talent curator…That’s the work that needs to be done, and I think we need to reshape that.
You also launched something called the CHRO Compass initiative, can you tell us more about that?
We started this organization called the CHRO Compass. I sent out a big announcement about this and I was shocked at the amount of response from people who passionately want to be a part of rethinking the job of the CHRO…We sent out a couple of newsletters already. And we’re planning a big event in Laguna for this consortium to come together and to reshape the future of HR…we got a huge response.
The first newsletter I sent out was around why it’s important to have a CHRO on your board. Only 7% of boards have a CHRO, which is shocking to me, because I would think you’d have [someone on] the comp committee who’s actually done compensation. All boards talk about the talent crisis, it’s one of their number one issues they’re dealing with, and they don’t have anyone who has dealt with talent.
So, I reached out to the community and said, if you’re on a board, and you’re CHRO, let’s come together and share. How did you make it happen? You can use the ladder to lift other people into that. And if you want to be on a board, let’s talk about how we can come together and help you make that happen. That’s just one example of how we’re engaging with the community around a specific topic.