In this Talent Tales episode, talent.imperative Founder Nicole Dessain had the honor to interview Mercedes Sullivan, Executive Vice President, People, Culture & Communications at McKinley Companies.
Mercedes describes herself as a “passionate, nerdy Latina” who has been in HR for fourteen years. The thread that weaves through her career – from her early years as a Tennis protégé, to consulting, then IT, and eventually HR - is a fascination with the human experience and how to organize yourself and others to hit your goals.
Merecedes’ superpower is looking at the bigger picture and the ecosystem around it so she can connect the heart of each person to the context around them.
Mercedes was first exposed to design thinking and Agile while she was in IT. When she moved into an HR PMO role (and inherited 144 projects), she brought these concepts with her. As a first step, she hired a team comprised of business, Agile, and design thinking specialists. Then, she moved the HR organization from a project- to a product mindset (for example, onboarding being a product). Next, the team used design thinking tools such as personas and employee experience journey mapping to re-design these HR products and deliver features of them incrementally.
She recalls that changing that lens was a huge change management effort. The point she tried to drive home was - whether we call it a service or a product - what matters is “how can we deliver value to the customer?” This is a problem statement that design thinking then can be applied to, changes be delivered incrementally, and solutions continuously improved.
Some of the barriers Mercedes encountered when bringing design thinking to HR, was that she tried to do too much at once. Her advice: start small and take a human-centered design approach to your own transformation. She shares the example of moving from jobs to skills and how she empowered the product owner with coaching to deliver the product in a human-centered way (and winning a Workday Innovation Award to boot). People saw the value of the approach by doing the work, and then word spread about its effectiveness.
The impact Merecedes saw after implementing a product-led approach in HR was reduction in time-to-delivery as well as increased satisfaction rates.
Want to learn more about how Mercedes applied design thinking to the jobs-to-skills product? Watch the entire interview on YouTube.