human resources

Crafting HR Strategy – A Conversation with Centro’s Elles Skony

Crafting HR Strategy – A Conversation with Centro’s Elles Skony

In this Talent Tales episode, talent.imperative Founder Nicole Dessain had the honor to interview Elles Skony, Vice President of Talent Management at Centro.

Elles’ creative superpower is “communication”. She believes that HR can come up with the best programs or initiatives but if they are not articulated in an engaging and humorous way then they are not going to be embraced by employees.

Elles is passionate about enabling every HR professional to become excited about the employee experience. One of the ways she fosters this is by networking with other HR professionals of mid-sized start-ups in Chicago. While there is competition for talent, this collaboration encourages taking a systems perspective towards making people’s work lives better by sharing best practices and lessons learned.

Elles leverages design thinking as a framework to prioritize HR initiatives at the beginning of each year and to define the employee experience at Centro.

Designing Your Career – A Conversation with BASF’s Jennifer Dewey

Designing Your Career – A Conversation with BASF’s Jennifer Dewey

In this Talent Tales episode I had the honor to interview Jennifer Dewey , Global Talent Management Lead at BASF Colors & Effects.

Jennifer’s creative superpower is “flexibility”. She has always been very flexible in her approach and mindset which certainly is evident in her impressive career trajectory.Jennifer graduated with a degree in social work and was a case worker where she ran a very lean team and learned how to problem solve on a daily basis. After a while, Jennifer was looking for more development opportunities. So she decided to interview her friends to learn about related fields where she still could work with people. That’s how she discovered Human Resources. Her first job was as a Recruiting Coordinator. From there, she worked her way up by keeping an open mind about new opportunities which included working in different geographies including in Asia.

For the last eleven years, Jennifer has worked at BASF.

Jennifer discovered design thinking as part of her late night Google searches where she was looking for inspiration for career development in a turbulent time when her business unit BASF Colors & Effects was undergoing a divestiture.

Cultivating Customer Obsession – A Conversation with Soumee De

Cultivating Customer Obsession – A Conversation with Soumee De

In this Talent Tales episode I had the honor to interview Soumee De, Head of HR for Consumer Banking Technology (EMEA/APAC) at Citi. Soumee is a self-described creative “artiste”, human professional, and technophile. Her creative superpower is bridging gaps - between technologists and those who are not that inclined, between business and HR, between the world of art and science.

In our conversation, Soumee describes how she discovered design thinking a few years ago through a workshop her company offered. To her surprise, she experienced herself struggling with applying the concept of empathy to our work. As HR professionals we get paid to pass judgement on people – when we interview them for a role, evaluate their performance, or assess their potential. Her personal takeaway was to unlearn some of the behaviors she’s honed in HR and apply more of an ethnographic research lens when trying to solve a people-related challenge.

Embracing a Growth Mindset – A Conversation with Christina Chateauvert

Embracing a Growth Mindset – A Conversation with Christina Chateauvert

In this Talent Tales episode I had the honor to interview Christina Chateauvert, Design Thinking Learning Lead at Ford Motor Company. In her role, Christina focuses on building design thinking capability inside the organization.

Christina’s passion is to educate others on how to use human-centered design in their business and personal lives through her work at Ford, her teaching in the “Learning Design and Technology” graduate program at Wayne State University, by providing professional development workshops for women at SheHive, and by hosting the Detroit hr.hackathon.

Christina’s creative superpower is “From Abstract to Action”. She thrives in the creative problem solving space and loves to translate insights from user research into tangible solutions.

If you are new to the design thinking method, Christina has a great definition of “human-centered design” for you: The way we introduce the people we are designing for into our design problem, so we make sure they are always the focus when we are trying to solve that very problem.

Yes, Professor Chateauvert!

Why Talent Tales?

Over the last three years I've discussed with hundreds of HR professionals how we might make our work places more human-centered by leveraging the power of design thinking.

From those conversations there was a theme emerging: Those who hadn’t used design thinking yet wanted to learn from those who'd already done it. And those who are steeped in the method wanted to share their experience to help advance our profession.

What if we could bring these groups together through storytelling?

A quote from Brené Brown popped into my head:

Maybe stories are just data with a soul.

Et voilà - Talent Tales was born!

My vision is to bring each story to life in a multi-media experience: live webinar, blog, video, and podcast.

I hope you will find this experiment valuable and will join us for the ride. As with everything in design thinking I am very open to iterating on the concept and content so please share your experience along the way.