Ep 65 | Revolutionizing HR: Ken Somers' Journey and Insights

Imagine journeying from an English major to an MBA, launching a career at IBM, and traversing the international world of HR. That's exactly the path our guest, Ken Somers, has walked. His wealth of experience, from navigating the 2008-2009 recession to founding his own consulting business, offers an insightful perspective on the shifting landscapes of HR both domestically and internationally. Ken's 'answers for the real world' approach will be a revelation, especially to small businesses looking to leverage HR functionality.

Ever pondered the critical role of culture and leadership in organizations, particularly as they brace for a generational change in their leadership team? Ken Somers will shed light on this and more. He dives into the value of an ESOP (employee stock owned company) and underscores the importance of securing leadership buy-in to drive change. Whether you're an HR professional or a business owner, don't miss this chance to connect with Ken for HR services. His journey offers a plethora of insights that could alter the way you perceive and handle HR matters.

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Dana Dowdell - Boss Consulting - @bossconsultinghr - @hrfanatic

Transcript

Dana Dowdell: 0:00

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Dana Dowdell: 1:03

Hey there, welcome back to another episode of Quirky HR. I am joined by, I want to say, a competitor, because we very much exist in the same sphere, very much exist in the same geographical area, but I've been told time and time again that we need to meet, so there must be something very special about you, ken. I'm excited to have you. I'm joined by Ken Somers. He's the owner of Somers HR Solutions. So welcome to Quirky HR.

Ken Somers: 1:33

Thank you, dana. We're not competitors. What's the phrase? Co-op petition?

Dana Dowdell: 1:39

I am a firm believer. I don't know if I shared this in a previous episode, but some of my best clients have come from another HR consultant. So that idea of an abundance mindset and that there's I mean there's plenty of business to go around has been an incredible mindset for my business and I'm excited to hear more about your business. But before we get to Summers HR Solutions, let's talk a little bit. You have quite an extensive history, both domestically and internationally, in HR, so can you tell listeners a little bit about how you got into HR, what your career was like and then how you transitioned into doing your own thing?

Ken Somers: 2:21

Sure, sure, and thank you for asking so. When I was in university I was an undergraduate English major and it was wonderful. I learned how to think critically, I learned how to write reasonably well and it was a great experience. The graduation came along and I had a faculty advisor who genuinely cared and looked at me and said what are you going to do with that?

Ken Somers: 2:50

And to make a long story short, I enrolled directly into an MBA program and stayed right on campus UMass, amherst and the first semester and a half I struggled because I went from an English major to finance accounting statistics and like, oh my God, what did I get myself into? And then I took my first, at the time, personnel class and fell in love and really never looked back. It just it turned out to be my calling and I've been incredibly fortunate that I was able to get through the master's program, successfully found my first job, I was able to get hired into IBM right out of university, which was a hard thing to do and I expect still is a hard thing to do and my career went from there. Would you like a brief summary of the career?

Dana Dowdell: 3:54

Well, I'm curious because your website bio has you working in many, many, many different places, and I'm always fascinated by how work and people and HR looks different no matter where you go, so I'd like to hear a little bit more about that.

Ken Somers: 4:14

Well, so I spent the first five years in my IBM time in the research laboratories, which was fascinating by itself. I got to see the very first inkjet printer come off the line. I'm dating myself now, obviously, but it was a very cool thing at the time. But after I left the research division I trained, spur to World Trade and fell in love with international and literally was six months after I joined World Trade I was on my first trip to Paris and we then got broken up into two international divisions and I went with the Asia Far East division and shortly after that I wound up in Singapore for three years and had a wonderful experience, got to travel all over Asia and the time came to repatriate and I said I'm enjoying international too much and, at the risk of offending everyone who works in domestic HR, the thing I loved about international, and still do to this day, is that every day is a every day is a different problem. Whereas a lot of HR rules in the US tend to be the same thing every day or variations on the theme, but not the international. Every day is different problems, especially when you're dealing with multiple countries. Instead of repatriating with IBM to a very nice job. I quit and moved to Hong Kong and did a couple of years of consulting with what was then Tower's Parin I think it's now Watson Tower's Parin or something like that. Left Tower's Parin moved to Japan and spent five plus years with Morgan Stanley as the head of HR for Morgan Stanley in Japan. That job grew to have all the centers of excellence for Asia in my team, so at one point I had 70 people from five different countries Left Morgan Stanley and went to the Hartford Insurance Company. I was the head of HR for Hartford in Japan.

Ken Somers: 6:31

I had the great timing to repatriate at the beginning of the 2008-2009 recession. That was fun. That could be a whole other podcast. I stayed with the Hartford for a few more years and then the Hartford balance sheet was hit pretty hard by the recession, so the division I supported was sold off, went to Philadelphia for a year, came back to Massachusetts, which is home for me. I'm a native Bostonian, go Red Sox and sorry to offend any Yankee fans out there, but we're both having miserable seasons and anyways.

Ken Somers: 7:16

I finally got back to Massachusetts and went to work with a software company and after a few years, near the phone ring one day and it was a person who used to work for me. No hello, how are you? First words out of her mouth Do you have one more international gig left in you? And I am not exaggerating. Six weeks later, I was in India for a year and had a great time. Then they sent me to Malaysia, then they sent me to Poland and after we came back from Poland in the spring of 2020, just as COVID was going bananas I looked around and said I've had enough corporate. 42 years of corporate was enough. So I came back, finished my assignment and hung out a shingle.

Ken Somers: 8:03

And here I am today. I love it.

Dana Dowdell: 8:06

What an incredible career path and experiences and pretty big names, big name organizations.

Ken Somers: 8:14

Yeah, I've been very fortunate to number one, have the opportunities. Secondly, I don't want to call it wisdom, but the luck to grab them when they present themselves.

Dana Dowdell: 8:28

Timing. Timing is very important.

Ken Somers: 8:31

Timing is everything, yeah, and I was lucky to have those opportunities, and what I try to do now is draw on all that international experience, the domestic experience, and try to add value to my clients in whatever way I can.

Dana Dowdell: 8:49

I love it. So I have a couple of questions from that. So one is I was just talking to someone before this call. She's based in the UK and she coaches HR consultants on growing their business, and we're talking a bit about the pop up of fractional HR HR consultants in the pandemic, and one of my gripes is that it can be sometimes disappointing concerning that HR is not sometimes looked at as a field that doesn't require expert knowledge, expert education, and so I'm curious, with all your experience, like how would you define human resources as a function?

Ken Somers: 9:34

How would I define HR as a function? Well, I think HR has evolved quite a bit over the last, over my career. Let's put it like that. I didn't want to count the years, but it has evolved a lot over my career.

Ken Somers: 9:50

When I joined HR, it was almost exclusively an administrative function and to the extent that HR was and remains administrative, I think your colleagues comments are probably pretty accurate. But what's changed is the recognition that the management of human capital is just as important as other, as physical assets and financial assets. And progressive companies even marginally progressive companies, I believe now recognize the value of having the human resources partner in the C suite. And we have an opportunity to be the organization that helps companies find that right balance between doing what's right for their customers and doing what's right for their people. And I'd like to. I'd like Richard Branson's comment, and I won't get the quote precisely, but Richard Branson basically says if you take care of your people, they'll take care of your customers, and that's been my experience. So I think HR is the conscious of your conscience of the organization. It's the driver of change in the organization and can be a catalyst for helping a business achieve new levels.

Dana Dowdell: 11:19

Ooh, I love that terminology the conscious conscience of an organization. That's great.

Ken Somers: 11:26

Yeah, I'll give you an example. I, not too long ago, I did a project for a client and we took the leadership team off site to do a culture definition project. And again, to make a long story short, we didn't start with culture, we didn't start with mission, we didn't start with values. We started with purpose. Why does the organization exist? Why does company X literally exist? And that generated a really interesting discussion which led, in my opinion, to the creation of a much more robust mission statement, value statement and action items to breathe life, boy, breathe life into what would become their culture. So I actually I think purpose is a super important thing for organizations to get straight on.

Dana Dowdell: 12:28

Yeah, that's, that's great, and so my other question that came out of your background, your history, is I know that you work a lot with small business, and so what do you see from an HR functionality, from the corporate lens, going to work with small businesses?

Ken Somers: 12:52

Well, really small businesses typically don't have HR, as you know yourself, and sometimes it takes the big problem for the entrepreneur to recognize that they need some help. So that can be both challenging and frustrating, because frequently the entrepreneur won't know what they don't know. But what I like is to find people who may not know what they don't know, but know enough to ask the questions. And as long as they know enough to ask the questions, you can usually find a way to help them. Obviously, bigger organizations have full functioning HR teams, all the bureaucracy, all the governance, and that's one of the reasons I like where human small organizations is because you have many more degrees of freedom to get things done.

Dana Dowdell: 13:47

So and this is a pitch I think for a bit about what you and I do is that corporate and larger organizational knowledge and experience those things you can use to influence, transform, make an impact in the smaller organizations.

Ken Somers: 14:05

Yeah, yeah. So I mean the tagline for my, for my business, is answers for the real world. So what I try to do is draw upon the decades of experience, all of all the battle scars I've earned, as I'm sure you've earned yours, and say, ok, how do I take that knowledge? How do I take that experience and apply it to the situation, and not over engineer an IBM solution for a 20 person company? So it's about taking the expertise and applying it appropriately for that client setting.

Dana Dowdell: 14:41

It has to make sense for the organization.

Ken Somers: 14:44

It has to make sense and has to be actionable and it has to be as bureaucratic, free as possible.

Dana Dowdell: 14:51

Mm, hmm, I love it.

Ken Somers: 14:54

And no, by the way, I hate bureaucracy myself.

Dana Dowdell: 14:58

Oh gosh, probably another conversation, right.

Ken Somers: 15:00

Yes, yes.

Dana Dowdell: 15:02

So you do a lot. You mentioned before you did an offsite around with the leadership team. You would do a ton of work around leadership development and kind of the culture, the pulse of an organization for large and small businesses, HR departments of one. Can you talk a little bit about why the culture component is so important, especially now?

Ken Somers: 15:25

Well, I think a lot of things have happened in the last few years. We tend to not blame but identify COVID as a catalyst for a lot of this, and I think COVID was a catalyst to some extent. But the changes we're experiencing now hybrid work environments is the most obvious one. That was building well before COVID, While COVID did was accelerated. I'll answer your question with a live situation.

Ken Somers: 16:03

I have a client in the center of the state. It's an HR department of one. It's an industrial company and the leader of the organization has the wisdom, the foresight to recognize that over the next four to five years he's going to have a generational change in his leadership team. So we're going in there. It's a live engagement. We're using predictive index tools, which I love and big advocate for. But we're using the predictive index tools to do behavioral assessments for the leadership team, to evaluate their leadership capabilities and to do a lot of coaching to build more bench strength so that this really well established and really very healthy culture can continue to thrive as the leadership team changes over the next few years.

Dana Dowdell: 17:05

That's interesting.

Ken Somers: 17:06

Having.

Dana Dowdell: 17:06

The foresight to realize that that's happening.

Ken Somers: 17:10

Yeah, this guy is very, very impressive. I'd love to share the name, but that would probably be inappropriate.

Dana Dowdell: 17:19

Is he the owner of the business that he found?

Ken Somers: 17:25

No, he's not the founder, he's the CEO, but graduated into that job from the CFO role.

Dana Dowdell: 17:39

It's interesting that idea of being in a leadership position within an organization that you did not start and being so committed to preserving the culture that needs to be preserved, yeah.

Ken Somers: 17:54

I mean, I was there yesterday visiting with them and we spent a little bit of time talking about the culture, and the reality is their culture doesn't need to change. All it needs to do is be even more deeply embedded, because they've got a lot of young people who this is an ESOP company, which is an interesting exercise by itself, and a lot of the younger employees don't yet appreciate the value of an ESOP For your audience, just in case anyone doesn't know, an ESOP is an employee stock owned company, so the employees actually own the business, which is a whole different management environment. But one of our objectives is to drive deeper understanding of both the value and uniqueness of their organizational structure. So it's a fun project. I'm having a blast.

Dana Dowdell: 19:00

I love it. One of the questions that I ask a lot of the HR leaders that I have on this podcast and I think it's relative to the conversation of culture and conversation of leadership is getting the buy-in from the top. Some people are like you have to make the business case. Sometimes people say you just have to stand for what's right. What is your philosophy on that concept and really influencing change when you're in an HR capacity?

Ken Somers: 19:33

So I'm going to give you an answer and give you an example. I had a boss a number of years ago who used to like to say to be successful in HR you have to be willing, able and capable because I think they're a little bit different to speak truth to power. That was a hard lesson for me to learn. I will tell you there was a situation and again I won't name the company, but I was an employee I spoke truth to power. Six weeks later I was told you're not considered strategic anymore and we're showing the door. The only time in my life I've ever been fired. But you know what I can look in the mirror.

Ken Somers: 20:22

So that was maybe a long way of saying, I think, any HR person. To have genuine credibility you have to be willing to say the hard truths. You have to be willing to say to a leader in the organization what were you thinking or have you considered other ways or what the hell? Even in some situations. And that's a really hard thing for people to do because that's who's writing your paycheck. But that comes with the role and I think it's one of the hardest lessons for any business, and HR business partner in particular, to learn to tell a client internally that no, can't do that, shouldn't do that, or what the hell were you thinking?

Dana Dowdell: 21:11

Have you found that that's changed at all as you switched from internal HR to a consultant role, or has it become more pronounced?

Ken Somers: 21:20

I think it's a little bit more common, certainly more pronounced. I do not do it with a cavalier attitude. I try to make sure that I understand the situation first, that I've invested time in building the relationship. It's not the kind of thing you do in the first week of a relationship, but if you can establish yourself and establish credibility, it gives you the opportunity and fortunately I haven't had to do it too many times. But when you do that, it is a profound influencing opportunity. Because business leaders aren't typically accustomed to being challenged that way. Sure, but I think that's a big part of the HR leadership role is to be that conscience and say why are we doing this? This is wrong, or let's find another way.

Dana Dowdell: 22:17

I find the dynamic of being like the B2B relationship in an HR consultancy role makes it a little bit. It's taken me a while to get comfortable with always giving the hard truth because I get so worried that a client is going to get upset or I'm going to upset an employee and they're going to go you know and to your point of the relationship and getting that buy-in is essential.

Ken Somers: 22:46

Yeah, yeah, I mean, it is hard, you know. Like I said, I've done it a number of times I still get sweaty armpits before I have to do it. Just you know. Just like nobody likes having to terminate someone, you can get very clumpeted at it, but when it becomes routine it's time for you to do something else. And I don't want to get comfortable challenging a business leader because that makes me say do I really know what I'm talking about, my confidence and my ability to speak an alternative truth to that leader. The good news, I think, is certainly in the last couple of years, when I've had the opportunity or the need to do that, my experience has been that most business leaders, after they get over the initial shock of being challenged, actually appreciate it, because nobody else has said that to them. Yeah, so I think it's a big part of the HR role.

Dana Dowdell: 23:54

Where do you see HR and just work in general heading in the next, you know, five to 10 years? I think there's a lot of chatter about where it's going.

Ken Somers: 24:07

I don't know. I mean, I clearly artificial intelligence is going to play some. I would like to believe that it's not going to eliminate the need for human interaction, but it's certainly going to make some jobs much more efficient. I do believe that we're going to still need human beings to interpret and implement whatever the box comes up with, but my biggest fear is that we're going to let AI make decisions for us. So I think AI is clearly a theme that HR is going to have to deal with. I do think that, well, I'll never work for them. Anyways, I hope the Jamie Diamonds of the world come to their senses and realize that hybrid is the right model. Not everybody has to be back in the office full-time, but there's a lot of drama around that as well.

Dana Dowdell: 25:08

I know I say a lot of times I wish people could hear I-Rolls on this podcast, because anytime someone says that remote work doesn't work is.

Ken Somers: 25:19

Let me tell you, remote work absolutely works. I was doing remote work, depending upon how you wanted to find out. I've been doing remote work for more than 20 years.

Dana Dowdell: 25:31

You have to have structure.

Ken Somers: 25:33

You have to have structure. I've had teams in five, six, seven different countries, and that's the definition of remote. You have to have structure, you have to have discipline and you have to have good people management capability. None of that is impossible to achieve, requires effort, but it's not impossible.

Dana Dowdell: 26:02

Just like culture, just like building a culture thought, intention, structure, collaboration it's all part of it.

Ken Somers: 26:10

It is, it is. I'm sure you see the same thing in your practice.

Dana Dowdell: 26:15

All the time Can I feel like we could talk for probably hours, but where can listeners find you, connect with you and learn more about you?

Ken Somers: 26:26

Probably the two best places would be my LinkedIn profile, which is really simple. It's linkedincom. Ken Somers, or my website, which is SomersHRSolutionscom. My email is ken at SomersHRSolutionscom.

Dana Dowdell: 26:44

Fantastic, as always. We'll make sure that all of Ken's information is in the show notes. If you're in need of HR consulting services, culture services, assessment services, he is a great, great person to connect with. On that, Ken, thank you so much for being on Corky HR.

Ken Somers: 27:03

Thank you, Dana. It's been a pleasure SOUND she is lucky.