CEOs of ADP, Lumen Technology discuss how they’re guiding employees to the future

As CEOs grapple with a new era of technological transformation, they’re also likely navigating how to bring employees along on the journey. HR Brew sat down with two tech CEOs at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit earlier this month to understand how leaders are guiding their workers through transformation, and the role HR stands to play.

Focus on company culture. Lumen Technology in recent years has transitioned from being a traditional telecom company to focus more on enterprise networking. Its CEO, Kate Johnson, has leaned on culture amid the changes to keep employees on the same page.

“It’s important to define your aspirational culture,” she told HR Brew. For Johnson, it’s a journey, not a destination. “We have eight behaviors that we aspire to have everybody have mastery over.”

To ensure progress, its 28,000 global employees are evaluated during their performance reviews on their commitment to Lumen’s values, which include customer obsession, courage, and growth mindset. “It’s not just what you do; it’s how you do it against those eight behaviors, and it’s actually easy for our people to see where they’re meeting the bar and not meeting the bar.”

To that end, Maria Black, CEO of payroll software giant ADP, which has roughly 67,000 employees, told HR Brew that leaders should be on the frontlines with employees as they navigate change.

“These touchpoints where you see how people are thinking about work, how they show up, their life and flow, where ADP fits in, how committed they are to our culture, our clients, and continuing to breathe life into that—that’s what every leader needs to be doing. We’re all in the people business.”

Success requires some vulnerability. Both leaders emphasized to HR Brew the importance of being open with employees to transformation success.

“We have to be comfortable with being vulnerable and maybe sometimes getting things wrong,” Johnson said, adding that being nimble and pivoting when necessary is core to success as well.

That’s why Lumen enlisted the help of Brené Brown, an academic with a background in social work, to teach the principles from her book, Dare to Lead, to the company during its transformation. The books, “help you teach people skills of courage and vulnerability, which they need,” Johnson said.

Black relies on compassion, coupled with the spirit of resilience and grit she developed emigrating from Sweden to the US as a child, to help her lead ADP.

“I am a natural empath. I tend to look at the world very bright,” she said. Black regularly meets with employees, and uses their conversations to help inform decisions down the line. “One of the biggest attributes of a CEO is being able to see around corners, being able to connect dots that may not already be connected.”

Lean on CHROs. Lumen couldn’t have gone through its transformation without its chief people and AI enablement officer, Anna White, according to Johnson.

“Strategies don’t transform companies; people do. And so we have to give our people the skills and the frameworks to be able to succeed in today’s world,” she said. “She has this really, really unique ability to embed all of this method about courage and vulnerability and customer obsession and resiliency and all that stuff into our operating systems as a company.”

White has built these frameworks into everything from performance management systems to meeting etiquette and employee development.

Black speaks to ADP’s CHRO “all day, every day,” and said their relationship is essential to transformation, as it provides her with necessary checks and balances. “I can have all the strategies I want and all the great ideas, but unless the talent strategy matches, and then you have the talent and the ability to execute upon that strategy, it becomes all for naught,” she said.

“It’s a counter voice at times,” Black added. “It’s always bigger than one person. It’s always bigger than the CEO, and making sure that you’re contemplating all the stakeholders and the impact to them, and that CHRO is that voice for me every day, all day.”