Change on the Run

May 1, 2022

Identifying Your Lessons Learned with Kathy Repa

Phil is joined by HR and change management expert Kathy Repa to discuss how to identify your lessons learned during change. Understanding how our experiences impact outcomes helps build change capacity and skill, and dramatically improves organizational knowledge on how projects work within our cultures. So, how do identify, record and learn from your experiences during a large change initiative? Kathy can be reached at: Email: kathy.shanley@yahoo.com EPISODE TRANSCRIPT PHIL: Hello everyone, welcome to the change on the run podcast, where we discuss common change challenges and ways to address them. When you're short of time, and I'm your host, Phil Buckley. Today's topic is identifying your lessons learned. Understanding how our experience impacts outcomes helps build change capacity and skill and dramatically improves organizational knowledge of how projects work within our cultures. Experience is the best teacher, which enables us to repeat success patterns and eliminate future roadblocks to achieve our goals in the quickest and most effective way. Learning occurs in the moment. Something worked or didn't work because of specific factors, and we often lose learnings we don't record quickly. This applies equally to organizations and individuals and is especially true in the middle of projects because we tend to remember only beginnings and endings, leaving the key middle ground foggy. So, how do you identify, record and learn from your experiences during a large change initiative? And my guest today is Kathy Repa. Kathy, welcome to the show. KATHY: Thank you so much for having me, I am so excited to be a guest. PHIL: Thank you, Kathy, and thanks so much for taking the time to be here. Kathy has over thirty years of global human resources and change management experience. She is currently the Vice President HR, Global Supply Chain at Mondelez International. Kathy holds a BA, Human Resources Development at DeSales University. So, Kathy, looking back at your thirty-plus year’s career and we've known each other for over ten years, what's been your experience with personal lessons learned. I look at you as the queen of lessons learned and I've learned so much about how you do so just generally. What's been your experience? KATHY: You know, one of my biggest lessons, and I think your book Change on the run really triggers a lot for me, is that we run a lot when we're doing these changes. We run from one change to another. We're change junkies. It's sort of our drug of choice and we look forward to those things. What we don't take time often enough as change professionals, to take a pause and to think about what we have actually learned, what lessons we can pass on to others or what lessons we can take forward ourselves, and I think that by doing that you don't often get as much value as we possibly could from that pause for purpose, that time to refresh, that time to reflect, and I'm a huge journalizer, so I do often sit back at the end of the week and maybe as I've gotten into my twenty and thirty years of running change, I do it much more frequently to say, you know, what things went well about this and what am I most proud of and what do I want to learn from that to take forward and make sure that I incorporate in the next ones? You know what things didn't go so well, and sometimes we punish ourselves for what didn't go so well, and I like to sit back and say, well, was that in my control? Because if it's not in my control, then why would I punish myself for it not going well? Then? That's not to say I don't take that as a lesson to do something differently, but I don't sit there and beat myself up over and over again about something that wasn't in my control, but rather reflect on how I can manifest it into something that next time might be much more controllable. And then I do celebrate, even if I do a happy dance around my place by myself. You do have to pat yourself on the back, you know, because it's not that people don't recognize your value, it's just that it doesn't often come out as the thank yous that maybe you need to generate that spirit and energy to go forward. PHIL: Thanks, Kathy, and it's great to see that you reward yourself and do the happy dance. But then also learn from, hey, this didn't work so well. And why do you think people focus more on what didn't work, or at least that's been my experience personally, but also observing other people? The one thing that didn't go well in the nine things that went very well to plan. We just focus on that thing that didn't go well and replay it off and as a tape in our heads. Why do you think that happens? KATHY: Well, think about how we approach anything, in life and at work. Think about performance reviews. People focus on what didn't go well during the year and they might have a sixty-second tidbit on what went well. Our nature is to focus, unfortunately, on the downside. When business is good, you get a little bit of a rave, but when business is bad, you hear it forever and then it becomes the stories that people tell. So, it becomes a legacy of the company or the legacy of the business or the legacy of the person, and it's hard to break out of that. So, I think, as change leads, it's our job to let people know that it's okay to have things go not so well as long as we're learning from them. But what's not okay to do is to not celebrate equally the things that went well, very well, and even the things that went okay that you're able to, later on, come back to. So, make sure you don't lose those gold nuggets because future-forward, you might have an opportunity to take that to a diamond. PHIL: No, that is great. What I find fascinating is if the project was deemed as a success, so we hit our targets, the lessons learned can be really glowing and it focuses on that. Hey, we’re the champions, my friend, but the ones that didn't work well, there are no good parts in it. It's all about we should have been better at this, we could have done that, we made a mistake here, and I think the impact is we're not going to learn from those good bits so we can replicate them. Have you ever seen that? KATHY: Yeah, and you know, I often reflect back to when you and I were partnering. We knew our clientele. I mean you know very well the clientele at Cadbury. I knew very well the clientele at Kraft. We needed to really sit and say what would be best for our clientele. If you remember, we went from place to place to place, leadership team to leadership team to leadership team. Each one of them brought a unique flare to what it was we were trying to do from an acquisition integration perspective. Each time we took the time to first and foremost talk to the senior-most leader and find out what the business agenda was. And then, even though we came equipped with discussion points and activities and whatever, we spent time with the members collectively and individually, and then we decided how to shape them for future-forward and align them. And then know that if you go to the next part of your journey on this massive thing that you've been asked to run and task to do, it might not be the same experience. It might be a hybrid and you have to be flexible enough to adapt that high bread and feel okay, you know, feel comfortable with that and feel okay and not just say, oh well, gosh, I didn't do it exactly like I did it with this team. So what? Because this next group isn't the same organism, and that's what we're dealing with every day, an organism, and we have to make sure that we're addressing every part of that organism in the right way. PHIL: Fascinating, and the point that you made was so important that it was co-created by going to the different teams and then sharing what the last team said to the next team and any comments on that lesson learned. KATHY: I think we gave them good things to think about. I remember one team that we went to that it was old Kraft, new Kraft, Lu Biscuit, Cadb…

31 min