Lessons in human-centric leadership: An interview with Nancy Vitale

This interview has been edited and condensed

Throughout Nancy Vitale’s distinguished career as an HR leader, she has surrounded herself with industry thought leaders. In 2019, Nancy founded her own boutique consulting firm, Partners for Wellbeing, where she provides strategic HR leadership to organizations addressing a range of employee and organizational needs, including wellbeing solutions that improve resilience, engagement and productivity.

Before starting her business, Nancy served in increasingly senior roles at Cigna, Procter & Gamble and Genentech, including spending over six years as CHRO at the biotechnology giant. Nancy currently serves on the boards of the Make-a-Wish Foundation and Voyager Therapeutics. She is an advisor to several technology start-ups and is also a senior faculty member at the Josh Bersin Academy, further broadening the number of unique perspectives and viewpoints she engages with.

We recently spoke with Nancy about a range of issues including the growth of human centric leadership and wellbeing and how ideas and practices in both areas can evolve and grow, all the way to what board service has taught her. 

Benson Executive Search: What does human centric leadership mean to you and why is it important, especially as we continue into 2021?

Nancy Vitale: This is a topic I’ve spent considerable time with recently in my role on the faculty at the Josh Bersin Academy, where throughout 2020 we held a series of roundtable discussions on the pandemic, the resulting recession and the multi-faceted conversation on racial injustice. Collectively and individually, these macro cultural moments have acutely highlighted the need for true human centric leadership, and to their credit, the top organizations we’ve been working with have successfully pivoted their strategies and approaches to be less industrial in the face of this generational change. 

Regarding human-centric leadership specifically, I always say that the one skill or capability that drives human centric leadership is empathy. This is not to be confused with sympathy, but instead is more focused on one’s ability to relate to another person’s circumstances, whether or not they have shared similar experiences themselves. In situations where there are shared experiences, displaying this type of empathy is obviously easier. However, the challenge of human centric leadership is really the ability to develop that sense of empathy in the absence of those shared conditions. 

So if empathy is the desired key skill to support human centered leadership , how can leaders develop empathy, given the broad skill sets, personalities and backgrounds that exist in a global workforce? I believe that developing a sense of empathy comes from curiosity, and in having an openness to learning about and understanding the various situations and conditions that impact teams and team members. 

One example that illustrates this point is one that I’ve heard frequently over the past year from many CEOs, stemming from their expanded distributed workforces. Before the pandemic, many cast a wary eye toward work from home and other non-office style arrangements. However, as their companies moved rapidly to long-term home work, they started to share these experiences with their teams. And yes, while they were sharing elements like remote IT support, Zoom call fatigue, or helping with their kid’s homework while preparing for a big meeting, they were likely doing it from more conducive home-office conditions and with more assistance and comfort in their day to day lives. These leaders reported that this experience sensitized them to the varying challenges many of their employees face regularly, and shifted their earlier views on the realities and possibilities of work from home. Most importantly, their understanding and appreciation of various employee circumstances fostered empathy, which they were able to use to create a better experience for their teams. That’s human centric leadership. 

Another thing which I think is very tied to this idea is that many companies are now shifting away from previous models of primarily shareholder maximization to one that includes significant stakeholder optimization. Recent events, led by the CEO Roundtable and the Action Committee, have brought to the center the idea that if you are a company that cares about stakeholder optimization, human centric leadership is a significant piece of those efforts. 

What can leaders do to allow themselves to find and channel that human-centric leadership mindset?

I would start first with trying to get more comfortable with discomfort. To me, this is best highlighted by the racial injustice movement over the past year. Likely for the first time, some white leaders were being directly confronted with the massive injustices in the underlying systems of our society. One of the main enablers of being a human centric leader is being vulnerable - possessing the ability to lean into and engage with certain situations or circumstances, even if they might be difficult, uncomfortable, or unknown. The racial injustice movement confronted these leaders with questions like: “How can I be vulnerable, and curious enough to ask questions”, “How can I be open to being educated, and not feeling like I have to have all the answers?” 

Personally, one book that I read last year, White Fragility, was very helpful in leaning into my own discomfort in some of these topics. It was truly eye opening to understand how we can better empathize if we put ourselves in an uncomfortable position with a subject matter, and learn from that through others’ experiences.

At the end of the day though, all of these factors are so interconnected and integrated. It’s really hard to tease them apart, so if we have to start somewhere, it’s pulling apart the empathy, understanding, and some of the ways in which those characteristics develop and grow.  I always like to remind myself that there is a lot of complexity and interplay with all of these ideas. 

In what ways do you see this movement evolving?

This question really starts with companies having the self awareness to conduct an ‘in-process' POST mortem where they can understand what went right and what went wrong in the decisions they made during the challenges of 2020. In fact, many companies surprised themselves with how fast they were able to accelerate their digital strategy, manage change, or do any number of challenging things. Now that they’ve emerged on the other side, the real learning will come from asking the questions that will allow them to understand what went right and what could have been improved. 

The next step is codifying those learnings so they can be used in the future. If these learnings are not articulated and memorialized in a way that cannot be leveraged moving forward, then they will ultimately be wasted. 

Finally, we need to ask ourselves, how can we be intentional about the application of these learnings moving forward. Now that we know this rapid change is possible, how do we begin to embed into the company’s long-term values, the novel solutions and approaches which enabled us to do work that was previously unthinkable? 

Care to share an example?

I remember a recent conversation with a global HR leader at Pepsico, right before they were about to adopt and roll out a new company-wide HR digital application. The project originally had a two year implementation timeline, but due to the onset of the pandemic, they accelerated that and got the work done, soup to nuts, in nine months. The necessity of the pandemic caused them to do what they thought was impossible. However, after the task was complete and the dust settled, the team actively sought to diagnose what they did, consciously learning how they could evolve from traditions and processes that had not been scrutinized in years. They wanted to not simply ‘manage how they had been managing’ but to make sharper, more agile decisions more often. Ultimately, they cut out some bureaucracy and redundant approvals, and added specific training. But more importantly, it was the codification of this new process, and subsequent new workflows to include in the future, that ultimately will likely have the largest impact.

Another example that comes to mind is several conversations I had with both a leading global transportation company and a large healthcare company. Both were trying to answer safety and productivity questions, but also came around to asking: what is the purpose of the workplace? As the world shifted primarily from offices to ‘work from anywhere’, both companies knew the answer likely lay somewhere in between, and that many uncertainties still remain. Therefore, leaders need to both be much more intentional about developing an aligned understanding of what purpose the office serves, and what it should mean to and for the company. For instance, is the office needed to develop and highlight a strong company culture, is it to give people dedicated heads down space to work, or is it to have employees collaborate in new and interesting ways? The answer didn’t really matter so much as did the self-awareness to ask the right questions, and the intentional and human-centric manner with which leaders went about implementing them. Human centric leadership really means being more explicit, intentional and thoughtful around the principles that anchor our company and drive how we operate. 

How can people, whether leaders or not, get better at this type of thinking?

While it might sound self-serving, I would recommend the forthcoming piece from the Josh Bersin Academy, which is a great starting point to understanding these ideas broadly. Beyond that, a very common thread that comes up around leaders continuing to expand “serving their people” is to have and promote a listening platform. Whether it’s with your own leadership team, or a platform that allows for survey pulsing on a regular basis to understand the various needs and concerns people have. This puts leaders in a curious mindset, hopefully allowing them to listen, acknowledge, and then act. It also helps understand the gap between what the employee experience really is, and what you hope for it to be. But in order to fill the gap, you need to first ask the right questions and then listen accordingly.

Another recommendation for all leaders is to ask for grace in this process. We know leaders can sometimes be uncomfortable participating in these discussions as they don’t have all the answers. But that’s the point, and saying something like “I realize I may stumble through some of these conversations, but my intention is to listen and to learn, and I ask for grace and your patience in that” can act as a release valve for leaders to begin to have these types of dialogues. 

How can we work to make human centric leadership part of a broader new paradigm?

The ultimate goal of most professionals in people and talent related roles is to create consistently great experiences so that people can be at their best, bringing their best selves to work, and performing at their best. Therefore, one thing we should all keep in mind as we develop and implement processes that scale accordingly, is to try to never lose sight of the fact that it's real humans, real people at the front and center of those processes. We need to make sure they still remain front and center both during and after that change. 

I was recently listening to an interview of a friend of mind, Tom Rath, that illustrates this point. Tom is an expert in the wellbeing space, and was discussing some longitudinal studies of radiologist professionals. Apparently, radiologists performed better at reading the images of patients for whom they had a picture of, than for ones that they did not. Keeping that human element and personal individuality in mind sometimes make the biggest difference. 

In fact, thinking from an even broader perspective, human centric leadership is also closely connected to the general idea of wellbeing.  What we have found in 2020 is that organizations probably play a bigger, more multifaceted, and more critical role, than ever before. And in turn, those organizations are thinking about ways in which they can support their people to be at their best. When I say wellbeing, I use the definitions we leverage in our Partners for Wellbeing framework, which are:

Fulfillment - finding meaning and purpose in the things we do each day.

Human connection - The quality of relationships in one’s life and the interactions we have day to day. In the pandemic, interactions have been reduced or flattened to 2D from 3D, which has had a big impact on social wellbeing.  

Financial - the ability to have and manage the resources to lead one’s desired independent life.

Community - having a sense of belonging and being actively engaged where one lives and works.

Mind/Body Health (two parts to one whole) - having energy to do the things we want to do each day.

Shifting now to another topic: boards. Many of our readers are curious about board service. Can you describe your experiences in that area and any advice you can offer? 

I’ve been a part of a nonprofit board, Make-a-Wish, for about four years.  While it is a non-profit, it is a sizable and highly visible organization, whose board members comprise many impressive executives, such as the CEOs of companies like Disney and TopGolf. I’ve learned quite a lot from that experience, largely from the diverse, smart, high profile people around me in that room. It also afforded me a great initial board experience to cut my teeth and learn more about the mechanics of board service, committee structures and the like.

I also recently started serving on the board of a life sciences company, Voyager Therapeutics.  I do see HR leaders being recognized more on life sciences boards, as we’re now seeing a sort of inflection point and awakening where companies are recognizing that the skills and capabilities of HR leaders can be felt in the C-suite as well as the boardroom, namely around areas of people and culture, but also in understanding and promoting different perspectives, assisting with board dynamics, and bringing strategy expertise. It is still a bit unique, but I’ve seen more companies start to move in this direction, and more that are thinking about doing so. Tech companies that play in the HR space have been doing this for a while, but it’s exciting to see the shift pick up more broadly. 

Comparing and contrasting the two (nonprofit and public), there are obviously a lot more regulatory and compliance aspects on the public side. It was a nice flow for me to get some experience in the non profit space, and I do see some transferability in those skills into the public arena. But ultimately, so much of the boards are also dependent on the people that are around that table, the interactions that are fostered, and the openness to allowing all types of skill sets and capabilities to be valued when they are needed and helpful. 

In my first board experience, at Make-a-Wish, I felt welcomed and valued from day one, because throughout the interview process I knew that they were specifically seeking someone of my phenotype to join. Still, I was definitely a bit intimidated by the caliber of the people around the table, and at first I was a bit reluctant to participate. However, after developing relationships and rapport with my fellow board members and leaning into the confidence that comes from that, it became much easier to see that my opinion was sought after and I was invited here for a specific reason. I was able to bring that mindset, as well as more experience and familiarity with the decisions and processes of boards, to Voyager’s board and contribute effectively, right from the beginning.