CHICAGO — Jack Gottlieb, founder and CEO of Total Solutions Group, challenged HR professionals attending SHRM24 to go beyond the conventional boundaries of the profession and become integral business partners within their organizations.
He drew parallels between the evolution of customer service strategies in commoditized industries and the necessity for HR to redefine its impact on business growth and employee engagement.
Gottlieb recounted something he watched unfold at Comcast during his time at Dale Carnegie Training around 2008. Despite an intensive nine-month initiative to overhaul recruitment, training, and customer service, the anticipated long-term improvements for customer call-centre staff failed to materialize.
“The first three months of the initiative? Gangbusters,” he said. “Subscriptions skyrocketed. Customer satisfaction scores? Great. Turnaround times when you make calls? Lessened.”
But in the three months after that, the scores started coming down a bit — “kind of fluctuating, but not really continually growing. Some things to tweak, and maybe we’re OK.”
In the third phase, months six to nine, things collapsed and scores actually dropped below where things started, said Gottlieb.
“Just digest that for a moment,” he said. “All this work, all this intention. Like, what do we need to do? So we’re firing people, we’re changing things. New metrics, new processes, and it just never gained full traction.”
Gottlieb watched it all unfold, and then approached the team at Comcast. .
“I say to them, ‘Look, I have no place in this at all. I just want to be of support since I’m working with the leadership team here’ (in my role at Dale Carnegie),” he said. “Can I just grab two of your main call centre directors that manage the majority of call centre folks?”
Simple question: ‘What’s going on?’
He wanted to get beyond the performance reviews, evaluations, coaching and mentoring. He took them across the street to a restaurant and asked them a simple question: “What’s going on?”
“You know what their response was? ‘Do you really want to know?’ Which means they’ve never had a chance to tell it,” said Gottlieb.
That conversation revealed two key bits of information. First, the staff in the call centre did not understand why they were being put through all the customer service training. Nor did they understand why the technicians — the ones going to customer’s houses — were not in the room for the training.
Second, they said: “All we’re here to do is answer phones. What’s the big deal?”
Comcast got all the fundamental things right — recruitment, performance management, coaching, recalibrating the business, he said. This disconnect highlighted the need for HR to foster a deeper understanding and ownership among employees.
Seven key shifts
So what’s missing? That led into the core of Gottlieb’s session, which focused on seven key shifts necessary for HR to evolve beyond traditional roles.
| Number | Shift | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Prioritizing Purpose Over Priorities | Gottlieb emphasized that a clear, actionable purpose must be the epicenter of an organization’s mission, transcending mere statements on the wall. |
| 2 | Fostering Ownership Instead of Engagement | Moving beyond engagement, Gottlieb advocated for fostering ownership, where employees take responsibility for the impact they contribute to the organization. |
| 3 | Being an Embedded Partner, Not an Order Taker | HR must integrate deeply within business lines, contributing strategically rather than merely fulfilling transactional roles. |
| 4 | Developing Organizational Capability, Not Just Individual Skills | Gottlieb argued for a broader focus on organizational capabilities, which includes navigating team dynamics and integrating with various departments. |
| 5 | Creating Real Business Impact | HR should aim to be perceived as a strategic contributor to business outcomes, not just a cost centre. |
| 6 | Promoting Total Well-being | The focus should extend beyond managing workload and stress to fostering holistic well-being that sustains long-term success. |
| 7 | Amplifying Human Touch with AI | While acknowledging the role of AI, Gottlieb stressed that technology should enhance human interactions rather than replace them. |
Practical application of these shifts
To illustrate the practical application of these shifts, Gottlieb shared a case study from Bristol-Myers Squibb. The company aimed to reduce its drug development cycle time significantly while ensuring individualized medicine enhances the quality of life for patients. This required HR to align learning and development strategies with the company’s broader transformation goals.
A similar transformation was seen at Johnson Controls, where integrating core functions into a dynamic enterprise was key to addressing digital solutions and smart buildings. HR played a pivotal role in aligning strategic priorities and closing gaps between departments.
Aligning with the executive team
Gottlieb concluded with a number of tips for HR professionals to become embedded partners within their organizations. For example, the following question can be powerful, he said.
“What are the biggest problems we need to solve, and most critical opportunities we must seize, in our markets to realize our greater purpose and strategic path?” he said. “What is the capability and capacity we must build for you, and our marketplace, to do that?”
That makes sense as a question, because its owning both the needs of the business and the customers at the same time, said Gottlieb.
Another question to dive into is what “real impact” customers want beyond the company’s products and services.
“And what are their most critical known and unknown needs to fully reach that?” he said, pointing again to the “capability and capacity” question around where the organization needs to focus.
Next up is to understand what objectives are most important when it comes to the impact, growth, financial strength, and culture the organization wants to have, he said.
His last bit of advice is to understand the “passion, dreams and needs of our people.”
“How do we align that to what’s really most important for our organization, for our customers, for our marketplace,” he said.
