Tina Kao Mylon on Empowering the Employee
As senior vice president, Talent and Diversity, Global HR at Schneider Electric, Tina Kao Mylon knows well the implications on performance management created by a large company with three global centres.
In this interview, Tina discusses:
- The value of high performance.
- Finding balance between what is delivered and how it’s delivered.
- How a global company personalizes and shares its values across different cultural settings.
- Empowering the employee to be in the driver’s seat of performance management.
Full Transcript
Michael: I’m excited to be back for another episode of Performance Management Stories, when we get into the nitty gritty of what’s really happening in the performance management revolution. My guest today, a long-time colleague of mine, is Tina Kao Mylon. She is the Senior Vice President of Talent and Diversity, Global HR, at Schneider Electric. She joined the company about a year and a half ago in April 2016, and has responsibility for talent management, leadership development, and diversity and inclusion. Really broad remit. Before she joined Schneider Electric, and this is where I met her, Tina was with BASF. From 2011 to 2016, she was the Global Head of Learning and Development. Prior to that, she was responsible for Talent Development and Talent Acquisition through North America.
She’s coming with a really great diversity of experience, which we’re really going to tap into in this conversation. Tina is an expert on topics of talent, leadership, OD, Organizational Development, and you may have come across her work in various journals such as People and Strategy, Across the Board, World at Work Journal, Human Resource Executive, and Human Resource Planning. So she’s a real thinker and a thought leader in this space. All the better for us. So Tina, welcome. So good to have you on the call with us.
Tina Kao Mylon: Thank you, Michael. I’m very happy to be here.
Michael: Yeah, so let’s set the scene. Tell us a little bit about Schneider Electric. What sort of organization is it, how big is it, how global is it? What are we talking about here?
Tina Kao Mylon: Yeah, happy to do so, Michael. Schneider Electric has been around a long time, 150-plus years. It’s a global leader in energy management and automation, and we are about a $25 billion dollar company, we have 144,000 employees in over 100 countries, and our basic mantra from a business perspective is how do we support companies to provide access to energy? We believe access to energy is a basic human right, and Schneider works with companies to make that happen. And the other interesting thing I think about the role, which has implications for how we think about certain processes like performance management, for example, is we’re very global, meaning we don’t have one formal head … We have three global centers, if you will, three global hubs across the world in Paris, Hong Kong, and Boston from which we drive our overall employee workforce.
Michael: I love that. I’m certainly interested in finding out more about that because an organization that size, and already dispersed with three global headquarters, makes for an interesting conversation. As you know, performance management’s been under the spotlight for the last number of years. People going, “We’ve got to change it. We’ve got to change everything,” or “We’ve got to change some of it.” How have you been thinking about performance management at Schneider Electric?
Tina Kao Mylon: Yes. Well, for us, first of all I would describe us probably in the progressive mode of constantly iterating and experimenting with performance management, but we aren’t at the far end of the spectrum of having eliminated performance management as you see in some other companies. It’s definitely one of our top priorities when it comes to our overall HR transformation, high performance and performance management being a lever of high performance, has been on our radar for the last two to three years and we’ve changed quite a bit, but I have to say, Michael, we’re not ready to kill it yet.
Michael: I think rumors of its death have been grossly exaggerated. I don’t think people are ready to let it all go. But they are interested in thinking about it and experimenting and beta testing, which it sounds like you’ve been doing as well.
Tina Kao Mylon: Absolutely. And for us, and I think a lot of the folks would be able to understand, with a global company there is always a balance of our sides, right? So part of our power in the market is a global company with local speed and real empowerment at the country level. So we want to be close to customer’s market and local, but at the same time we do believe in a few core global things. A few years back our CEO and head of HR really proclaimed high performance, which is not a new topic, but nonetheless for us, high performance as one of our consistent global backbones touching all 140,000-plus of our employees. So we really are trying to strike that balance all the time in how we manage performance.
Michael: What I love about that is you are already pointing to, where does the initiative to reinvent or rethink about performance management come from, and it sounds like you’ve had a kind of remit set from the highest level around why this is important. Do you know why the CEO and head of HR kind of picked high performance as that key thing to focus on?
Tina Kao Mylon: Yeah. I think for us, and I don’t think it’s revolutionary, it’s fairly sound, but I think we’ve been very clear that high performance is first and foremost about being ambitious for our customers and business. So this is our driver, it’s what gets us all rallied up in the market place. And for us, having some kind of cadence in a global company with a fairly decentralized structure, so having that common cadence for us and how we drive toward performance, each of us individually to a collective impact has always been top of mind for our management.
Michael: Nice. So what sort of things have you been tinkering with? I mean what have you played with, and what are you kind of excited about, about what’s emerged as being a useful tweak or change to the process?
Tina Kao Mylon: Yep. Happy to share. For us, so now I’m talking about something that’s been in place for almost three years now, and I’ll highlight some of the basics. So nothing fancy here, but for us we do have one universal approach so I’m the global business process owner, if you will, of performance management. I don’t know if it’s a lofty title, but that’s what I have to try. There’s one cadence. We do it once a year formally and then really encourage frequent conversations and feedback throughout the year. But there is one formal system and calendar cadence to that.
There’s one technical system, so we do use one global ERP. In this case it’s Oracle Fusion that anchors the process. And we have a four-scale rating and we look at both the what and the how, in terms of the performance assessment. I’ll give you those high levels in terms of folks who are quite familiar with running performance management systems. Those are probably the core elements of how we drive it. And I think for me, how I look at … Oh, go ahead.
Michael: Oh, no, no, no. Carry on, please.
Tina Kao Mylon: I was going to say, also, probably what’s been most interesting and challenging but for us, probably most fruitful to drive, is this balance of the what and the how. So again, I don’t think this is a new concept but to implement it with efficacy at our level in the company, the global workforce, it’s been a really challenging but incredibly fruitful journey. For us, now three years in, I’d say that we’ve got universal alignment more or less across the organization of emphasizing that what you deliver and how you deliver. The how is really aligned to our company values and what we call our leadership expectations. That piece of reinforcing that, having conversations about that, assessing in the system on the what and the how. That’s been, I’d say, a real win for us at Schneider in terms of impact and just effectiveness of the implementation from a change perspective.
Michael: I love that. I mean, I love that separation from the what and the how. That isn’t, as you say, a revolutionary brand new idea but it’s also tricky and it actually occurs less often than you might think. I’m desperately curious to know about how you manage the change management process around that because such a big company, decentralized or largely decentralized as you said, and yet you found this kind of global pulse that people have bought in across the company here. How did you make that magic happen?
Tina Kao Mylon: I would say a couple of things, Michael. One is if you again envision Schneider Electric, a big global company with a local feel, our mandate at the global level was to empower each of the local entities, and here I’m really talking about a hundred countries, so at the start of that campaign empowering each of those countries with a … It really was a storytelling packet or a tool kit, which gave all the basics and the facts and figures and process detailed for the countries to deploy, on how to run performance management. I think it was imbued with really personal human emotional stories including video testimonials and self-assessment tools and whatnot that employees, managers and HR could use to really talk about not just the what and the mechanics of performance management, but the why, and why it matters to each of us as employees, and why it matters for the company overall.
So there was quite a bit of testimonial and video and storytelling that I think helped animate it in a more personal way. We’ve done that in the last couple years and I’d say that’s been one of the highlights. And it’s more fun too, because as we all know performance management, it’s not always the most popular and ideal topic. Those of us in HR, we know that. So to make it animated, make it personal, make it connect to how we drive Schneider forward, that’s been part of our challenge. I’d say we’ve done a pretty good job there.
Michael: I love that. So what I hear in that is both there’s a connection to the bigger picture strategy, here’s the why behind this. But there’s a way that this fit is making it feel personal and human, not just a kind of faceless corporate decision that’s being imposed on different countries.
Tina Kao Mylon: Yes, because… That’s exactly right and I think at the end of the day, both for driving performance and also for driving career and development, we know at the very end of the day it’s really through the lens of each of us as an employee. So we really try to go down to that lowest but super critical common denominator and make sure the employee himself or herself really gets it and really feels equipped.
The philosophy for us at Schneider is they are driving both in the sense that, for performance management yes, there’s a manager in the end that gives you an assessment and all that, but we want employees increasingly to take more initiative, take initiative to trigger those conversations about performance and development, to trigger goal setting around performance and around career development. And with the driver’s seat being in the hands of the employees I think the change management effort has to be really geared towards the employees.
Michael: Tina, let me ask you another question. I’m just geeking out over here about how interesting this sounds. So here’s what connections I’ve made in my head and I may be wrong, but you’ve talked about the what and the how. You’ve talked about the how being driven and based on the company values and what that means. But also, often those values as they show up, they’re probably global values but they may be interpreted differently in different cultures in different countries. I’m wondering how you sustain consistency across the how, knowing that values are often interpreted differently in different cultural settings.
Tina Kao Mylon: Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s major main for us because we’re actually, now that we’re three years in at the close of this journey next year, Michael, we’re actually thinking about how to reboot or revitalize those very values that you just mentioned. Part of it is driven, in part, by changing business focus or more urgent business priorities. But I think you’re also right in alluding to the fact that in the end we also need to make sure it appeals and is inclusive to all our employees. I’d say for us the values we have today, and some of them are pretty straightforward, one is about really being … Well, I just said it. One is really about being straightforward.
At Schneider we’re expected to speak straight and be direct with each other, not have hidden agendas. How do we address that? In some of the communication training materials we’ve really tested and gotten feedback from the countries on what that means in their particular cultures. We’ve also given materials that allows for some nuance. Allowing a country, for example, to say in X country this might look like this behavior with this kind of outcome if you’re trying to observe it.
So we’re trying to build some nuances in the materials and the training that we provide to support the process. I think it’s still a challenge for sure, but we’re very sensitive to the fact that we have so many different, not just nationalities, but just a diversity within our workforce so we have to be as inclusive as possible.
Michael: So Tina, this has been a great story about success and what’s worked well as you rolled that out over the last three years. But I’m always curious to know what things may not have gone quite as well as you were hoping, or what proved to be a deeper, harder struggle than you were anticipating. Do you have a story or two there you might share?
Tina Kao Mylon: Sure. We are a company, we are quite a technical company, a lot of engineering, a lot of R & D. So we, like similar companies of that nature, we love our KPIs and we love our metrics and I’d say on the HR side as well, we run these campaigns, if you will Michael, with fair degree of rigor around KPIs and whatnot. I think we’re at a stage in our company and our company culture where we’re really questioning are we getting suffocated or hindered by too much focus on the KPIs?
When I look at the performance management campaigns these last couple years, I’d say one of the challenges is how do you ensure that we do it, and we do it on ongoing, continuous feedback, and we also close the campaign at each year without being just inundated with constant metrics, constant obsession? You can imagine it happens at the global level and then it’s cascaded and exponentially multiplies at the local level. So this year as we are in the midst of it and closing the cycle, one of the challenges for the next campaign is how do we continue to keep it robust, valuable, but super simplified? I say here, we have room for improvement for sure. Absolutely.
Michael: There’s that great quote from-
Tina Kao Mylon: And I think the other one I alluded to earlier… pardon?
Michael: I was going to say-
Tina Kao Mylon: Yes. I was going to say that the other one that, for me-
Michael: Sorry, Tina. There’s a bit of delay on the line, so we’re stepping on each other’s toes here, but-
Tina Kao Mylon: Oh, okay.
Michael: Do you want to speak to a second story?
Tina Kao Mylon: Yes. The second one is something I alluded to earlier, which is again empowering the employee to really be in the driver’s seat when it comes to some aspects of performance management, especially encouraging a culture of two-way feedback and also initiating the setting of goals. For us, I think we’re still sometimes in a wait and see kind of environment where employees still are expecting that the manager triggers this. This is a much deeper cultural shift, as you know. It’s less about process than how do we continue to shift mindset and shift culture so that employees feel empowered to take more initiative on this topic. This is another challenge and priority for us in the future.
Michael: I think that’s actually one of the really profound challenges most organizations face because organizations by their nature are set up a hierarchy, and asking people to upend the hierarchy and take responsibility for their own careers, their own freedom, is actually quite a radical act so I think it’s a challenge almost in every organization that I’ve come across.
Tina Kao Mylon: Yep. I fully agree.
Michael: So you talked about the rhythm you have of having an annual cycle but an increased encouragement of people having ongoing conversations. That’s not dissimilar from what we’ve heard from other organizations as well, that if we’re going to look to increase one thing it would be the more consistent, if you like, coach-like conversations managers are having with the people with whom they work. That’s easy to say. That’s often hard to do. Do you have any insight around how you’ve helped increase those more informal conversations? Any kind of levers or nudges that have helped managers be more coach-like, have more of those common chats?
Tina Kao Mylon: I think we did this year, Michael, so we just kicked it off this year and it’s for our 11,000 people managers around the world. Basically, we went through a change initiative for setting up around 150 internal coaches, we worked with an external learning firm to certify these coaches and really engage them around being a network for, I’ll use your word, definitely for nudging and also training and supporting our leaders on a series of fundamental, core skills.
The first modules that we rolled out this year were on giving great feedback and also coaching for performance. This was really about engaging our leaders to do this. We did it in a pretty ambitious way, meaning we rolled it out to about 80% of our countries around the world, so you’re now talking about over 70 countries, and in waves and some of it was in short hour and a half learning nuggets face to face, some were virtuals, really depending on what the countries wanted. All in the spirit of learning nuggets to really trigger this idea of managers practicing and then really putting into reality giving great feedback and also coaching for performance. And it’s been so successful, this idea of internal coaches that were quick learning nuggets, and materials to support an overall process, in this case, performance management. We’re going to continue with those two topics and then next year we’re going to roll out hidden bias, or unconscious bias education through that same initiative.
Michael: Fantastic. It sounds like a great commitment.
Tina Kao Mylon: Yeah. That’s been really fun. And exciting for us. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It was not easy but I think it’s been an effective way to really engage and frankly, put some accountability and also some excitement in the life of a people manager because I think they, as a group, sometimes feel quite not recognized enough. Sort of the job on top of the … Just the day job of delivering on business. And we want to make sure we engage them as a global community.
Michael: I love it. That classic squeeze of the people manager, pressure from below, pressure from above. And not a whole lot of love. So it’s great to give them the love and support that they might be looking for. Tina, almost as a final comment, any final reflections on lessons learned about performance management, particularly I’m always curious about the change management process because it’s one thing to have good ideas. It’s a whole other thing to actually engage hundreds of countries around the world. Any final comments or final thoughts?
Tina Kao Mylon: I think from my side, first of all we know it’s a continuous journey, so we get that and we learn every year. For me, honestly, the simplicity and making this a very human, very personal process versus the corporate top-down HR process, and having that spirit spill into everything from training materials to leaders telling their own stories or testimonials of how they do this … That’s been a huge lesson for me. How do I keep it simple and very personal when I’m managing a very big, sometimes very heavy global process?
I’d say that’s one. And then the second one for me is how do I continue to keep it digital? And even more digital? Like many companies, we have our core system in place and it works fine. It’s not perfect but it works fine. And now we have 97% of our employees worldwide completing performance management, so we’re super proud of that. But how do I keep innovating on that front-
Michael: Wow. That’s great.
Tina Kao Mylon: Yeah. It’s been great. I mean, there’s a little tough down-push there, I won’t deny that, but it’s been amazing because we’ve had double digit change year after year since we implemented it. Then the next horizon for me is how do I continue to keep it even more agile and more digital? So for sure, we will continue to pilot certain apps. We’ve piloted this year a number of different feedback apps and next year we want to do a two-way kind of feedback app, so employees also giving feedback directly to the managers, and also we’re planning something around continuous feedback. How do you do that in an app format that you can do on the go, when you’re on the road with customers. So that’s another piece that we’re really interested in for us.
Michael: Tina Kao Mylon, it’s been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for sharing your insights. You’ve been extremely generous about telling us what you’ve been up to at Schneider Electric and you’ve been up to some cool stuff, so thank you. We’re all going to benefit from this.
Tina Kao Mylon: Michael, thanks for the opportunity, and it was great speaking with you.
