 Good afternoon. I'm Ray Tsuchiyama, and this is the first of a new series, I hope, on all about leadership in Hawaii, national, and of course globally, on issues about leadership and organizations. I have here a guest, Ed Hudson, who is the managing partner of Pacific Partners HR Consulting, and he's been exploring issues with leadership in Hawaii based on his long experiences at Fortune 100 firms like 3Com, Sun Microsystems, UT Starcom, all back in California in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. He has an MBA in HR from USC and a bachelor's, also HR from a California university, and he's been focusing on issues based on facts and research for decades, and I think they're really relevant to leaders and managers in Hawaii, in nonprofit organizations, in business, and also government that's really trying to transform their organizations into a better place to work and to engage. Welcome to ThinkTech Hawaii. Thank you, Ray. It's great to be here. And what are your linkages to Hawaii? Well, going all the way back to the beginning, literally, I was actually born here in Honolulu, didn't grow up here, grew up in California, and then my next linkage is my daughter, who actually came to University of Hawaii to study education and has been teaching here since then at one of the local elementary schools. That's great. And now your experiences have mostly been in HR and business, am I correct? Yes. In large or small organizations? Actually, for about 30 years, I've been working in organizations, again, global organizations, but based in California for the most part. About 20 of those years were in Silicon Valley, and I've only recently relocated to Honolulu. But I always characterize it as large and small global organizations with operations around the world. A lot of times a couple of organizations with significant operations in Asia. So I've done a lot of work with my HR counterparts in China and Japan. And when you say HR, what does that encompass? What kind of people that you employ and what do they do? Yeah. Again, these were in the technology space. So practically all of my career were the really small few months in financial services when I was doing some consulting before in between corporate roles. So it's all been engineering, scientists, technicians, manufacturing folks. Well, what I meant was were you involved in typical HR work like recruiting, working with the CEO with organization development, benefits. The whole thing. Actually, early in the career, I started off in the recruiting side, but I've worked specifically in every function as I was going up the ladder, the corporate ladder, got to the point where I was actually leading the HR function in organizations on a global basis. UT Starcom was probably one of my largest organizations. And how large was that? How many employees? The company itself at its peak was about 6,500 employees. About 60% of those folks were in China. And we had HR folks in China that took care of the day-to-day operations, but I was the global leader for the function. That's terrific. And now you realize also that in Hawaii, we don't have that type of 6,500 employee organization. That's very rare. In fact, during the last 30 to 40 years, the story about Hawaii business is that transition from the big five, in fact, Dylan and Theo H. Davies, A&B, and Castle and Cook, to a landscape of SMEs with maybe fewer than 100 employees at most, and they're in all kinds of fields from construction, real estate, hospitality, hotels, and so forth. But I think many of the insights you have become aware of are really relevant to smaller and medium-sized organizations. Yeah, I actually believe that the principles of management, business success, things that organizations do to be successful, whether you're a small organization or a medium-sized or a large global organization, are going to be the same. Organizations, no matter again what industry sector or what their size, they're trying to get business results through people. And so the people factor is what's the common trait, right? So we're back to your core competency, working with people, what to do with people, how to lead people, and how to give guidance and advice to the top leadership dealing with these issues. And you've been also really keeping track of research in this area. Tell me about any papers or research that's been done that really gives you great insights to what keeps CEOs up at night. Yeah, sure. I think it's a great question. As an HR professional, the challenge is always to figure out how do I create the talent management strategy that will help us achieve the business strategy. And a lot of times, the challenge is to get the business leaders to understand and appreciate the value of the things that an HR professional might propose in terms of development. I sometimes describe myself as an HR professional that leads with development. And the reason for that and the reason why I will use any study that I could get my hands on, because it helps in making the case for doing development in organizations, development is very expensive. And what do you mean by development? What does that mean? Development learning and development training, which can be training employees, how to do their jobs if it's a bank, training tellers, if it's an engineering organization, it's training them on the latest technical developments in an organization. And of course, all about IT and introducing new ways to increase productivity through technology. Right. And so there's the big theme of today. Exactly. And so you'll see it a lot of times in organizations and I'll characterize it as training that is or development activities that are targeted at employee success, helping employees be successful and training initiatives that will help managers be successful, which and then I'll even take it to the next level and say, how do we make leaders be successful? So I'll segment the types of activities that we might do, but all with the same intent and purpose, which is to up level the capability of the organization. And so there are certain studies that I've been following for 20 years. Probably the first one that I really got a hold of and I've just followed since then is the Towers, now it's Towers Watson, at the first it was Towers Perron. Right. And now it's Towers Watson since the merger with Willis. And their study on employee engagement and specifically what they're tracking is, what are the drivers for attraction, retention and engagement? Those are three words right there. Attraction, retention and engagement. And it's consistent. It's a global study and the results are consistent over the decades. They keep refining it, but basically what they find is that leadership, for instance if you want to talk, we're talking about leadership, leadership is characterized as being important regardless of the age. So it cuts across age demographics, which is interesting because everybody talks about millennials being a kind of a new breed and how do we attract and retain those folks. It applies to them as well. And what it is is it's basically trust and confidence in senior leadership. And the word culture comes up, doesn't it? And that people attracted certain organizations because of a great culture. And there was this great quote, culture is simply a shared way of doing something with a passion. And so I think if employees love their company, of course, embrace their culture and really want to do things within the company, it shows. It shows in a bottom line and with customers and with products and so forth. But this, two words that you came up recently though, was something new, but probably something old, employee engagement. What does that really mean from an HR perspective? But what is that outcome for the CEO? Yeah, that's a great question because engagement very simply is, I like to say, it's the three H's, it's the head, the hands, and then the heart. And the engagement is to get the heart of the employee. And so to give another way of defining it is that discretionary effort and commitment that you want to get from employees, they will willingly give that to you if they are feeling engaged by the organization. And so simply what that means is in terms of values and culture of the organization is, do they feel that the organization, as part of the value proposition for the employee, that the organization cares about them as much as the organization wants them to care about doing their jobs and about the customers. Well, I think that's a very interesting point because another line came back to me, good managers make people believe in them, great leaders make people believe in themselves. Exactly, yes. And they say that great leaders are born, not made. And the difficulty, I think, is that you truly can't just put someone into a C-level role as they go up and expect them to know how to be a good leader if it's not something that is being modeled from above. I've been fortunate to work with some good business leaders and some were better than others. But even the better ones, when it comes to the concept of what I do as a leader or as a manager, how does that impact the employees, my words, my actions, those are really impactful. And a lot of times, really smart CEOs don't quite appreciate how important it is. And I always say, leadership actions speak louder than words always. It's not so much what you say, that's important, but it's really most important what you do. That's very good because people are looking at you all the time as a model and you're absolutely right. Now, the other thing that comes to mind though, of course people talk about culture, people talk about engagement, but isn't it certain things in being an employee that you worry about is like salary or benefits or some of the things that office space or vacation time, aren't these part and parcel of being a great place to work? Yes, they are. They're actually on the attraction and retention side of the drivers, what attracts employees and what retains them are things like compensation, base pay, base salary, benefits, work environment, flexibility of work arrangements, things like that. And we're going to go back to all those and go into depth just as we take a short break. Hello, everyone. I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture, which is seen on Think Tech, Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. And with the show's host, Martin Desbang, we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live, but other aspects of our life, not only here in Hawaii, but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech, Hawaii. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I'm the host of Think Tech, Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea comes on every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join us. I like to bring in guests that talk about all types of things that come across the sea to Hawaii, not just law, love, people, ideas, history. Please join us for Law Across the Sea. Aloha. This is Ray Tucci. I'm back again with our guest, Ed Hudson, and he's a veteran of many years in Silicon Valley, the Bay Area, and California and all those big and medium-sized high-tech firms. And he's giving us great insights on what makes a great company and some of the things that an employee would be interested in or passionate about being part of his workplace. Now, there's another quote. Being a great place to work is a difference between a good company and a great company. And you hit the nail on the head because people are attracted to great cultures, a great place to work, and while there, they want to be sustained. They have to go forward with all kinds of great things, and they're going to, of course, contribute and increase productivity and stay there, which is, again, about retention, which is how do you attract and retain the best people on earth to work for you? And that's, of course, what keeps many CEOs up at night. And so you're talking about some of the HR benefits and what will work with employees. I'm sorry to interrupt. Go ahead. That's okay. I actually wanted to make a point on your comment there, Ray, because a lot of employers, there aren't that many that are way behind the curve in terms of business practice, especially in certain locations, certain economies. And Silicon Valley was the same way, very competitive. So you're not going to find too many companies that are lagging way behind in terms of things like workplace environment and benefits and what have you. So where can a company try to get some sort of advantage or barrier, let's say, to taking your people? So retention guard is in how you treat your people and how engaged they are. That's hard to replicate. It's not so much a natural thing. I think you hear it a lot in the business world today. People kind of throw out the words engagement, but it's not something that I think is automatically something that organizations know how to do. What's interesting is that we talk about the employee engagement, and it sounds like it's a new thing, but the reality is that the kinds of things that management gurus have been talking about for a long time are the same things that we find today characterize great leaders. Going back to your thing about leadership, and what's interesting to me is that with the rise of outsiders in politics, this is the odd kind of thing about Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and others, and we're talking about the authentic voice rather than perfection or rather strength. How authentic are you? How does employees perceive the leader as being engaged with you and really looking out for your interest? Is that part of today's world being authentic for a leader? Oh yeah, I think it's most important. I wrote a short paper that was titled Eight Fatal Flaws of Leadership, and probably the positive reverse of that would have been eight things that great leaders exhibit, but I should have probably taken that approach. But one of the flaws is disingenuousness, and employees are looking for the actions to match the words, and they look hard for that, and they see it real fast, and it doesn't even have to be intentional, but if management or leadership says one thing and then the actions don't quite add up, employees are right on that, and again, it doesn't even have to be intentional. That's the value of having people in the organization, particularly good HR people who are kind of that early warning system, if you will, and help make sure that our actions are aligning with our words. Organizations put a lot of effort into coming up with core values, and I say to CEOs that you're not done with the core values when they're in a poster outside of your office on the wall, and sometimes CEOs look at me with a puzzled look like I thought we were done, and the reality is that you're not done unless the employees are actually believing that, and you don't want them kind of rolling their eyes when they look at the core values in a poster on the wall outside the CEO's office. You want them to say, yeah, we live by that. Very good point. I've been in the C-Level roles before, and if you were to go to a CEO today and tell that person how they can work best with HR as their partner, as their right hand man or woman, and take advantage or leverage what they know so that the CEOs can really be successful and take the organization through a very difficult time, or what people are trying to do today, CEOs today, which are to transform the organization, and that's a big word and may mean many, many things, and transform into a leaner, better organization, a more collaborative organization, one that's more focused on bottom line, one focused on the customer. There are many, many sides to transformation, but if you were going to give insights and advise the CEO how best to leverage that relationship, what would that be? Yeah, I think probably the number one thing would be to expect that, to expect a certain level of thought leadership around things like transformation, around change management, because that's what kind of comes into play. I actually take it one level further, and I don't refer to it as change management, I refer to it as change leadership. Organizations have to have the ability to be agile and adapt and flexible and speedy, in terms of responding, especially in today's world and the more global it is. All you can do is plan for your actions and try to anticipate the actions of your competition, you really can't control those actions. So the more change ready an organization is, the more capable it is to do those kinds of transformations, the better. The only way that you can really do that is to make sure that your managers and your leaders have the basics of what are the steps that we need to do in order to prepare the employee base for significant change. Very good points, and the one word that I grasped readily was global. Yes. And here you are in Hawaii, in the middle of the Pacific, and you've experienced a lot in Silicon Valley and California, of course, global things, in Asia, Pacific, Europe, you know, there are all kinds of offices I used to work for. AOL and Google had offices throughout the world and had dealing with leaders and management in many, many different countries, cultures and so forth. You're in Hawaii, that's a population of 1.2 million, and you've been talking to a lot of CEOs and leaders. Are there any takeaways that you see that compare contrast with transit of mainland and in Hawaii? Yeah, actually it's interesting because I've talked to quite a few folks, a lot of HR folks, business leaders, as well as some folks in education, but I actually started doing some benchmarking before, you know, a few years ago just through contacts and one of the most insightful pieces of feedback that I got, which stunned me quite, to be quite honest about it, was I was talking to someone who was the COO at one of the coffee companies on the Big Island and I was just asking him, you know, about how do you do strategic development, how do you do leadership development, and his comment was, and he was very courteous with me, but he said, Eddie, the first thing you have to understand is that this is not the mainland, and so we don't always have, and it will differ depending on the employer and the industry, but his point was that we have jobs and we have difficulty getting people to come to work, you know, if it's a good day and the surf is good, you know, so the issues may not be the same as what you have in Silicon Valley, so I think that the most important thing, and so that learning, different environment, you have to, you know, and so someone like myself, even though I can say, hey, I've got 30 years of experience, I've worked in large and small global companies, it doesn't really mean everything, if I don't figure out a way to leverage what my experiences are to fit the environment and the culture and the actual needs of the businesses here. I know it's a smaller business, the unemployment rate is really low, and so the issues are so much, you know, hiring engineers that are going to go to Google for a lot more money, it's how do we keep our people, how do we keep them happy so that our customers are happy, and engaged employees mean, you know... But there are similarities, engagement of customers in hospitality and hotels, you really, the customer's king, they don't, they stop coming to Hawaii, that's the end of our tourism-based economy, but there must be similarities also with the mainland. I mean, you pointed out that there's some things from the get-go that are different, but there must be things that you've heard that says, oh, I've heard that before in Silicon Valley, they're thinking the same things about employee engagement or transformation here in Hawaii. Yeah, I mean, I've heard, you know, a lot of times, you know, you listen for what the questions are that leaders ask, right, and look for the opportunity to propose something that you know would help address some of those issues around employees. And so I think managers, leaders here are looking for what do I have to do in an environment where my managers may be good managers, but maybe haven't had the development to become even more effective leaders and managers, and so I think there's opportunities there. I think the same thing I've heard from the HR perspective is that we have people, that there's a gap potentially between, you know, the folks who are doing the operational day-to-day business of HR, and then that next level up of how do we become more business partners to the organization? You hear that word drawn out a lot, strategic business partners, and really what a strategic business partner is, at least in my definition, is someone who is able to help the business leader, manager, leader, CEO anticipate what are the people implications of a given business issue or strategy, and what do we have to do in terms of recruiting? Do we have the right capability on board? If we don't, how are we going to go get it? If we don't, if we have talent in the house that can be developed, then what are the programs we need to put in place to do that? You know, managing, and so here's a consistent thing, whether you're here or there or in China, managing is the most difficult job in any organization, right? Getting, when you're an individual contributor, you're responsible for what you do. When you're trying to get work done through other people, and especially if there's geographic dispersion, that's a difficult thing, and it's not something that, you know, people come out of schools when they focused on whatever their functional specialty is, they don't generally get that kind of training. So if it doesn't come from within the organization somehow, then that work of being a manager, getting results through people. So you do see a gap in the middle management area for more development of these managers to really excel at managing and getting more productivity out of their employees or subordinates. Yeah, I mean, and again, I would base that off of my experiences in Silicon Valley, right? These are companies that will to some extent put more effort and money into development, but it's still a gap. And so I would assume that there's a similar gap. It may not, you know, it may look different, but I would assume that there's a gap because again, as I started off earlier, development is expensive and metrics are hard to come by. And so that's a reason why a lot of organizations just won't spend the money. They don't know what the impact will be. Well, you're correct that CEOs, I think it's too soft. It's not bottom line already. They have to sell more revenues and get revenues. But, you know, we've had a really interesting discussion, 30 minutes have passed, maybe we can return to some of these issues for CEOs of Hawaii Business 250 companies in the future. Out of this, I hope that CEOs will look at this program and say, wow, I never knew that. Or maybe we need to explore this further for our organizations or managers to really dive into. And so I thank you, Ed. Oh, you're welcome. Thank you for your contributions today and for your insights. And this is Ray Tsuchiyama. And I hope this is the beginning of a series all about leadership. Thank you very much from Think Tech Hawaii.