In First Person: Stephanie Fehr

Stephanie Fehr is chief people officer at UnitedHealthcare, where she leads the HR strategy for the company’s 160,000 global and domestic employees. Before joining UnitedHealthcare in 2017, she spent 17 years in various HR and talent leadership roles at Apple and led the development of the Apple retail stores’ talent strategy. As part of People + Strategy articles editor Adam Bryant’s “Strategic CHRO” series on LinkedIn, he sat down with Fehr to discuss her career path and her views on leadership, hiring, and change management.

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People + Strategy: What big changes have you seen in the CHRO role during your career?

Stephanie Fehr: It’s a very different landscape in many ways. The complexities of the job are very broad. We’re dealing with five different generations in the workforce. We’re dealing with an aging demographic. And we’re dealing with global issues that are very sensitive and personal to people, like the Middle East conflict.

So, there are many variables that create a more challenging landscape when creating an employer-employee value proposition today. I don’t think it was that complicated when I started in HR. People have much greater expectations of their companies now than they did even 10 years ago.

P+S: How did you get into the field in the first place?

Fehr: I discovered it along the way. I was a 16th-century literature major—Shakespeare, to be exact—and wanted to be a professor. I was planning to get a Ph.D., but I worked for Pan Am right out of college as a purser on international routes. I did that for three years and experienced a difficult environment at the company because of the unions.

I’m not anti-union, but I was struck at a young age by how much easier and better it would be if we could create a proactive strategy where people felt like they were owners of the business and have a chance to work directly with leadership. I became intrigued by the question of how you create an environment where people feel really cherished and valued while also balancing that with the needs of the business.
 

P+S: Your role requires a lot of resilience, comfort in uncertainty, and a willingness to always be learning. Where does that come from for you?

Fehr: I get bored with the status quo. I like a lot of movement and change. When I was 7, my parents were divorced, and that was transformational for me because our family unit was suddenly turned on its head. My mother was a stay-at-home mom, and she was caught flat-footed.

She returned to school to become a registered nurse while raising my brother and me. I learned from her the importance of being self-sufficient, really on the balls of my feet, and ready for change. At a young age, I recognized that continuous learning was going to be critical to my survival and flourishing. That was always at the forefront of my mind—how do I keep growing, learning, and acquiring new skill sets?
 

P+S: How do you hire? What qualities do you look for, and what questions do you ask in a job interview?

Fehr: Authenticity is so important—somebody who feels really comfortable in their own skin. People need integrity and transparency from their leaders, and you can only get that from people who feel comfortable with who they are. So, I look for authenticity. I look for resiliency. I look for people who are comfortable with ambiguity.

To get at those qualities, I like to ask about when they have faced adversity in their life, how they dealt with it, and what they learned from it.

You would think that everyone would learn from their experiences, but most don’t. There is this special quality that a minority of people have of taking an experience and sucking the marrow out of it and applying those lessons to new behaviors. That’s what I look for and listen for in an interview.