Profiles in Transformation

When we talk about transformation in the workforce, it all comes down to the secret sauce—the people. As part of this edition’s focus on transformation, we’re featuring Q&A discussions with three leaders who were recognized as 2024 winners of the SHRM Foundation’s Tharseō Awards, which honor transformational leaders who have created a tangible impact on the global workforce.

Representing HR, business, and politics, these visionaries shared their unique perspectives on the evolving landscape of company culture, the workforce, and personal leadership. Their stories highlight the game-changing power of leadership and offer valuable lessons for anyone navigating the complexities of change.

TRANSFORMING YOUR CULTURE

with Kathleen Hogan, CHRO at Microsoft

As executive vice president and CHRO at Microsoft, Hogan helps direct the culture that attracts and inspires more than 220,000 global employees. Before becoming CHRO, Hogan served as the corporate vice president of Microsoft Services, a team dedicated to helping businesses maximize the value of their Microsoft investment. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2003, she was a partner at McKinsey & Company and a development manager at Oracle.

P+S: When you were brought on as CHRO, you were specifically tasked with leading the culture transformation at Microsoft. What was your impression on getting the ask?

HOGAN: I wasn’t expecting the call at all. I was on the way to my sister’s 50th birthday party and our CEO Satya Nadella called. I’ll never forget that phone call because Colleen, my sister’s daughter, was listening to “The Brady Bunch” in the backseat. I’m talking to Satya and he says, “Will you come help me? I really want to evolve our culture, and I’d love to partner with you on that.”

That was the beginning of starting to think about culture transformation. I’d led our consulting organization, Microsoft Services, before I stepped into the role of HR, and Satya was on the product side of it. We had worked together in that capacity, and I think we both believe that people are the secret sauce—their sense of thriving and having meaningful work. Being energized to do meaningful work was always really important to both of us.

As Satya stepped into the CEO role, he made that a first-class priority to work on. He always had a sense that how we do things would matter as much as what we do. The strategy would evolve, but the how we do things in service to our mission to empower others would be long-standing.

P+S: How has Microsoft gone about changing its culture and evolving with the times?

HOGAN: Our culture journey started with being super clear that culture mattered, and then, it was about nine months of us really investing in defining our “aspire to” culture. We met with a lot of different focus groups across the company. We really tried to tap into something that we thought would speak to everybody in terms of what we want to preserve about our culture, what we don’t want to change, and what do we think is getting in the way of us continuing to succeed.

After nine months, we emerged, saying, “We don’t want to change the fact that we take on big, bold ambitions.” We didn’t want to change our spirit of giving, but we wanted to evolve. Ultimately, we declared that we were going to move from a bunch of know-it-alls to a bunch of “learn-it-alls” and really focus on this concept of a growth mindset.

We then focused on three key pillars that we thought were going to be key to our culture: being customer-success-
focused, increasing diversity and inclusivity—because we really believed that was going to help us make the best decisions—and being “one Microsoft.” Once we declared the culture, we have had many different levers that we pull to close what we say is the gap between our “aspire to” culture and everybody’s lived experience.

P+S: What are a few changes you made to close the gap to move closer to that “aspire to” culture of Microsoft?

HOGAN: One example of something that we changed was around a process we called “people reviews.” Leaders would come in and present their people agenda. But it often felt more like it was a criticism—often focused on why people weren’t better at a specific benchmark. It often made people feel defensive.

We changed the format to “talent talks.” That was symbolic to say that we’re going to talk about talent, and you may not have all the answers. This is about, collectively, how do we continue to invest in our talent? And we all have that shared goal.

Another symbolic change was that we used to only have maternity leave. In the spirit of being more inclusive, we added paternity leave to have both men and women navigate coming in and out of the workforce to try to level the playing field in that regard. We also added caregiver leave. We used to look at our benefits from a perhaps parent-centric lens. We still are very committed to families, but also expanded our benefits to include people that don’t have kids but have aging parents.

Another change we made was to share what we called our “inclusive behaviors.” These included things like not interrupting others in meetings. It seems obvious, but if you’re not somebody who gets in there or your style doesn’t play to that, then often your voice doesn’t get heard.

P+S: I’ve heard that only 15% of companies that set out to renovate their culture actually succeed. Why do you think it’s so rare for an organization to successfully go through a cultural transformation?

HOGAN: We definitely don’t think we’ve arrived. Culture is the sum of everybody’s behaviors over time. You’ve never arrived in your culture. This is our “aspire to” culture, and we’re constantly trying to close that gap versus asserting “This is our culture” or “We have perfection.” I think that kind of helped set the mindset that we’re always going to be working to improve and to earn that culture.

The CEO is a role model. If they have that growth mindset, that is absolutely a force multiplier. But it’s not just at the CEO level. In addition, you want to really unlock your leadership team, managers, and our employees. We’ve done a lot of things through hackathons, where great ideas bubble. The idea for adding paternity leave came from a hackathon. There’s no  one lever that’s going to get you to the culture. You have to be vigilant and earn it every day. 

P+S: How does the CHRO’s relationship with the CEO affect the success of transformation?

HOGAN: That constant drumbeat and conviction from your CEO is important. And it’s helpful if the CEO is doing it because they have conviction about the culture, versus this is something that HR is suggesting they do. When you have that kind of partnership, it’s really invaluable to feel like the CEO has your back when you’re driving change. 

I can’t understate how important that relationship is. But I would say it’s not just the CEO—it’s also with the senior leadership team (SLT). I think one of the things that’s been very helpful is that our SLT has really made the “people priorities” their priorities. The leadership team leaning in and saying “People is our priority” versus something for HR to do has been key to our people agenda and key to our culture transformation.

P+S: A growth mindset includes having the space to fail. Why is it so important to experience failure?

HOGAN: Failure is going to happen. But failure is essential to mastery. If you view failure in that way, it’s very empowering when you fail, as opposed to demoralizing. If you never take any risks, you’ll never fail, but then you’ll also never necessarily have a breakthrough. You want people to have a growth mindset, take risks, and succeed. But if somebody takes a risk and fails but gets you closer to the goal line because of that, how do you celebrate that?

We’ve certainly had our setbacks, but in those moments our CEO [Satya Nadella] went and met with the team and said, “I stand with you. This is a failure, but let’s learn from this. Let’s figure out how we would not have this happen again and be better, stronger as a result.”

If you do that, then people will lean in and continue to take risks.

TRANSFORMING YOURSELF AS A LEADER

with Horacio Rozanski, chairman and CEO of Booz Allen Hamilton

Horacio Rozanski started with Booz Allen Hamilton in 1991 as a summer intern. After being hired full time as a strategy consultant, he rose through the ranks to eventually serve as chief personnel officer, chief strategy and talent officer, and then COO before being named CEO in 2015 and chairman of the board in 2024. During his more than 30-year career at Booz Allen, he’s had to transform his leadership skills every step of the way.

P+S: When you were an intern at Booz Allen, did you ever think you’d be sitting where you are today as CEO and chairman? What was your professional journey?

ROZANSKI: Being a CEO was never my goal or my aspiration. People always ask me when I decided to be CEO of Booz Allen, and, jokingly, I say, “When they offered me the job.” I’ve been on a journey to learn, to work with people, to do things that I care about. And I’ve been blessed to work in a place where that road, ultimately, led me to here. It was one of those cases where I didn’t have a destination in mind, I had a journey in mind.

When I started at Booz Allen, I was on a work visa. If I lost my job, I lost my chance to stay here. For me, not progressing to the next step meant more than just not progressing at Booz Allen but leaving the country. I was eager to get promoted because I wanted to be in the United States.

In one of my annual reviews, one of our most senior partners said, “Let the game come to you.” I interpreted that as: I should focus on what I care about, which is learning. I’ve always been a very curious person. I took apart my parents’ alarm clock because I wanted to see how it worked. I never was able to put it back together, so they weren’t happy about that.

The funny thing is, when I started focusing on learning, not on getting promoted, I started getting promoted. The thing I love about this job is that no two days are the same, no two situations are the same, and I’m learning every day.

P+S: You made the jump from a “doer” in your strategy consultant role to a leader as chief personnel officer. What does it take to make a transition into leadership? What tips do you have?

ROZANSKI: If you are good at what you do, it’s hard to let go and allow other people to do it. It is particularly hard to accept that if you surround yourself with great people, they’re going to do things better than you and differently than you. The first part of the leadership journey is to allow for that and to figure out how to add value to brilliant people’s thinking without telling them what to do. Honestly, I struggled with that.

The second thing is that as you start to get more responsibilities, you start to work across and with more people. I’d always worked on relatively small teams of five to 20 people where you get to know everybody on a personal level. When you add a zero to those numbers, people don’t know you as a person through everyday interactions. So, you have to develop a way that works for you to communicate what you care about—and your values and your priorities—in a more systematic way.

In my job now overseeing 35,000 people, there are people that will hear from me once a year. That’s my little window of time for them to appreciate what’s important, what I care about and what Booz Allen cares about, and what the right thing to do is. Being very deliberate about how you make that available to people as your responsibilities scale is a huge leadership challenge.

P+S: What were the pivotal moments along your leadership transformation journey?

ROZANSKI: There are a couple moments where the theoretical integrated with the practical.

Moment No. 1: I was brand new in my CPO role and was talking through a budget situation with the CFO. I thought he wanted to get deeper into the numbers and instead he pulled back from his chair and said, “What’s the right thing to do here?” I thought it was such a powerful question. It demonstrated to me that this company really was about doing the right thing. As one of my previous bosses said to me, “Permission to do the right thing is always granted.”

Moment No. 2: I was part of a think tank on people issues, and there was a whole discussion about bringing your whole self to work. Because I’m an introvert, I realized how guarded I was about my personal life. I realized that if I opened up more and people got to know me more, I was giving them a chance to decide if they could trust me. Trust is the basis for leadership and followership. When I started talking more openly about my thoughts, about my family, about myself, about my interests, it helped me connect on a different level with people. That’s something I’ve continued with throughout my career.

P+S: A big part of your leadership transformation has been around defining the company culture. Why do leaders need to invest so much time in building the company culture?

ROZANSKI: As Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” It took me a while as a strategy consultant to accept that as an absolute truth. Culture is something that evolves. The corporate culture that you want to have is essential to the success of the company, to executing the strategy. But also, it’s going to evolve. You have a choice of whether, as a leader, you try to shape and guide that evolution, or you ignore it and it just happens to you.

We’re very proud of our culture at Booz Allen. It’s a culture of values, collaboration, of doing the right thing, of working with clients and putting them first.

Every company has a culture, whether it’s well defined or not, whether people can articulate it or not. As a leader, if you’re not focused on the No. 1 element of success, the culture of the company, you’re not doing your job and you’re not going to be successful.

Companies that have huge innovation can go 10, 20, maybe 30 years without having to worry about the culture because they’re just getting product out the door. But if you want to be around for 50 or 100-plus years and your role is being a leader where that happens, you have to be focused on culture every day.

P+S: What tips do you have for leaders to keep up with technology? 

ROZANSKI: First of all, accepting change as a constant is absolutely key. Then, accepting acceleration as a constant is also a key. In his book, Thank You for Being Late, Tom Friedman explained that if you were born in the 11th or 12th century, you wouldn’t know the difference. Essentially, practices were identical for hundreds of years. The biggest technology innovation was the longbow. If you fast-forward to today, technology cycles last only one to two years. You have to constantly be on the lookout and bringing on people who understand those technologies. Also, you need to create a culture that values people reinventing themselves.

TRANSFORMING YOUR WORKPLACE

with Asa Hutchinson, former governor of Arkansas 

P+S: How has your upbringing in Arkansas shaped your views on job creation and labor issues?

HUTCHINSON: Growing up in an agricultural state like Arkansas, you had people working on the farm and then they would be working in a factory, as well. That’s how they made ends meet. My dad was a farmer. He needed a second job, and the closest one he could find was in Tulsa, Okla. Every Monday he would get up early, drive to Tulsa, spend the week there, and come back on Friday. That made me realize how important jobs in the community are. Job creation was an important part of my understanding of Arkansas.

I also wanted to bring industry to the state and grow high-paying jobs. That all starts with having the job skills in the workforce and, secondly, matching that with the industry and recruiting them to come into the state. Both of those were focuses of mine as governor.

P+S: What first sparked your passion for workforce training and development? 

HUTCHINSON: Every prospect we met with about relocating or expanding their business to Arkansas asked me fundamental questions: “What are the skills of your workforce? If we expand or move our operations there, can you provide the workforce that we need?” That’s what created my passion for workforce training.

For decades, parents were told that if your son or daughter doesn’t go to college and get a four-year degree, they’re not going to be a success. We have to change the culture to make everyone understand that you can develop the skills in many different ways.

That’s why we started “Be Pro, Be Proud,” a marketing initiative of our Chamber of Commerce that was designed to showcase the opportunities for a great living and lifestyle with a skilled trade or industry. The Be Pro Mobile Workshop was a tractor-trailer unit filled with computerized equipment that would go to high schools to showcase different professional careers that students could pursue. That was an important part of growing the workforce in Arkansas.

P+S: What personal experiences shaped your perspective on the importance of vocational training and skills development?

HUTCHINSON: My understanding of the importance of computer skills training started with my service in Homeland Security. I saw what our computer scientists could do with data management, with analytics, and saw that those computer skills and software skills were essential to the security of our country, and I saw that as an opportunity for Arkansas.

We emphasized computer science training in our high schools. In 2015, we were the first state to mandate computer science be offered in every high school in Arkansas, and then we expanded that into the K-8 grades. We went from 1,100 students taking computer science to over 25,000.

P+S: You’ve been an advocate for modernizing education to prepare people for the future of work. What do you think is still missing in today’s educational system?

HUTCHINSON: It’s about affordability, access, and adaptability to the changing work environment. The challenge for our educational systems is the slowness to react to change. We’ve developed in education the industrial model of learning, where it’s all in a block form. You’ve got 50 minutes and it’s standardized. It’s just like the assembly line. That’s not how students learn today, and we need to adjust to how they learn, how fast they learn, and what they need to learn. We’ve got to be more nimble in education. It’s a very slow process to change education to keep up with the workforce needs and the way students learn today.

P+S: Do people still need to get four-year degrees to get a good job in this country? 

HUTCHINSON: Four-year degrees are important, but even those people going for a four-year degree may find that they need additional micro-credentialing that supplements their degree.

I’m a big supporter of four-year degree programs, and I want to make sure those are accessible and affordable. But at the same time, you can emphasize the importance of credentialing and the upskilling that is needed. When somebody is 10 years into the workforce and needs to upskill their workforce training to make them more marketable, it is a lifelong initiative that education needs to lay the foundation for.

P+S: Do lawmakers understand the importance of upskilling?

HUTCHINSON: I think they do, and they’re very supportive of it. In Arkansas, it’s illustrated by the fact that the Legislature is trying to use the lottery proceeds for workforce training. They’ve been instrumental in helping create the workforce training programs.  

P+S: You ran for president in 2024. If you were president today, what two things would you do that would make the most difference to help the workforce?

HUTCHINSON: First, you want to create an environment where we can grow jobs in America. A growing economy is critical for our success and opportunities of the workforce. Having a climate of growth, that would create opportunities for businesses to advance and expand here in the U.S.

Second, it’s about making sure the federal government is a good partner with the states in terms of workforce training. You want to lift some of the restrictions on the money that flows into education to make sure it can be adaptable to the needs of the workforce and properly invested into workforce training. I would have a nationwide initiative on computer science training. You’ve got to be careful that the federal government does not impose mandates and take away the state’s role of education.