On this episode of People Fundamentals, I’m joined by Larry McAlister, Head of Digital Transformation at Nutanix and founder of the Corporate Humanist Consultancy. Larry’s expertise lies in transforming businesses by aligning talent strategies with HR technology, but his deeper mission is to foster real, human-centric culture change.
One of Larry’s core beliefs is that change cannot happen through mandates alone — it has to come from the heart. “The minute you tell me something is mandatory, I immediately in my brain devalue it,” he says. “If you’re telling me it’s mandatory, then it can’t be good for me.” Real change comes from leading with employees first, and showing them why the change is good for them.
In this conversation, recorded live at HR Tech 2024 in Las Vegas, Larry shares his insights into how to lead with the heart to create lasting cultural shifts, from aligning tech with talent strategies to supporting well-being through meaningful, employee-centered tools.
Listen in as we explore how thoughtful, empathetic leadership can transform organizations.
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Align talent strategy with technology
For HR tech to deliver meaningful results, Larry says, you need a cohesive talent strategy guiding a purposeful implementation. “If you don’t have a clearly defined talent strategy at the top, everything you’re talking about is a new conversation, and that dilutes your message and distracts your employees,” he says. Too often companies focus on technology without first creating a unified plan.
Larry believes the key is to make the strategy digestible for the entire company. “Build the strategy, make it digestible so people understand why we’re doing it, and then support it with branding and … marketing,” he says. This ensures that employees are not only aware of the tools available but are motivated to use them because they see how these tools fit into the bigger picture of their personal and professional growth.
Larry shared a personal success story to demonstrate the power of well-aligned tools: “We brought in four tools in 18 months,” he says. “And one of them, we had a career week where we talked about ‘your career changes now.’ … And it was the fastest adoption in the history of that company.” That’s because when Larry and his team introduced the tool, they framed it in a way that resonated with employees, aligning their personal goals with the company’s broader talent strategy.
Focus on the point where strategy meets action
While many companies talk about culture, Larry insists that real transformation happens in what he calls “execution culture.” This is where companies decide how things get done and ensure there’s alignment between those ideals and actual behaviors.
“There’s two kinds of cultures, and they’re both simultaneously happening inside every company,” he explains. “One is what we commonly call the culture and values: ‘Here’s our value statement, here’s how we treat each other. That’s nice. It’s meaningful. [But] what really matters around strategy is the execution culture. How do you get things done?”
Larry believes that leadership must model this execution culture, but it cannot succeed without the involvement of employees across all levels. He has created a business advisory group in his own organization, bringing together leaders and employees to co-create solutions: “You have 12 VPs saying, ‘Here’s the strategy, here’s how we’re trying to move it,’” he says. “Then we have a working group of on-the-ground employees saying, ‘This won’t fly in my group.’ That’s how we bring people along.”
Support well-being through tools that matter
As the lines between work and life blur, particularly post-pandemic, Larry emphasizes the need for tools that support employees’ overall well-being — not just their productivity. “There is no more demarcation line between work and life. It used to be, ‘Okay, I’m going home. …. Work is over,’” he says. “Technology, and the pandemic specifically — everyone working from home has gotten rid of that line.”
For Larry, well-being initiatives cannot simply be added on. They need to be embedded into the fabric of the organization and supported by tools that genuinely help employees. “If you can just tell the story about what it is, and people can just get it and use it immediately, the adoption of it is immediate,” he says.
Larry notes that successful well-being tools don’t feel mandatory or disconnected from daily work. “To bring people along with you on things like well-being has to be from the heart and not from the top,” he says. Larry explains that when employees see how a tool benefits them personally, they are far more likely to engage with it.
Larry’s insights emphasize the power of leading with empathy and strategic clarity. He believes that aligning talent strategy with HR technology is the backbone of cultural transformation, but it requires human-centered leadership to make it truly effective. His experiences show that successful HR transformations are built on a thoughtful approach to strategy and execution, supported by tools that serve employees’ well-being as much as their professional development.
People in This Episode
Larry McAlister: LinkedIn
Transcript
Larry McAlister:
If you don’t have a clearly defined talent strategy at the top, everything you’re talking about is a new conversation, and that dilutes your message and distracts your employees. So what we’re saying here is by 2027, three years, we want to have an irresistible employee experience fueled by integrated technology, across the moments that matter. So then, everyone’s like, “That sounds cool. I want to have an irresistible experience.” Some companies never go past that. They just sort of say, “That’s it.” But everything we do now should be communicated of making good on the promise of what that said.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Hi, and welcome to Betterworks’ People Fundamentals podcast. I’m your host, Ashley Litzenberger, senior director of product marketing. Betterworks’ core belief in people fundamentals revolves around helping HR lead through constant change by focusing on core values like fairness, support, balance, and enabling growth opportunities for employees. These tenets empower everyone in the workforce to strive for excellence, to foster creativity, and to acknowledge each other’s contributions. Betterworks believes that strategic HR leaders can translate these principles into action, shaping their workforce for the better and helping drive meaningful business outcomes.
In today’s episode, recorded live at HR Tech 2024, I’m thrilled to be joined by Larry McAlister. Larry is the head of digital transformation at Nutanix and founder of Corporate Humanist Consultancy. His work is all about helping companies build strong talent strategies that are directly tied to their HR tech, and he’s dedicated to helping companies achieve real culture transformation. We hear Larry’s take on why aligning your tech and talent strategies is crucial for creating an employee experience people love. He also shares how listening to both leadership and employees can make or break these big challenges. So get ready to learn how you can bring your tech and talent strategies together to build a truly great employee experience.
Larry, thank you so much for joining us here today at the Betterworks booth. We’re so excited to have you. And I am curious, you’ve been at HR Tech for just a day or two now. What has struck you about your experience so far?
Larry McAlister:
Yeah. Last year I felt, as I was talking to different vendors, they had the attitude of, “Well, what’s your problem? We can solve it. What’s your problem? We can solve it.” And that’s a losing proposition, because most people are coming here with a problem, looking for a solution, not a problem, looking for a “build it together.” So this year I feel a lot of the people I talked to have honed their message and are really trying to differentiate themselves, which is what we need. There’s so many people here. The quicker you can differentiate yourself, the better it is for a customer.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Yeah. And I think that’s really interesting because when it comes to… the People Fundamentals podcast is hosted by Betterworks. We are a software company that serves HR organizations as well. But when it comes to being a software, we know that we are a piece of the puzzle, but we are not the silver bullet, we don’t fix everything in a puzzle. So I’m curious, in your perspective, what does that look like? What does solving a challenge in HR look like today? How does software fit into it and what goes beyond that?
Larry McAlister:
Yeah, that’s a great question. And so the company I work for right now is 15 years old. They have 42 tools in HR, all untethered, all not part of a strategy or governance. That’s what happens. People just buy a tool to solve an immediate problem. Which, the best thing to do is to build a talent strategy that is digested by the entire company. This is where we’re going. That’s where you start, and then you buy the right technology to propel that strategy. You remember the old baseball movie, “Build it and they will come”?
They won’t come. Many wasted dollars go on, “Oh, I have a shiny new thing, let me turn it on,” and employees don’t care about it. And they don’t care about it because it doesn’t tie to a bigger strategy, it doesn’t tie to a better future for them. Having a golden thread of your talent strategy, and on that golden thread is your technology, gets people motivated, gets people wanting to use the tool for a greater good and not just because you told them you have a new tool.
Ashley Litzenberger:
As a kid, I used to drive my parents crazy because they would always tell me to do something and I had to really understand why. So for example, they always told me to clean my room or make my bed, and I was like, “Why? Because I don’t mind.” And they had to sit down and talk about philosophically why that’s important, what habits it sets for a future. And once I understood how it would help me in 20 years, I was like, “Oh, I get it.”
Larry McAlister:
Right.
Ashley Litzenberger:
But you’re right, it’s the same thing for employees. If you are just telling them to drop in goals or update goals once a week or to complete something by a specific deadline, if it’s not meaningful to them, it’s just a sprinkled on additional clutter in the rest of their work.
Larry McAlister:
It gets interpreted as extra work. So the minute you tell me something is mandatory, I immediately in my brain devalue it. If you’re telling me it’s mandatory, then it can’t be good for me. So that’s why I say you should have a velvet rope. I always tell this story about Studio 54, it used to be a dive bar until they put up a velvet rope that said, “You can’t come in.” Then there was a line around the block. That’s what you want your talent strategy to do. That’s what you want your technology to do. I want to do that. I want to get in there. That’s how adoption skyrockets.
Ashley Litzenberger:
So tell me a little bit more about talent strategy. What do you mean when you say your talent strategy? How far into the future are you looking? Let’s start there, and then I’d love to learn a little bit more about how do you communicate that out to your employee base? Because it’s different talking to your leadership than it is talking to your workforce.
Larry McAlister:
Those two are the two sides of the same coin. If you don’t have a clearly defined talent strategy at the top, everything you’re talking about is a new conversation, and that dilutes your message and distracts your employees. So what we’re saying here is by 2027, three years, we want to have an irresistible employee experience fueled by integrated technology, across the moments that matter. So then, everyone’s like, “That sounds cool. I want to have an irresistible experience.” Some companies never go past that. They just sort of say, “That’s it.” But everything we do now should be communicated of making good on the promise of what that said. So if we do, we’re going to think about bringing in an LXP to have curated learning. That messaging should be, “This is going to help you have a great employee experience, an irresistible employee experience at the moments that matter of your development.” So you’re making good on the promise. And then that message gets told over and over and then when the next thing comes, “Hey, that last thing was good, I’m going to try this.” So the communication has to be tied to that.
And branding is a huge part of transformation. Telling the story as a brand and having enablement. You can’t just send an email, “The tool is here and we promised you it’d be good.” Enablement is multi-modality over the long term. Different ways for people to understand success stories or ask me anything’s or bringing external speakers. Enablement of a transformation has to be constant multi-modality over the long term.
Ashley Litzenberger:
I’ve seen examples where if you’re bringing in change around an employee experience element, if it’s feedback or recognition or completing pulse surveys, it can come from having managers and department leaders being very vocal about, “I just completed my pulse survey this week. I hope you will too. Let me know how it’s going,” and having specific goals tied to it, or then having spiffs or feedback around, “The person who submitted the most feedback for their team gets a cool piece of company swag.” You can get into really specific programs that help incentivize and drive forward, alongside the philosophy of, “We want to do this because we want to create a culture where we’re recognizing the great work employees are doing,” or where, “We want to hear your voice,” and lead to a strong employee experience. You have the why, but then you might also need a little bit of a push.
Larry McAlister:
You can’t only have incentives because then that gets sort of inauthentic, but to have a larger story and, “This is why we’re doing this,” and then here’s some incentives to help you…
Ashley Litzenberger:
Here’s how we jumpstart the habit to build it.
Larry McAlister:
Yeah, jumpstart’s a great term.
Ashley Litzenberger:
There are so many times when I’ve adopted a new app where it’s going to change a personal habit of mine, but I’ve learned that if I don’t create my own internal reward system, that works out.
Larry McAlister:
It goes away. Yeah.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Yeah. An example is I decided to cut down on screen time in the evenings, and it wasn’t until I replaced it with getting to replace an hour of watching a TV show to, “If I do this every day for a week, I get to buy the really comfy blanket that I now want for my sofa.”
Larry McAlister:
Oh, nice.
Ashley Litzenberger:
And then I get to snuggle up with the blanket and my book and I’m going to buy some really nice hot chocolate too. And then it turns into a habit and you don’t need all those things all the time, but you do need something to jumpstart.
Larry McAlister:
Yeah, making it a habit is so important.
Ashley Litzenberger:
What do you think of the saying that culture eats strategy for breakfast?
Larry McAlister:
I think it’s true, and there’s two kinds of cultures, and they’re both simultaneously happening inside every company. One is what we commonly call the culture and values. “Here’s our value statement, here’s how we treat each other.” Maybe we evaluate you against that or reward you against that. That’s nice. It’s meaningful.
What really matters around strategy is, the other culture is an execution culture. How do you get things done? How does this group, this company, especially at the top, decide how we get things done? Are we aligned? Is it an alignment, execution, and transparency culture? And, “Here’s how we’re going to make that part of the muscle every day.” Then you’re delivering on the strategy. If you just have a strategy that you’ve put on the wall or did it in an all-hands meeting and you don’t execute against that, that’s when you’re eating the strategy for breakfast.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Yeah. And it is so interesting because the two elements of culture are so well entwined. If you don’t have employee wellbeing, because you don’t have a culture where you can bring your full self to work, where you actually do feel heard by your employer or your manager, where you feel like they’re investing in your career growth as an individual, you don’t have that process in place, that culture towards getting stuff done and navigating through the challenging parts of change and transformation because you don’t have that foundation that’s really strong, that trust that’s built to be able to lead to navigating through the difficulties of change and of transformation.
Larry McAlister:
Right. Well, I mean what we learned during the pandemic and on the other side of the pandemic is there is no more demarcation line between work and life. It used to be, “Okay, I’m going home.” Before cell phones, “I’m going home. I don’t have a laptop, I don’t have a cell phone. Work is over.” Technology and the pandemic specifically, everyone working from home has gotten rid of that line. So the big, new focus has to be on the whole person approach. Well-being. If you stay up too late, you’re not going to be as engaged the next day because your body’s not allowing it. That’s the most basic thing. But if you don’t have psychological trust or your manager doesn’t hear you around your working from home or doing your thing, forcing people back to the office, that breaches that trust and that, “I believe in you as a whole person, you can get things done.” We can measure engagement all we want. That is a huge engagement number that doesn’t really show up. “You’re not treating me fairly. I don’t want to do it anymore.”
Ashley Litzenberger:
So if we take a step back, we’ve just talked about you need to set your company’s strategy, you need to set your talent strategy and where you want to go in terms of having an excellent employee experience, for example. But then underneath that is a culture of getting things done, to act on it, underpinned by software, but also with this psychological safety and well-being and a safe and an inclusive company culture that you’re creating as well. Where does someone begin? If you’re an HR leader and you’re looking at all of these different things, do you start all of them simultaneously? Where do you begin? Is it top down, is it bottom up? What are the places of impact?
Larry McAlister:
So just top down doesn’t work, but I think the strategy and how we get things done here has to start at the top. But how it comes alive, I think you start bringing people in. I’ve started a business advisory group internally. So you have 12 VPs and say, “Here’s the strategy, how we’re trying to move it. This is how we want to treat employees. Do you agree? How are we going to make this come alive?” Then we have a working group of on the ground employees making comments on it or, “This won’t fly in my group.” So to bring people along with you on, especially things like wellbeing, has to be from the heart and not from the top down.
I have a story from when I was really younger in my workforce. I was the brand new director of L&D and I was just running to just deliver programs, just deliver programs. And the HR guy brought me to his office, and he was like Yoda. He would just talk in one sentence and the meeting would be over. So he brings me in there and he says, “You’re running so fast, you’re going to get to the finish line and no one’s going to clap for you.” And that stuck with me for 30 years. And that’s why this idea of having a business advisory group, a working group of employees, not running to the finish line, but bringing a nice size group with you to the finish line just guarantees that it’s going to be more digested into the organization.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Something that I’ve been reflecting on recently is the importance of culture carriers within an organization. And there is one person on our marketing team who’s absolutely a culture carrier. She not only has this get things done and is also always thinking of how to make something 10% better or how to push the envelope just a little bit more, but she also is the one who brings in the conversations around, “What did we do this weekend? Here are my passions. What are your passions?” And she creates this place of safety and this place where we know each other personally as well as professionally. And one of the things that I think about is, how do organizations create space for those culture carriers to foster that opportunity? Often, we hear about people volunteering to run an ERG group, but that’s a lot of work on top of your full-time job. How do companies actually create space for someone to do that as if that is a base part of their work, or that is a big part that is acknowledged and accounted for in their work week?
Larry McAlister:
That’s such a difficult question. So what we love to recognize people for is, you work 20 straight hours to accomplish this.
Ashley Litzenberger:
This person went above and beyond.
Larry McAlister:
Above and beyond.
Ashley Litzenberger:
They worked late, they worked weekends.
Larry McAlister:
They almost killed themselves to do this project. Look at that. What message does that send? Or they did three projects at once or all extra work, which accomplishment is important, but to be specific in recognition around, “Thank you for talking about my kids,” or, “you bringing us along with you to make these decisions.” Specific recognition around the things that are not normally recognized changes the way people think about recognition. We can talk to each other about that. We can congratulate-
Ashley Litzenberger:
We can take five minutes and talk about someone’s birthday party or what someone cooked for dinner last night when they tried a new recipe.
Larry McAlister:
Yeah. It makes a huge difference. I mean, I think in the old days… I’m way older than you… That was either one company would do it, family-owned companies would love to do that, but corporate companies, I don’t even want to know anything about your personal life. Humans would, but corporations didn’t encourage that at all. But I think we’ve come a long way in whole-person.
Ashley Litzenberger:
And our benefit programs can really reflect that. Do we have a wide variety of benefit programs to meet everyone where they are in life? Is it continuing education programs for anyone? Is it also specifically re-education or re-training? Is it family benefits? Is it benefits that think about someone who’s a caretaker of a parent or someone else.
Larry McAlister:
Just anything around well-being and we want you to be healthy. Just to say that is a big difference. So I think platforms that focus on health and well-being and we care about your life and not just your productivity, we’re there. I think we just need to get better at communicating why we have it. I think a lot of times, like we said earlier, people just turning on these things and sending an email saying, “Hey, go do that.” But to say, “We’re doing this because we care about your health, we care about your family, we care about you,” that’s a different vibe than turning on and saying, “Go do this. You’ll get a $500 credit.” It doesn’t have the same impact.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Yeah. This happened a while ago, but there was that Barbie/Oppenheimer marketing campaign around the two movies that launched at the same time. And I always think that, I don’t think either movie would be anywhere near as successful if it wasn’t for that big initiative. And I think in some ways HR is starting to have to think that same way. How do we market to our employees? What is the message that is going to resonate with them and how do we bring this in and how do we recenter on their experience and the benefits for them to launch and succeed in the transformation we’re trying to accomplish?
Larry McAlister:
I mean, back to the first question, build the strategy, make it digestible so people understand why we’re doing it, and then support it with branding and really marketing. Remember we said we’re doing that? Here’s another thing we’re doing that points to that talent strategy. We want this to be irresistible. Part of being irresistible here is you get to have all these cool benefits to do with your kids and your family. You have to tie it to the top and not just another tool that gets turned on.
Ashley Litzenberger:
And you have to repeat it often. It is amazing how often you have to repeat a message or bring it back up to someone’s attention for them to realize this is a common thread that is continually happening.
Larry McAlister:
And in multi-modalities, right? In most companies, the largest attendance is at an all hands meeting. That’s usually the largest attendance. Are you talking about that stuff, or are you just talking about financials? Is the CEO saying, “This cool new tool that we brought in, 500 of you have used it and here’s the results. This is the benefit we have. It ties to the strategy”? I think with that kind of multi-modality messaging people just forget.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Tell me a little bit about the book that you wrote and what inspired you to write it. What was the challenge that was going on at the time that you wanted to really dig into?
Larry McAlister:
Yeah. Right as I was about to start to write the book, I was leading transformation for two Fortune 500 companies. One that was growing from 3000 to 9,000 in a year, employees, and one that was moving businesses.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Wow, two very different challenges.
Larry McAlister:
Completely different. And so I learned a lot from the first one and even learned more from the second one. And I didn’t want to write a book that was theoretical, so I called it The Power to Transform: A Field Guide to Building a Human-Centric, Tech-Enabled Culture. Human-centric means everything you build starts at the employee, not at HR. So how is this going to make the employee better? What does this tool do for the employee? Not just how easy is it for me to run a report? And then tech-enabled was, build the strategy and tie it around there. So I just wrote a factual, “Here’s how I did it,” field guide. And I think it’s evergreen, no matter how the technology changes, you still have to do the same storytelling and branding. One, I wanted to remember it for myself, but two, I want HR folks to feel that they are transformationalists and they are technologists. You’re not just an order taker. You can drive cultural change and here’s a way for you to do it.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Do you have any stories or questions or feedback that you’ve gotten from folks who have read your book or have had conversations with you coming out of it that were particularly memorable?
Larry McAlister:
This is the funniest one. It happens a lot. Well, this is just common sense, of like, “Yep.” But no one’s doing it. I mean after someone explains it to you it’s, “Oh yeah, this just makes sense to me.” And when I first heard that, I was like, “Well, is that a demeaning statement?” But the more I thought about it, I was like, “Good, it should make sense. That means that I wrote it in a way that spoke to you and you feel you can do it.” So that was funny.
Ashley Litzenberger:
So when you think about human-centric technology or a human-centric transformation, what are the hallmarks of that? When you look at software as you’re thinking about implementing transformation in those two instances or others that you’ve done since?
Larry McAlister:
I mean, the classic human-centric is Apple and the iPhone. You get an iPhone without a direction book. You don’t need a video training. You just know how to use the tool. If you’re launching any of these software, if you can just tell the story about what it is and people can just get it and use it immediately, the adoption of it is immediate because it’s so easy to use, because it was built for you and not for me, that’s a hallmark of, “I got it.” A lot of times with these small companies, they have a technologist and a sales guy. Those are usually the first two people who start one of these startups. They don’t bring in HR until they already have customers and they already have revenue. And so it’s sort of like who’s thinking about the end customer coming in? Sometimes they are good like that, other times they’re like, “Look at my shiny baby, look at my shiny baby.” And employees will be like, “What am I supposed to do with this?”
Ashley Litzenberger:
So let’s say that you are someone who has set your employee strategy. You want to create an excellent employee experience for everyone. You know what that’s going to look like end to end, you’ve kind of got your North Star or your end point that you’re getting to. What are questions as you start to figure out how you want to bring different technology to help that come to life? What are the questions that you should be asking of those vendors? What is the research that you recommend doing? Because so often one of the challenges is, where do you get started? You’ve found your destination, but you’re not even sure if it’s a bike or a Jeep or a golf cart that’s going to help you get there. Where do you begin?
Larry McAlister:
So I’ll give two answers. One is a tactical answer, one is a larger answer. Coming here is great. Coming to these kind of events, you can just walk up and down and say, “What did you do? How’d you come up with it? What problem are you trying to solve?” So that’s good. I did an HR tech parade where we brought in a line manager, different COEs, finance, IT. We built a criteria of where we wanted to go and what we’d want a tool to help us get to that destination. And we brought in 16 vendors in two weeks. And after every one we did a scoring, we had a discussion. “Is this going to hit it? Why not? What else do we need?” And so by the time we got through 16 of those vendors, we settled on four, and we brought in four tools in… Well, we ended up bringing seven. So we brought in four tools in 18 months. And one of them we had a career week where we talked about your career changes now. We talked about your strategy. “Here’s a tool to do it.” And it was the fastest adoption in the history of that company.
Ashley Litzenberger:
That’s incredible because you really aligned it with, “How does this benefit the employee? How does this align with that strong employee experience? How do we make this not extra work that’s mandatory that gets deprioritized and turn into something that is exciting and something that you want to participate in?”
Larry McAlister:
And the first question was, “How is the employee going to use this? Is it easy to use for them? Do they see its value?” That was some of the criteria. Then the larger story is, everyone should be thinking now… Like I said, we had 42 tools. We saw today the average is 93 tools. So the future is, how do we quickly get to a point where your employees don’t even know who those vendors are? It doesn’t matter who those vendors are. If there’s a skin over it all, that’s guiding you, that’s helping you solve problems. The idea that we have to search is going to be over, it’s going to be guiding you or…
Ashley Litzenberger:
You have to remember, which application is the one for applying for vacation versus entering that Pulse survey versus doing the performance review? Those days are over.
Larry McAlister:
And each one has a completely different interface and treats you differently.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Or it’s all the same one, but maybe not the best experience.
Larry McAlister:
Oh, that, too. So the idea of you’re just interfacing with the most human-centric tool, and we’re talking about agents now where the agent will say, “Okay, you looked up…” I don’t know, “… sick leave. Do you want to check with your doctor? Do you want to look at your benefits? Do you want to do this?” And one question can help guide you to a whole solution as opposed to, “Okay, I found out about my sick leave. Now, where’s my benefits card?” The search will be over soon.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Yeah. That’s incredible. As we wrap up today’s conversation, I’m wondering, if you could go back to where you were at the beginning of those first two transformations, what would you do differently? Where would you start now?
Larry McAlister:
That’s a great question. I think what I learned as I started is no one’s going to bring it to you. There’s not someone in the company who’s thinking about cultural transformation. They may think of values like we talked about, or they may think about a strategy or our mission statement. That does not usually inspire and help people transform to a new reality. So the definition of transformation is changing behaviors over the long term, and the only way to do that is usually, culturally, for someone who’s a transformationalist in the people space to do that. So I probably would’ve gone even faster or said, “Hey, you’re in charge. You really are in charge. Get going, faster.”
Ashley Litzenberger:
Own the power. Own the opportunity.
Larry McAlister:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Well, thank you so much, Larry, for joining us today.
Larry McAlister:
Thanks, Ashley, for having me.
Ashley Litzenberger:
As we wrap up today’s conversation, let’s think about how we can bring some of these great ideas into our own organizations. First, make sure your talent strategy aligns with your HR tech. As Larry mentioned, when your technology is truly connected to your talent goals, you create a better experience for employees and they’re more likely to engage with it. Second, build a culture of transparency and action. It’s not enough to just have a strategy. You need to make sure everyone knows how to execute on it. When people understand the steps to take from leadership down to employees, things move much more smoothly. Finally, prioritize the whole employee experience. Larry reminded us how important it is to focus on psychological safety and well-being. By creating a culture where employees feel supported and valued as individuals you’re setting up the organization for success. These steps aren’t just about improving your talent strategy. They help create a more connected and motivated workforce.
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