In part three of our series with Amy Rojas, we discuss the critical aspects of leadership, focusing on the importance of having a clear vision, consistency in leadership, understanding team dynamics, and the necessity of regular development conversations. They emphasize that people are the greatest asset of any organization and that leaders must invest in their teams to foster engagement and productivity. The conversation also highlights the significance of knowing individual team members' aspirations and values to guide their career development effectively.
In part three of our series with Amy Rojas, we discuss the critical aspects of leadership, focusing on the importance of having a clear vision, consistency in leadership, understanding team dynamics, and the necessity of regular development conversations. They emphasize that people are the greatest asset of any organization and that leaders must invest in their teams to foster engagement and productivity. The conversation also highlights the significance of knowing individual team members' aspirations and values to guide their career development effectively.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Leadership and Results
03:01 The Importance of Vision and Consistency in Leadership
05:56 Understanding and Empowering Your Team
08:50 Development Conversations and Career Pathing
About Amy
Amy Rojas is an accomplished business and HR executive with a proven track record of driving success by aligning people strategies with business objectives. Her career began in fostering business growth through product innovation, later shifting her focus to achieving organizational excellence through its people. With undergraduate and master’s degrees in psychology, Amy brings unique insights into human behavior as a powerful tool for leadership and team development.
Amy’s extensive HR expertise spans Talent Management, Global Talent Acquisition, workforce planning, and building high-performing teams. She is skilled in crafting integrated talent strategies that create measurable impact. Her leadership has been integral in managing transformational changes, including culture development and navigating mergers and acquisitions, always maintaining a people-centric approach.
Certified in executive coaching by the International Coaching Federation, Amy specializes in guiding senior leaders and teams, fostering trust, and unlocking their full potential. Her dedication to excellence extends to areas such as change management, HR operations for business success, and senior leadership development.
With her deep understanding of business and human behavior, Amy helps organizations thrive by creating empowered, innovative cultures. Her commitment to delivering results leaves a meaningful and lasting impact wherever she contributes.
Connect with Amy on LinkedIn
Speaker 2 (00:00.152)
Hi, I'm Liz Cunningham, co-host of Elevate Care. In today's show, we'll be picking back up of our three-part series with Amy Rojas. If you haven't listened to the earlier episodes of the series, head back and listen to them now. Here's the episode.
So I spent really a large portion of my career on the corporate side of the world in commercial roles, in advertising and in marketing and in commercial strategy. And I spent time in very large companies. So I've seen a lot across a lot of different organizations, different countries, different departments. And at one point in my career, I discovered that all the work that I had done to help companies be successful through their products and services really translated into helping companies be successful through their people.
and helping companies really recognize the fact that their people are their greatest asset, they can't get anything else done without them. Leading for results is interesting because first of all, the results have to be clear. So we have to start with what is our clear vision? What are the results that we want to achieve? And what I see all too often is that the results shift and change too much. So what I advocate for, and I've said it before, is having a very clear vision, sticking to that vision.
Underneath the vision, there are all sorts of things that you can change, but being able to always connect it back to what is our ultimate goal is very important. So that's one of the first things about leading for results is what do we mean by results? What are the results we're looking for so that people aren't floundering, trying to figure out what it is that they need to achieve? The second thing I'll say is the notion of consistency. I touched on it, but you have to remain consistent and if there's a change, you have to be able to explain.
why the change happened and how it's going to impact our ability to meet that ultimate vision and what it does to our results. I would say within that as well, people have to have a reason to believe. We talk about that a lot. a reason to believe, a reason to have a connection to what ultimately needs to get done. But Lior, we could go on and on with having strong trust in the team. We could go on and on with having good team norms.
Speaker 1 (02:08.95)
All of these things have to exist at a foundational level to get people to be willing and interested to focus on results. Do you measure engagement? Do you measure how committed people are to the organization? How interested they are in achieving whatever the ultimate vision is? So I would say that's a very important measure which directly connects to culture. Do you look at your culture? So there are so many different measures. I don't know that I could hone in on just one specifically.
But being able to measure more than just your annual objectives and more than just at the top of the organization, you have a vision and you have, let's call it five strategic goals. It has to be more than that. You have to look underneath and measure the things that make those goals possible. think it's also about being a confident and secure lead. So knowing why you're there, ultimately cascading these things through the organization is essential.
And so when we talk about a vision at the top or five strategic objectives, you then as your own leader have to have the same. You have to have your own vision for your function department, whatever part of the organization you own and your own personal. What is it that I'm trying to achieve? What is my vision? And those need to line up. So then as things change, if the organizational vision or which I hope it doesn't, but if it does, if it changes or the strategic objectives changes or the tactics to get to it changes, then you can come back to what yours was.
and make sure that those two things are lined up because when you have conflict between those is when your team is not going to work well. That's when dysfunctions are going to happen. There is absolutely when you talk about change agility, managing the mindset and making sure that people are in a place to understand why things need to continually change. There is also a basic engagement model, which at the foundation, if that is not in place, then it's going to be really difficult to sustain that productivity or to increase that productivity, especially when things are hard.
But I would also say that there is a critical importance to understanding your people. It's built into that model I just mentioned, but I'll go a little bit deeper, but really understanding what drives them, what matters to them. You know, we know that the number one reason people leave organizations is because of their manager. And the number two reason is because they're not being developed. And so figuring out how to make sure even in the hardest of times, people are having an opportunity to develop, they are invested in.
Speaker 1 (04:31.138)
You know, in anything we do in life, whether it's at work or at home, if we don't feel that people have invested in us or value us, we have a lot less motivation to achieve the productivity we're talking about. And so I think it's really important to know your people, know what drives them, what's their vision, what are their values, and to manage the team and the individual relationship with those people accordingly. I talk a lot about
you may or may not be familiar with. Well, certainly there's a book called The Five Languages of Love, but there is a five languages of appreciation in the workforce, which is the same author that made it work appropriate. So, and really it's a very simple tool to understand what it is that people get the most reward out of. Just from a very simple, how do you recognize people? is it in a way that matters to them? So again, going back to your question around productivity, if you know that,
And you just do, I always say that this should be integral to the way that you lead. It shouldn't be above and beyond or on top of. But if you just do regular things on a regular basis that are personal and authentic for that person, that is yet another productivity driver. One thing that gets underestimated is empowerment. Giving people the opportunity to spread their wings, to fail, to try things they haven't tried before. If you think about an organization, the people in an organization in a bell curve.
And with any bell curve, have your Jack Welch 10 % to the left of the non-performers, you have your middle ground, and then you have your people who are just really wanting to achieve more, aspiring to be the CEO, whatever they wanna be. And our goal is to always keep people moving to the right. And so making sure that you are working with them on what matters to them, that middle ground is often forgotten.
So if you've ever done a talent review or if you're familiar with a nine box, they call it, there is a center box, it's a five. And a lot of times people say, there are five. Fives are invaluable to an organization. Those are the people you can rely on all the time. Those are the people that are good at their job so they don't need a lot of your attention. And we don't often think about that. So I would add to this whole discussion the importance of thinking about the people on your team and not putting them in
Speaker 1 (06:55.102)
a box of top right always, but how essential and critical everybody is to your team and how you make sure that they also get developed and get invested in and get some attention. I always advocate for having regular development conversations. tend to, not unlike performance review process, we tend to do it once or twice a year. We kind of have talent review coming up, so we sit down and have the conversation and prepare for it. I like to tell leaders that either make it a part of your regular one-on-ones,
One-on-ones tend to be very status oriented. How are we doing on our tactics on the job at hand? I asked leaders to either make it the first or last 10 minutes of every meeting. How are you feeling about the work you're doing? Is there anything else you want to do to grow? Do you want to be a part of any other projects? Are you really struggling someplace that I'm not aware of? Those kinds of conversations. Or the other thing I find to be really effective is if you have week, let's say you have weekly one-on-ones and they're typically status one-on-ones.
then one of those in the month is just a development conversation. And you make it off limits to talk about status and work. You just make it about them. And you may take it to a different environment. You may take them to lunch. You may go for a walk. Walking and talking is highly, highly effective. People talk a lot more when you're side by side and looking out. It's kind of a proven research fact. But having those development conversations in a different way on a regular basis. The other thing I would say is
IDPs are great and I've worked in organizations and helped to institute a process where we, through succession planning, which is absolutely essential, where we look at paths. And so for each individual, we look at the different paths. So you and I may be having a conversation and you might say to me, I wanna be CEO one day. Great, let's build a path. That's what normally happens. What I would say is, okay, if you wanna be CEO,
then let's look at what you have and what you don't have and let's figure out two or three different paths to get there. Because what often happens is the path that you decide or devise with your leader doesn't ever come to fruition because someone has moved or something's happened or something gets in the way or someone's a blocker, which we know about. And so having two or three different ways and letting the person know, we're gonna make sure that we have options to get you there. But letting them know that you're thinking about it that way lets them know that you really mean it. You really do think they can get there.
Speaker 1 (09:19.63)
but they're gonna have to work with you on the different ways to get there. Now, if someone would have told me all those years ago, again, not putting a number to it, that I would have ended up in HR, I'm not kidding, I would have laughed. I would have said, why would I do that? But what a rich and rewarding career it's become. And if I had some really great leaders, don't get me wrong, I had some fantastic leaders who saw in me what I didn't see in myself. But if we had sat down and had that kind of conversation, like the what else could be true conversation, the what else is possible,
You know, we may have landed here anyway. Most of my career moves happened. I don't say happened to me in a bad way. I say they happened without me even looking. They just kind of happened, you know, a strange turn here and a strange thing there. But I would say to add to that or expand on that is also really knowing your people. So I'll give you one example. I worked for an organization where we spend a lot of time doing talent reviews and looking at the high potentials and looking at where people had opportunities to grow and move within succession planning, et cetera.
And there was one very high potential female that we were very excited about. And we literally thought that she had the potential to ultimately be the CEO. And we made this whole plan for her based on that really excited about being able to offer these, these stretch assignments. And, and one of the steps was to move to be part of our Asia organization. We talked about it. We put a plan in place. We had the leader go back and talk to her about it. And she quit because nobody had bothered to talk to her about what she wants.
And it happens all the time. We make assumptions, we see potential, we see people being very, very good at something. So we think, they could be this, but what if they don't want to be that? And so having that conversation and really knowing your people and creating a two way where they're comfortable saying, I know you see me as becoming this next, but what if I don't want to do that? What do we do then? Because you want to hear that. You don't want those really great people to end up leaving and going someplace else because somebody took the time to understand them better.
Thank you for joining us today on Elevate Care. If you found this episode valuable, please consider sharing it with a colleague and subscribing to our show on your favorite podcast platform. You can learn more about this episode and our show on our website at amnhelfcare.com and follow us on social media to stay updated on new episodes and the ever-changing world of healthcare.