In this Talent Tales episode, talent.imperative Founder Nicole Dessain had the honor to interview Jayne Glick, Director Organizational Effectiveness at design agency IA Collaborative.
Jayne has been “following her nose” when it comes to crafting her career: She started in visual communication design, then went into advertising, then project management, and now works in organizational effectiveness with a focus on talent development. The golden thread throughout her career has been to make people’s lives better.
Jayne’s superpower is being able to synthesize a variety of data points into a structure that others can act upon.
As a former designer, Jayne brings that perspective into her organizational effectiveness work.
For example, she recently led an initiative to revamp the agency’s career framework and performance process. This was a very complex endeavor with various tracks of work. A key focus was to understand team members’ perspectives, needs, and desires around career development. Jayne facilitated co-creation sessions with individual contributors, managers, and the executive team to surface these insights. Each of the sessions were held separately to ensure psychological safety. Jayne took the team members career framework prioritization into consideration for the career framework redesign. She also conducted service blueprinting to ideate and test touch-points involved in the revised performance management process. She then asked managers to pressure test the new career framework by thinking through their direct reports and whether the descriptions match what people do at each level. The feedback she received resulted in changes, for example tweaks to the terminology that was used.
Jayne also highlighted that bringing stakeholders along is key to any HR-related design thinking effort so they can see the value of the process. It also helps with buy-in and change management.
Overall, Jayne really believes in the power of prototyping and working out loud to show your thinking. Visualizing the process (e.g. with service blueprinting) is a good first step to get initial feedback. Understanding what the desired outcome of a prototype is, is key. What are you measuring to understand whether you have achieved a desired outcome? And then finally, use a postmortem to decide what needs to change or how the solution needs to evolve.
Want to learn more about Jayne’s career framework redesign? Watch the entire interview on YouTube.