fter 30 years in HR, Libby Sartain can tell some stories.
Like the time a cop hid in the closet while she gave an exit
interview to a Southwest Airlines employee who had threatened someone.
Or the time a Southwest pilot heroically landed a plane with
malfunctioning landing gear, then gave a tear-jerker of a speech praising the company’s
hiring and training efforts.
Or the time Sartain managed her first layoff, which included
laying herself off.
That happened in 1979, well before Sartain emerged to become
one of the world’s best-known HR professionals, with high-profile stints at Southwest,
Yahoo and the Society for Human Resource Management. Sartain, who recently stepped
down from Internet icon Yahoo to take a breather in her career, vividly recalls
that gloomy day three decades ago.
She was working as a personnel administrator at a computer
services firm. As she prepared layoff packets for other employees, her boss stopped
by and told her to make one more for herself. Just 25 at the time, with a newly
purchased home and a husband who earned a teacher’s salary, the news brought her
to tears—after she left the office.
"I was devastated," she says.
Sartain came away from her own downsizing determined to be
compassionate to other people losing their jobs. "I will never forget that it is
someone’s livelihood and how they’re likely to feel," she says.
Even as she has sought to retain the "human" in human resources,
Sartain has become a force for bringing strategic business thinking to the field.
She has co-written two books on workforce management matters, a rare feat for an
HR practitioner. Sartain also served as chair of SHRM in 2001, and was named fellow
of the National Academy of Human Resources in 1998.
Under Sartain’s leadership, both Yahoo and Southwest made
Fortune’s list of the 100 Best Companies to Work for in America.
Fred Foulkes, faculty director of Boston University’s Human
Resources Policy Institute, calls Sartain one of the top dozen HR professionals
in the United States. Sartain helped Yahoo realize the importance of talent in its
rivalry with Google and Microsoft, and she has a sharp mind, Foulkes says. He is
also impressed with her commitment to fellow HR professionals. "She’s just given
a lot to the profession and really cares about it," he says.
Sartain has taken her lumps along the way, most notably when
she was the public face of an unpopular vacation policy change at Yahoo.
But as Sartain argues, "You have to have a thick skin" to
be an HR executive. She just emerged from a tumultuous year at Yahoo, during which
the company announced a restructuring, cut 1,000 jobs and faced an unsolicited acquisition
offer from Microsoft.
Sartain, 53, says that even before the Microsoft offer she
planned to resign from Yahoo and relax on a refurbished ranch in Texas for a spell.
But she intends to return to the profession in some way—and
to work on what will be her third book on an HR topic, Brand for Talent.
In her Silicon Valley home recently, Sartain talked with
Workforce Management senior writer Ed Frauenheim about her HR career so far
and shared some thoughts on the field she has helped shape.
Workforce Management: You worked early in your career at cosmetics
firm Mary Kay. What was significant there?
Libby Sartain: It was still run by Mary Kay Ash. She was running
the company and it was starting its growth trajectory. I guess when I joined it
had maybe 600 or 700 employees. When I left it probably had about 2,500. It was
based on values. It was based on a strong founder’s philosophy. And there was an
esprit de corps among the sales force and among the employees that created a culture
that was unique.
Their values started with the golden rule. Then work/life
balance—the way Mary Kay would say it would be very controversial now, but she would
say, "God first, family second, job third," because she was religious. One of the
reasons the company worked was that so many women could work from home who sold
the product. And then there was a lot of training in the whole core sales experience
about people and making people feel important and making people feel good about
themselves, because the product line was all about sort of raising women out of
their households.
Seeing this strong woman who literally started this company
with her son with a $5,000 investment—she built it from a small little shop in Dallas;
now it’s a worldwide company—that really shaped me. I thought, I always want to
work for a company that had these kinds of mission and values.
WM: Your fame in the field has a lot to do with your career
at Southwest Airlines. Did you report directly to Southwest founder Herb Kelleher?
Sartain: Southwest had a very interesting org structure. Herb
was at the end of his career when I was there. He was grooming successors. So he
had only three direct reports. He had a head of corporate services, who had areas
like finance, legal, systems. He had a head of operations—that had all flight attendants
and pilots. And then he had what was called head of customers, and that was Colleen
Barrett. And she had everything that touched a person inside or outside the company.
So that would involve the frequent flier program, the governmental affairs, the
customer relations—and HR, because Southwest had this unique philosophy that our
employees were the No. 1 customer.
It was absolutely another thing that shaped my thinking, because
marketing was part of that and sales was part of that. I was part of a team that
was thinking about building customers. And that’s what led to Southwest being one
of the very first companies that discovered the whole premise of employer branding,
which is one of the most powerful tools any organization can use.
WM: How did you get to employer branding at Southwest?
Sartain: We had developed our own new corporate brand in 1995.
It was "Symbol of Freedom." Before, when we had different tag lines, it was easy
for our employees to embrace that. But when we’re talking about something kind of
nebulous like a "symbol of freedom," it was hard to get the employees to make the
emotional connection to that. We had a culture committee that tried a number of
initiatives, including creating a museum full of symbols of freedom. We had our
ad agency develop an employee song about freedom. But none of these things took
hold.
So my boss, Colleen Barrett, took the head of marketing and
myself out to lunch and said, "Look, our employees have not embraced this brand.
I want the two of you to figure it out."
So we called our people together. It was a very interesting
meeting, because we had our ad agency, we had our media buyer, we had two different
HR consulting firms—one that did our benefits, and one that did our corporate communications—we
had our head of advertising, our head of marketing and several HR leaders.
At the end of the day, somebody said, "What if the experience
of working at Southwest Airlines was a product? How would we sell it?"
The marketing people in the room said, "Whenever you are trying
to sell a product, you begin to say what differentiates your product from other
products on the market." So we began to catalog what differentiated the experience
of working at Southwest. Before we knew it, we had these eight symbols of freedom
that you had from working at Southwest. That became our internal brand.
WM: Can you give me an example?
Sartain: We had the freedom to learn and grow. The freedom
to create financial security. The freedom to work hard and have fun—that was our
answer to work/life balance.
Then we created an overall employee brand: "At Southwest,
freedom begins with me." We made that connection that you’re delivering the freedom
that Southwest delivers—you, the employee—and in turn you get these freedoms from
working here.
I began to say, "This is magic." Suddenly I wasn’t talking
about, "Oh, I need to get $200,000 to do a new benefits booklet." I was saying,
"We need to help our employees understand their freedom to pursue good health. So
in order for them to have their freedom to support our brand, we need to do a new
benefits booklet for $200,000." It was a different conversation. And it stuck.
WM: How was Yahoo different from Southwest and Mary Kay?
Sartain: I always saw more similarities than difference. One
of the reasons it appealed to me was it had two founders still involved. I had the
Mary Kay founder, I had the Herb Kelleher founder. Now I had Jerry (Yang) and David
(Filo), still there every single day. They weren’t just like, "Hi, I’m a billionaire.
I’m breezing in." They were in their cubes working their butts off next to everybody
else.
The age of Yahoo employees was very similar to the age of
Southwest employees. A lot of young people. Lots and lots of 20-somethings.
What was really different is the workers themselves. Southwest
primarily has people who are high school grads, who are very career-oriented, who
are joining to be part of something bigger than themselves. Yahoo had a lot of very
brilliant people. They were all the top in their class, they never got below an
A. But there was a lot more competition to get ahead. And a lot more, "We all have
an idea, and ours is best."
There was a very collaborative atmosphere. But sometimes things
didn’t move forward as fast as you wanted it to, because more brilliant people would
have more brilliant ideas about how to make something even better than it was before.
WM: That’s a refreshing comment. You often hear these Silicon
Valley companies only talk about the collaboration and the harmoniousness.
Sartain: At Southwest there was a healthy respect for authority.
If Herb said, "I made this decision, we’re going to do it," then everybody kind
of fell in line and got it done. [Former Yahoo CEO] Terry Semel could stand up in
front of the whole company and say, "I made this decision, we’re going to do it,"
and everybody would say, "Oh, bad decision. No, we’re not going to do that. Oh,
he came from the media business, what does he know?" You just don’t make a decision
and announce it and think everyone will fall in line. That was the challenge: You
have to win over the minds and the hearts. Whereas at Southwest it would be the
hearts first and then the minds, at Yahoo you would have to make an intellectual
argument sophisticated enough to win them over.
WM: Do you see a different attitude toward layoffs by employees?
Are they not as big of a deal anymore?
Sartain: I really think the Silicon Valley is different from
the rest of the world. In the Silicon Valley, people almost expect to be laid off
at some point. I’ve been involved in two major layoffs at Yahoo: one when I first
got there and one as I was leaving. Some people were happy to be laid off—they were
ready for a change, they wanted a package. Most people weren’t devastated. Most
people knew that they would go on and get another job. There’s probably very few
people in the Silicon Valley who haven’t been laid off once, or their spouse laid
off once.
But when you go to the rest of the country, I saw people did
really want to join a company and stay for their career.
The best companies get to situations because of disruption
and change that cause them to have to make that business decision to lay off. It’s
unfortunate. I wish there were a way around it.
WM: What are the biggest challenges these days for HR leaders?
Sartain: I think the talent marketplace in the last two or
three years has changed so dramatically that almost everything we do in HR has got
to change with it. The evolution of the Internet, social media, the global economy,
the Gen Y generation coming of age as the baby boomer generation is leaving creates
a situation where you can no longer just think that you can have an opening, and
recruit for the opening and get an employee.
The company used to be in the driver’s seat: "Here’s the job
I have. Here’s how much I want to pay you to do this work. Come to work for me under
my terms as the employer."
I think those days are fading. I think it will evolve almost
to the point that you have a marketplace like eBay where someone will put themselves
out to bid: "Here I am. Here’s what I’m willing to do for how much money I’m willing
to make. And here’s my hours and my location and what I can do for you." It’s going
to be that person in the driver’s seat.
And that person may be a Gen Y person or a baby boomer looking
for a little more flexibility in their lifestyle. I think employers are going to
have to learn how to have this individual work arrangement with each employee in
certain aspects of the talent. I’m not saying that’s going to be the case for retail
jobs or volume hiring positions. But it’s going to be the case for some of your
top talent or some of your core talent in certain industries. It’s beginning to
happen. The Silicon Valley is probably where we see a lot of it. But it’s going
to sweep the country.
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