Interviews from HR Innovator magazine

Breaking In, Bowing Out

Susan Bowick
Executive Vice President,
Human Resources and Workforce Development
Hewlett-Packard
Palo Alto, CA

Throughout the high-tech world of Silicon Valley where networking technology is often touted as the hope of the future, it's hard to imagine anything livelier than the networking of the Bay Area's HR leaders. And for the last several months there was a buzz abroad: Hewlett-Packard's HR chief Susan Bowick was about to bow out. “How can that be?” one HR maven asked. “Susan is having way too much of a good time there.”

Now it's official. Bowick, HP's executive vice president of human resources and workforce development, retired last December after more than 25 years at one of the world's fastest-growing, highest-profile companies. Bowick began her career as a teacher but applied for a job at HP in Loveland, CO, at the casual suggestion of her husband. She signed on in 1977 as a business analyst, then moved into the HR department two years later, and has since invested herself in growing the people side of the business.

Of course, the big news out of HP has been its controversial merger with Compaq in 2002, the largest technology merger ever. For Bowick, the challenge of doubling her employee population around the world (roughly 86,000 HP employees and 60,000 from Compaq) and integrating it almost instantly gave her a chance to use the very technology that HP offers its own marketplace. Among the many initiatives rolled out to make that happen, the most noteworthy is an employee portal that unifies almost 150,000 employees around the globle. This portal system has been recognized by the Gartner Group as the Number One Enterprise Portal in the world. And HR has since packaged it as a product in its recently developed HR services/technology/consulting suite of offerings to its customers.

In this interview, she talks about the major lessons of her career and how she has grown along the way.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received?

When I was a little girl, my German grandmother had a saying: “Remember the sun doesn't shine every day.” When everything doesn't go well, that's normal. As I got older I had a lot of opportunities to remind myself: “Well, this was a learning experience, this wasn't a good day, but I won't let it throw me off course.” This advice was a very big part of the foundation of who I am. I expect things to go up and down and not always be perfect. I've always believed that you can figure out a way through even the most difficult mistake or conflict-ridden mess.

I actually have shared it with others over the years when I can tell someone has been thrown by heavy workload or something they didn't expect and they're letting it affect their attitude. They haven't developed the coping skills to lead themselves through the down times.

What was the moment that changed your career forever?

It was when I decided to get out of teaching and start at HP. I was teaching business subjects at the high school and community college level, and I was miserable. I woke up one day and said, “I just can't imagine myself doing this for the next 20 to 30 years.” My husband, who had run a junior achievement program for HP, had seen an ad for a glorified secretarial job for the company. He said, “Susan, I think you have the personality to fit in there, and you'd really like HP. Why don't you send in your resume?”

I said, “Oh, I've got my degree. I worked as a secretary to get through college. I don't want to go back and do that!” He said, “Just give it a try.”

Once I got over my original objections, I sent in my resume. I had to go down and take them work samples -- which was demeaning to me because I was teaching those subjects! The boss who interviewed me for the job offered me a job more as a business analyst rather than strict secretarial work, and my life really changed. I started doing something where I wasn't confined by a job description or rigid structure, like teaching had been. I was able to use my creativity, figuring out what needed to be done. I had found a place where I could think.

The other step “back” was inside HP where the man I worked for got a promotion. By that time I was in a group HR manager job, which was pretty high in HP. There were two of us in that position at that point, and I knew my boss didn't need two group HR managers. But he didn't make the move whether it would be me or this other guy. So, I was the one who decided, “This is for the birds.”

I saw a job that was open inside HP. It wasn't in the Bay area. It was in San Diego and several levels lower than I was. It was a site personnel manager, but it was in a business I had never worked in. I had been a site personnel manager before. I knew that I liked it. So I volunteered to be interviewed, and I took the transfer to San Diego. Again, it was a demotion. My colleagues thought I was nuts. It wasn't the traditional onward and upward career path. But I did it so I could go learn and experience a different part of the business I didn't know.

How did that benefit you in the long-term?

Ultimately I think that move is what got me here today. It was a move into the printer business. I went from site personnel manager to group personnel manager over all of HP's printer business in less than a year. And then my boss at the time got promoted to having 80% of HP's business, and I went with him where I then had 80% of the global HR business at HP. When Pete Peterson, my predecessor, retired, he had identified two of us as internal candidates who were most likely to be considered for his replacement. I was the one luckily who was selected for the corporate job.

Not only did you have a track record of doing good work throughout your career, you also had the good fortune of being noticed. Do you have any suggestions on how HR professionals can make sure their contributions actually get the attention of the people who can help them along in their career?

I try to look at the world through my boss's eyes, not just mine. I've always found in HR in particular, if you understand the business, the organization structure, the culture, HR is just a candy store of tools to help the boss get better results through people. And so the boss doesn't look at it as “HR for HR sake.” They start seeing it as a marvelous contribution. And it's worked time after time after time that the boss in the organization got better results than he would have on his own.

It's because I have always felt my priority has been to make the business more competitive and to make it a better place to work from the employees' standpoint. These two objectives don't have to be at odds with each other. Let's face it. A lot of the things we deal with are the things the line managers are the least comfortable with. Many of the line teams appreciate someone who helps them be better at parts of the job that they might naturally avoid.

What would you have done differently if you could do it over again?

I wish I had worked overseas earlier in my career. I didn't realize how important globalization is and the need to understand from firsthand experience different cultures and different ways of viewing what is a U.S. centric company. For a variety of reasons I didn't actively go after that when it was brought up earlier in my career. And, knowing what I know now, I would have.

A lot of the emerging markets and untapped skill sets are in Asia , Eastern Europe, Middle East, Russia. Get ahead of it today. Those are the places I would take a transfer to -- and learn as much as I could about the regional expansion first hand.

What advice do you have to share with HR professionals on their way up?

Don't think that the only way to progress is up. Be really willing to actively pursue horizontal moves, even demotions, if you're going to learn something that's new, that's going to be vital, that's going to help you understand a part of the company, or a part of the HR skill set that you don't currently have.

As long as you're learning and building your skill sets, don't pay that much attention to job title or pay levels – the short-term rewards. Careers are a long-term thing. And I see a lot of people limit their thinking by only looking at a vertical progression.

What do HR professionals need now that you didn't need when you started your career?

The first thing that comes to my mind is that you have to bring into HR some of the same technology and practices it takes to run the business. Knowing what it takes to go fast, to enable basic things, is just entry into the game today. It's not the complete job. Ten or 15 years ago, if you were able to run a huge global project, that was a breakthrough. Today, we in HR have had to lead the use of technology to enable integration. Build on that and do things like knowledge management, metrics, and global workforce surveys.

The second thing, which I mentioned earlier, is the ability to work globally. Frequently our most effective teams are dispersed global teams that have figured out how to work together. Technology again is an enabler. All of a sudden you can select the best talent anywhere in the world, no matter where they sit, bring them together, and get them productive. This is an example of how technology and the ability to operate globally enables a company in a way that hasn't been done before.

What is the best thing new entrants can do for themselves?

You need to understand the business you're working in first, and you do have to speak the language of the business. Part of what has held HR back, as compared to IT and Finance for instance, is that frequently we can speak the language of HR first but cannot clearly articulate how it benefits the business. Or we're not comfortable with talking in business terms. If you use the vast capabilities and resources in HR and position them in terms of what they will do to help the business become more successful, or a better place for the employees to work, you get much better results and a much better connection with line teams who ultimately have to jointly own everything that HR brings to the table. And so, to me, that is the most critical foundational skill for the HR professional.

I think every new entrant should have some accounting classes, some business law classes, and some economics classes. I don't think you have to have an MBA, but you should go to an executive program and be familiar with case study methodology.

How important is it for the HR practitioner to actually have a passion for the company's product?

I don't think that one is a make or break issue. My first 12 years were in test and measurement, and I never fell in love with the dynamic signal analyzer. I just felt happy if I could describe what our customers did with it. You have to have an appreciation for what it takes to develop and design and sell the product.

There are other businesses, like the businesses that HP is in now, that you can get passionate about it: digital imaging, printers, PCs, and more consumer products. I don't think it's a prerequisite that you love the project or be passionate about what you're producing. But you need to understand it. Understand the whole product lifecycle. You need to understand the development, manufacture, distribution, service, where the money is made and the interdependence and connections among all those things. You need to understand that whole profit model, product inception on through customer use and disposal.

What's the worst thing HR professionals can do to limit their potential?

In general, if someone looks for approval or direction from others before taking a risk, regardless of what you set out to do, you're going to be limited by other people's opinions of where you come from. It can be especially true in HR where a lot of people don't expect very much from you. Starting out, if I lived up only to those expectations – or down to those expectations, I should say -- it would have been a very disappointing career. Line managers need the HR team to set high expectations, articulate them and then deliver.

What characteristics and qualities do you look for when hiring a new HR professional?

It's hard not to have 10 pages of everything that can go into this profession. But there are certainly a set of core characteristics that make up the foundation: You need to be value oriented. You need to have an internal focus of control. You're going to have to deal with a lot of conflict and change and situations where there is no cookbook. So you have to be very well grounded, have a sense of humor and objectivity, and not be seen as a political player. And you need to be able to go sleep at night and get up the next day with the personal stamina and objectivity to be able to help the organization. You need to have a strong personal base.

And, of course, you have to have a business orientation. You have to be able to speak the language of line management, profit and loss, and synthesize out HR implications of what the business or management team needs.

We all need some technical competence: labor law, the ability to deliver training programs, and the ability to work across functions. We tend to operate in silos inside the HR department, which doesn't help our customers. Our line managers want an integrated service from HR. They don't want to get a set of salary ranges here, a set of evaluation processes here, the annual stock program here. They want someone to present this to them in terms of an integrated performance system. In order to do that, HR people have to work across functional silos. I don't expect people to be experts across the silos, but I expect them to understand where there is a place for them to connect what they're doing with everyone else. And to be able to lead a team of other specialists who may not be in their area of expertise, and be more solution-oriented and not be a stand-alone producer.

That's why HR sometimes gets a bad rap. They forget to look at what they do from the manager's perspective.

When did you take a risk in your career and have it pay off?

Not to be melodramatic but every day you have to take risks, intervene, and bring issues to the table that other people might just as soon ignore. The real risk is when you don't deal with the conflict.

We call it “moose launching.” Blast that thing right into the middle of the table! It means frequently I have to be the person who gets that issue that everyone is talking about around the cooler onto the table and make it a legitimate topic of discussion. I have this iceberg model that shows how typically all line mangers gravitate to what we see above the waterline. It's all that happens below the waterline -- how power is distributed, how we deal with conflict, how we deal with protracted periods of uncertainty where people don't know what tomorrow may bring – that is where the real issues lie. Actively managing that, I think, that's a daily act of risk taking for a lot of HR professionals.

You're the one who has to understand the dynamics below the water line and get those issues on the table. If you don't work them through, along with the hard issues, you'll never get the results you need.

So what's the pain you feel when you launch the moose?

It's usually the question: Am I the only one who thinks we should work on this? If I launch the moose, is there going to be anyone else in the room who will also say, “Yes, that's an issue.” No matter how experienced you are, other people are going to look at you like, “Man are you ever coming in from left field.”

With experience, you learn how to trust your judgment and sixth sense.

Have you ever thought about doing anything other than HR?

Not once I got in it. I just found it to be the most complex and challenging and rewarding thing that I could possible do.

This article originally appeared in the January/February 2004 issue of HR Innovator magazine. Reprinted with permission.