Interviews from HR Innovator magazine

Keeping Faith in the Valley

Peg Wynn
Vice President, Worldwide Human Resources
Xilinx
San Jose , CA

There is no shortage of stories - personal and organizational - that have tumbled out of Silicon Valley since the economic downturn began to plummet in 2000. There are few, however, that actually provide inspiring lessons that tech industry and employment watchers alike want to carry with them in to the future as lessons on how things should be done in both good and bad times. The lessons out of Xilinx, a San Jose, California-based, programmable chip manufacturer, are not so much about the latest in whiz-bang leadership theory as they are about just plain old-fashioned human decency. And how the president and CEO, Willem ("Wim") Roelandts has continued to keep the faith with over 2,000 employees.

Roelandts has a term for the relationship he shares with his partner in keeping the faith, Peg Wynn, vice president worldwide human resources. He calls their synergy a twisted pair , which is an electrical engineering term for a partnership of cables or wires so intertwined that together they keep out interference from the outside. That pretty much sums it up for them.

Peg grew up in Youngstown , Ohio , where she watched her father struggle in the doomed steel industry. Without realizing it at the time, she was an early observer of yet another intense relationship - the relationship between individuals and their livelihood. After discovering HR as a temp, she spent 14 years at Intel, followed by five years as a management consultant. She took at the job at Xilinx not entirely convinced that her best role was inside the corporate environment.

But together Peg and Roelandts achieved an accomplishment few Silicon Valley companies can brag about: they weathered the economic storm without laying off one single person. Using across the board pay cuts (including Roelandts' salary), lengthy sabbaticals and other methods to trim the high expense of people, they stood up the analyists and the skeptics and kept the company growing with all hands. By hanging on to its values, Xilinx not only prevailed - it has gained market share supremacy - as well as the trust of its employees and five years ranking in Fortune's Best Companies to Work For list.

In this interview Peg talks about the love of her work and her deepest commitment to give that same opportunity for authenticity to the rest of the employees at Xilinx.

How did you get into HR?

In the late 1978 I was a teacher in Tennessee working as a temporary in the summer. Allied Chemical's airbag manufacturing plant needed to hire 40 sewing machine operators. I interviewed them all summer long.

I enjoyed hearing people's stories and really being able to listen for commitment. Were they just there to do the job? Or were they really committed to being a great employee for this company?

From watching my dad work so hard in the steel industry and be so unhappy much of the time, I was committed to the principle that if people are going to work 8 hours a day, they should come alive. They should not be deadened by their work. They should be rejuvenated by their work.

Something about that whole situation that really fueled my passion to make sure that people are doing the right thing; doing what they love to do at work. I really believe that magic happens when people are treated with respect and they're matched up with the job that they love to do.

How do you apply that principle to the overall HR organization to help HR careerists keep that magic alive for themselves as well as for the organization?

When I make presentations to our HR people, I show them this continuum that I developed. On one end is a list of the ways other companies do HR. On the other end is a list of ideals that we're trying to achieve at Xilinx. And I think people are really inspired to go there. They want to go there. They know that's also going to challenge them as well and bring out their best ideas and authenticity. I tell people all the time, "Do not bring in all your HR ideas from other companies. We're going to do it our way here." We have a vision of the company that says build a company that sets a new standard on how to build a high-tech company. HR's job is to help us innovate our way out of problems and eventually help us close that gap in terms of what our continuums are.

We in HR are at the center stage when it comes to what we want to do here.

So that invites your HR staff to bring in their own sense of self-direction, imagination, innovation -- which has to feed their self-esteem.

Absolutely. We just did a survey and our empowerment scores are really high off the charts. People know that we want them to do it differently and they know that their job is to think their way out of the problem and come up with a solution that's obviously legal, moral and ethical.

What was the moment in which your career changed forever?

In 1987 my boss at Intel came to me and said, "You've been doing HR and keep giving us great ideas on how to be a great manager. I have a problem I need solved, and I want you to solve it. I want you to run the mask design and engineering organization.

So I left HR for a while. And I never did HR the same way again after that experience. That's where I learned how to be effective by solving their problems and not by putting my programs on top of them. Every day I would be faced with the questions, "How do I do this?" "How do I do that?" "How do I reorchestrate my team and redeploy the resources and get our product out faster without sacrificing other important initiatives that my team was facing?"

I had one member of my team who was clearly sabotaging our efforts and I just had to deal with him straight on. If I had been in my HR role, I might have followed all the many steps and rules of procedure. But I just sat him down, told him what I knew about what he was doing to the team and I gave him a simple choice. Either decide to leave and then do it -- and I would support him in finding a new job. Or decide to stay and give me a plan as to how he intended to support our efforts. The choice was his. I completely overrode the performance management process we had in place. But I was able to get results by being both candid and respectful.

We get these notions of respect mixed up. We think that respect must always be kind and gentle. And that's clearly an important part of it. But authentic and truthful is also part of being respectful. Everyone wants to know how to be treated truthfully and respectfully. No one wants to be molly-coddled. People don't need to be hand-held. They need to be told the truth, and be told respectfully.

That's what changed me.

How did the effects of the economic downturn change you personally?

I did emerge from the downturn with even more credibility inside the company and among my peers. The moment I was most proud was in December 2001 when we went to the board to lay out our plan for managing the crisis. The analysts were already all over our CFO pressuring him to make even more drastic cuts and the board was beginning to lose faith in us. So it was our job to explain what we were doing; why we were doing it, how we were growing our market share in spite of our reduced revenues; how our product launches were on time, we put more products out on time than our competitors. And we were asking them to trust us.

I had come up with the theme "We want to reduce expenses, maintain productivity and emerge stronger." Wim saw the early stages of my board presentations and said, "We're doing this together." I loved it. Our presentation mirrored one another.

He calls us a "twisted pair," which is an electrical term. We went in and did a presentation to the board. One of the board members, a man who is a particularly hard nut to crack, said afterwards, "I have never been so proud to be a part of this organization." It was one of those moments you never forget.

The board said, "Alright, we're going to give you one more shot." Revenues bumped up the following quarter. And we gave everyone a bonus at the end of the quarter. We went from 35% market share in 1999 to 51% market share today. We knew if we hung on to the people, if everyone tightened their belt together and kept the faith together , we could go that much further ahead of the competition. Everyone bought into it and it really paid off for us. Big time.

I'm more confident in my abilities to be true to my authentic self and to put my trust in the right places. I don't have to execute on programs that I don't believe in here. And I can stick up for my people and say, "They're not going collude either." This isn't how we do it here.

If it hadn't been for Xilinx, I might have been one of those people who identified herself as a management consultant. I might have been one of those perennial outsiders.

Were you surprised by such a synergy between you and your CEO?

It's important for HR professionals to match their personal values with the values of the organization in which they were going to work. And I know that's really hard to interview for. Everyone says the same thing. "People are our greatest assets." "Of course we want you." "Blah, blah, blah." Everybody says that, right?

After I left Intel, I worked as a consultant for five years. And Xilinx was one of my clients. The HR VP at the time said, "Peg I want you to work here," and when I resisted, he urged me to come meet the CEO. I sat down across from Wim and said, "You know I'm not really convinced I want to come to work here. I have just a couple of questions for you. I understand that you pride yourself on being a good guy. So the first question is: Can good guys finish first?" He said, "That's exactly what I'm here to prove."

So then I asked him how he planned on doing that. We had this amazing conversation about making sure that we held on to the values that are typically thrown away at other companies or are words on a wall. We wanted to really hold on to our values. And at the same time get really focused on results. It had to be both/and, not either/or. He does not do one employee communication where he doesn't mention the values. The man really lives what he's saying. It was a partnership made in heaven at the very beginning and that's why I've been so amazingly fortunate.

Was it that partnership relationship that the two of you have that has allowed the two of you to stare fear in the face for the last several years?

Yes. We all stood shoulder to shoulder. We got so many emails from employees saying, "We know the other shoe is going to drop. We've been in other companies before. We know the shoe is going to drop. Can you just tell me because I'm about to remortgage my house?" We kept telling them that laying people off was absolutely the last resort. And we didn't lay anyone off.

Based on what you've learned these last four years, what piece of advice would you give someone coming into the HR profession that you might not have given before?

You have to talk to your colleagues, peers and CEO on their terms, not on your terms. And ultimately you have to solve their problems with your authentic self.

Over the years, there have been numerous surveys that show that happy employees make for happy customers. Taking that same theory and overlaying it on the HR profession, how important is it to be happy in your work as an HR professional to effectively serve your constituents?

It's amazingly important. I think your whole attitude, your approach, the way you solve problems, the way you make decisions are all affected by your outlook on life. They feed each other. And if you believe that you can make a difference, you will. And that will be infectious inside the organization.

I'm an eternal optimist. I'm so bullish about this company and there's not one person inside this company who doesn't know that. It's a very cool place to be. I think I infect other people with this notion, and I think my HR folks do too.

And by the way, if you don't believe in the product that you're selling, it makes it that much more difficult to infect the rest of the work force with the kind of enthusiasm that makes a difference. You don't have to understand the technology of it, but you do have to believe in the end result of it.

Do you see your work in HR as relieving pain, restoring hope, or bringing beauty into the world?

It brings hope, no doubt about it. Creating hope is about creating the possibility for everybody to do what they love to do. If you can create the kind of hope that actually gets people juiced up, ready and revved up to come to work, that's visionary.

Whether you're an engineer, or an IT professional or a manufacturing logistics coordinator, you've come here to do something great for this company. Our job is to figure out how to help you realize how to do that great stuff. If you're really a great HR professional you help remove some of those obstacles so that people really can do their best work.

"I've never seen a de-motivated engineer come up with an innovative product." I need to make sure that people who are working here are motivated and are not de-motivated.

He would not ask anyone to do anything he wouldn't do himself. To me that's the dream come true. To have a partner like that in a company.

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