A company can spend millions trying to solve a staffing problem without realizing it already has enough employees. The real problem may be that those employees are in the wrong places, doing the wrong work, at the wrong times. That possibility should make any CEO uncomfortable, particularly when the proposed solution involves adding payroll.
Debbie McKinley, Chief People Officer at Herschend Family Entertainment, and a former Vice President of Human Resources at Home Depot, has spent much of her career confronting the difference between what executives believe is happening and what actually happens on the front lines.
Her approach challenges a comfortable assumption about executive leadership: The higher someone rises in an organization, the more they can rely on reports, dashboards, and people further down the chain to understand the business.
Those tools have their place. But an executive who has never experienced the work being measured may be making expensive decisions with incomplete information.
The $12 Extension Cord That Exposed a Management Blind Spot
McKinley spent a full shift working in housekeeping at a resort that was part of Herschend’s portfolio of entertainment properties. She made beds, cleaned bathrooms, dusted rooms, and discovered how physically demanding the work was. After making six beds across three rooms, her back was already protesting.
Then she noticed something that had apparently escaped management’s attention. The housekeepers were vacuuming their way out of completed rooms, leaving the familiar clean carpet lines guests expect. But the vacuum cleaners had 12-foot power cords. That meant stopping midway through the room, unplugging the vacuum, relocating the plug, and repeating part of the process. The employees had accepted the inconvenience because those were the machines management had purchased.
McKinley recognized the wasted effort immediately. The company bought appropriate extension cords from a nearby hardware store, and she instructed the housekeeping supervisor to specify 24-foot cords when purchasing replacement vacuums. A relatively inexpensive operational solution had been hiding in plain sight.
Consider how many times an executive might approve a labor budget, discuss housekeeping productivity, or review operating expenses without ever discovering that an equipment purchasing decision was creating unnecessary work. The spreadsheet could show labor costs accurately while offering no explanation for some of the time being consumed.
McKinley describes her approach with a phrase from her military background: “I learned to dig a ditch.” That means participating in the work rather than observing it from a comfortable distance.
At Herschend, executives are required to work on the front lines. McKinley has made corndogs, operated rides, and performed other jobs that directly shape the guest experience. There’s an important condition: Executives have to stay long enough to experience the work.
A two-hour visit, particularly one arranged for photographs, is unlikely to reveal much about the physical demands, recurring frustrations, or operational obstacles employees face. Worse, employees recognize the difference between someone trying to understand their jobs and someone performing concern for an audience. The executive’s presence becomes another interruption.
Before You Approve More Payroll, Consider Alternative Solutions
One of McKinley’s clearest examples of strategic HR came during her career at Home Depot. The company faced a familiar retail complaint: Customers couldn’t find enough associates to help them.
The intuitive response was to increase staffing. More employees wearing orange aprons should mean more available customer assistance. However, adding substantial numbers of employees across thousands of stores would have created an enormous recurring expense.
McKinley and her colleagues examined the problem differently. They visited stores at different times, studied the labor models, observed customer traffic, and evaluated where employees were actually spending their time.
What they discovered challenged the premise behind the staffing request. Employees weren’t necessarily absent. Some were stocking merchandise in aisles where they felt comfortable working without customer interaction. Others were assigned to locations that made sense under normal conditions but not during changing customer traffic patterns.
The issue was partly how employees were deployed. Instead of supporting a broad staffing increase, the team developed an additional store leadership position that functioned like an air traffic controller. These employees would continually circulate through the store, monitoring activity, identifying customers needing assistance, and directing associates toward those customers.
The approach concentrated on coordinating existing labor, with roughly two people filling that function during busy periods rather than adding large numbers of associates across every shift. It also created another opportunity for supervisors to advance into higher-paid positions and develop leadership skills.
That combination is worth examining. A staffing complaint produced a proposed solution involving operational coordination, labor efficiency, customer experience, and career development. HR contributed beyond its conventional administrative boundaries because the analysis began with how the business made money.
The solution doesn’t establish the financial savings or subsequent customer-service results, and those shouldn’t be assumed. The decision illustrates a useful discipline: Before accepting a request for additional headcount, executives should establish whether the organization lacks capacity or is failing to use the capacity it already pays for. Those are very different problems, with very different price tags.
Strategic HR & Earned Influence
There’s a persistent complaint among HR professionals that executives don’t give them a meaningful seat at the table. Sometimes that complaint is justified. McKinley’s career raises a harder question: What has HR demonstrated that would cause an operating executive to seek its advice on a major business decision?
Knowing employment policy isn’t enough. Neither is being an effective employee advocate. A strategic HR executive needs to understand the company’s financial goals, operating pressures, customer expectations, and competing uses for capital. That doesn’t mean becoming the CFO or COO. It means understanding how people-related decisions affect the outcomes those executives are responsible for producing.
McKinley identifies two essential responsibilities for strategic HR: advocating for frontline employees when resources are allocated and coaching executives to improve their judgment and performance.
The first responsibility creates healthy tension. There will always be competing demands for money. Operations wants investment, shareholders expect returns, and employees need the tools, compensation, and working conditions required to deliver the product or service. HR should be able to explain why investing in employees produces a business return, rather than relying exclusively on arguments about employee satisfaction.
The second responsibility requires something equally uncomfortable: telling executives when their behavior or decisions are ineffective. That can mean explaining why a meeting failed, identifying people who were alienated, or recommending that an executive repair a damaged working relationship.
McKinley also acknowledges that an organization accustomed to transactional HR may need time to understand a different model. Influence has to be demonstrated through contribution. Simply demanding inclusion doesn’t establish credibility.
When HR Solves Every Management Problem, Managers Stop Learning
A strong individual contributor becomes a supervisor. That supervisor performs well and eventually begins managing other managers. Organizations frequently treat those promotions as natural progressions of the same skill set. They aren’t.
Managing frontline employees requires different judgment than leading people who are themselves responsible for managing teams. McKinley sees coaching as one of HR’s central responsibilities, but she draws a firm boundary between coaching a manager and doing the manager’s job.
Early in her HR career, after serving in operational roles at Home Depot, she sometimes crossed that boundary. She could see what she believed needed to happen and would step in to make it happen herself. At other times, she became so personally invested in another executive’s struggles that she absorbed responsibility for their failures. Neither approach helped her remain effective.
Her conclusion is direct: “I’m not the QB. I’m the coach.”
That’s a useful standard for any executive support function. If HR repeatedly takes over difficult employee conversations, makes routine supervisory decisions, or resolves conflicts that managers should handle themselves, the organization may become increasingly dependent on HR. The immediate problem gets resolved, but the manager misses the opportunity to develop judgment.
Effective coaching requires asking what the manager observed, how they evaluated the situation, what alternatives they considered, and what they intend to do differently. The manager still has to make the decision and own the outcome.
McKinley learned not to judge every operator against how she personally would have performed the job. If the customer experience and business outcomes are strong, a manager’s different approach doesn’t automatically require correction. An HR executive who can’t accept difference in delivery can become an obstacle to capable managers rather than a resource for them.
Behaviors and Purpose
Corporate values are easy to announce. They’re considerably harder to enforce when a productive executive consistently violates them. Herschend takes an unusually concrete approach to that problem. Its culture, called Heartspitality, emphasizes specific leadership behaviors associated with its commitment to treating people with care.
Employees in salaried leadership positions receive quarterly evaluations in which half the assessment concerns cultural behaviors and the other half concerns financial performance or goal achievement. That allocation sends a message that executives can’t safely ignore. Financial results alone don’t determine whether someone is meeting the organization’s expectations.
McKinley describes the challenge of being patient, forgiving, truthful, and respectful even under pressure. Those qualities are evaluated through feedback, including conversations when an executive hasn’t demonstrated the expected behavior.
The company also connects those behaviors to a common purpose: bringing families closer together by creating memories worth repeating. That purpose has operational relevance because Herschend’s properties, including Dollywood and Silver Dollar City, compete for families’ leisure time and spending. The relationship between employee behavior and customer experience is direct.
Compare that with a company that advertises respect as a core value while continuing to reward a financially successful executive who routinely mistreats employees. The written value and the actual incentive disagree. Employees will learn from the incentive.
Herschend’s system doesn’t eliminate difficult behavior. McKinley openly acknowledges that practicing the company’s values can be demanding. Defining behaviors and incorporating them into performance reviews gives the organization a way to address the gap between what it promises and what its managers do.
Focus and Diagnosis
McKinley uses another practice from her military experience to keep her HR team focused on solving the right problems. Once a month, a team member examines a business issue using the military planning framework known as SMEAC: Situation, Mission, Execution, Administration and Logistics, and Communication.
For a project involving employee recognition, that means:
- investigating current practices across properties
- studying employee feedback
- identifying gaps
- defining the actual problem before proposing a program
The analysis might reveal that the company needs better recognition tools. It might reveal that new managers don’t know how to recognize employees effectively. It could also reveal that no additional program is necessary. That’s a more disciplined approach than assuming every perceived gap requires another initiative.
The same reasoning applies to the staffing challenges at Home Depot and the vacuum cleaners at their resorts. Executives often begin with a proposed solution because someone has already framed the problem for them. The solutions often look like more hiring, better productivity, or another employee program. However, the request itself may rest on an assumption nobody has tested.
I’ve seen how easily an organization can start debating the cost of a solution before establishing whether it has correctly diagnosed the problem. The executives who contribute the most aren’t necessarily the ones with the fastest answers. They’re the ones willing to point out that the question being discussed is the wrong one.
Sometimes that requires detailed financial analysis. Sometimes it requires challenging another executive. Sometimes it requires spending an entire shift cleaning hotel rooms. The next costly operational problem may already be obvious to the people doing the work. The question is whether anyone making the decisions has bothered to experience it.