Interviewer: Mahmoud Mansi
“One of the most frequent change management principles that I apply to my work, relates to ensuring people are able to have a degree of control over whatever change they may be impacted by. People buy what they build.”
Karen Guzicki
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWEE
Karen Guzicki is a Co-Founder and Principal Consultant of Watershed, an executive and organizational development consulting firm, providing expertise in the areas of change and transition, leadership development, organizational strategy and talent management infrastructure.
In addition to serving as faculty for the Human Capital Institute Karen is an adjunct professor at Aquinas College teaching Organizational Behavior. Karen also served as a volunteer for the HR Pro Bono Corps, a foundation dedicated to providing free consulting services to not-for-profit organizations.
Karen lives in Michigan with her adrenaline junkie husband Mark and her three children.
THE INTERVIEW
1. HR Revolution Middle East Magazine: Karen, as someone who’s job revolves around developing people, how do you advise HR learners to choose what is best for them?
Karen Guzicki: My advice to HR learners is to align your development to your passion points. Nothing is worse than investing time, money and effort into a skillset that you aren’t interested in. Think about both your career and personal aspirations, identify the roles that will allow you to achieve both, and select development opportunities that will build on your interests and support your trajectory toward those roles.
2. HR Revolution Middle East Magazine: To what extent are certifications important? And how can employers make the best out of their certified employees?
Karen Guzicki: I think professional certifications offer tremendous value to both the individual who holds the certification as well as the organization the individual is employed by. For the participant, the learning experience exposes them to contemporary research and practice in an environment where they can learn from the facilitator as well as the other HR peers in the course. The certification exam itself serves as evidence that they have a proficiency in the subject area. The value to the organization is exponential; they now have in-house expertise that can be leveraged as a key resource for purposes of driving key HR initiatives. Additionally, the certified individual can serve as a mentor and teacher to others and provide opportunities for knowledge transfer.
I think employers can make the best out of their certified employees in two ways:
- Invite that employee to lead or teach a session to share key learnings obtained from the certification experience.
- Ensure that the certified employee has a seat at the table for projects that touch their new area of expertise.
3. HR Revolution Middle East Magazine: What about your experience as an educator at the Human Capital Institute, how did it start? And why HCI?
Karen Guzicki: My experience as an educator started more than 10 years ago when I had my first experience as a learner in the HCI course (SWP) Strategic Workforce Planning. I loved the learning experience, found the content practical and relevant and was immediately able to apply the learnings to my role. I subsequently added two more HCI certifications to my repertoire. My most recent certification experience involved inviting HCI to deliver Strategic HR Business Partner certification as a corporate training at the organization I was employed by at the time. During that experience in particular I had opportunity to interact with the business development staff, the education department and the facilitator. I was highly impressed that HCI was focused on conducting research, delivering contemporary learnings and providing a solution set we could leverage. Many of my experiences with competitors in the learning space had always left me feeling like it was all about the sale – not so with HCI. They wanted to be my partner in learning. That interaction led to more conversations and I eventually joined the HCI organization as a facilitator in Fall 2017.
4. HR Revolution Middle East Magazine: HCI is offering online training programs where you as an instructor participate with learners logging from different places of the world, what are the challenges behind online course delivery and how do you turn them into opportunities?
Karen Guzicki: I think one of the biggest challenges behind online course delivery is creating points of connection. I don’t want my learners to feel isolated, or worse yet, bored. My online learners bring such a richness of information and experience with them to the online courses. I work hard to ensure there are regular interactions with all the participants so that they can learn from each other as much as they learn from me. Additionally, when I have online participants from across the globe, I know that they are dealing with different technology constraints as well as various time zones. I’m sensitive to the need to try and make the experience work for everyone, and sometimes that means we leverage some of the online functions more than the others so that everyone has a good experience.
5. HR Revolution Middle East Magazine: Karen, it is quite interesting that you are also working as an adjunct professor at Aquinas College teaching Organizational Behavior. From your perspective how do you find teaching different than training in application and evaluation?
Karen Guzicki: I find teaching at Aquinas to require a much more theoretical approach and to necessitate a lot of case study work. The art of storytelling and context setting is critical in my college teaching because my students don’t have the robust work experiences that my HCI learners do. I have to focus more on theory and give my students tips and tricks for how to recognize certain elements of organizational behavior when they do hit the workforce.
6. HR Revolution Middle East Magazine: Besides your career as a trainer & a professor, you are a Co-Founder and Principal Consultant of Watershed. Can you tell us more about the story behind your company, what inspired you to start it?
Karen Guzicki: When I was in graduate school I had a professor, Mike Schuler, Ph.D., who constantly challenged me to think about the work of Talent and Organizational Development in new and different ways. We didn’t always see eye to eye but developed a very respectful tolerance for each other’s views that turned into a wonderful peer relationship. Over the years we maintained contact, often serving as a professional sounding board for the other. Mike had significant experience as an external consultant to organizations while my roles had always been as an internal consultant to organizations. We often joked that we should join forces and “rule the world”, given that the combination of our experiences and skill sets were complimentary and extremely well rounded. I left my employer in early 2017 due to layoffs and at that time considered what I wished to do next. Mike and I spent some months discussing the opportunity in front of us and determined that together we could offer clients a more robust and powerful solution than either of us could offer alone. We took the leap, started Watershed, and haven’t looked back since.
7. HR Revolution Middle East Magazine: Can you tell us what are the challenges you faced in starting up your own business? And how did you self-consult to go through the challenges?
Karen Guzicki: There were a variety of challenges in starting up a business. First and foremost, in my geography, there is a healthy presence of competing consultants. In particular, there are a lot of practitioners who have self-anointed themselves as such, not because they have the academic credentials or the employment background in the Talent Management and OD space, but because they think it a fun space to play in. We had to determine how we wanted to position ourselves in the market and differentiate our approach to the work. One of these differences is in how we decided to scale the volume of work – we don’t try to sign the most clients – we try to sign the clients that we can be most helpful to and whom we can ensure we have plenty of time for. We like to think our client roster to be about quality over quantity. Another differentiator for us is related to marketing and promotion – we don’t do it. Not because we don’t think marketing has value but because we find that our clients are our best commercial. When we do a great job for them, they tell their peers and make introductions. To date we have been entirely referral based and think that speaks to the quality of service we provide. It may not be the fastest way to grow the business, but we believe it to be the most sustainable. We pride ourselves on the number of clients who continually reach out to us for support.
8. HR Revolution Middle East Magazine: How do you utilize your experience of consultancy in HCI’s training programs?
Karen Guzicki: I’m able to utilize my consultancy experiences in several ways while facilitating HCI programs. First and foremost, I am able to appreciate the material from both an academic as well as a practical perspective. Secondly, I understand the context of the work that the participants are involved in because I have had like work experiences and responsibilities. The broad reach I’ve had throughout my career and with our client roster has equipped me to provide relevant examples of how I’ve seen the work executed or the skills practiced, and share lessons learned.
9. HR Revolution Middle East Magazine: In HR Revolution we value social work to a great extent. We are proud that you were a volunteer for the HR Pro Bono Corps, providing free consulting services to not-for-profit organizations. Is consulting for non-profit organizations and the needs and services provided usually different than the usual consulting?
Karen Guzicki: While offering free consulting services to not-for-profits through the HR Pro Bono Corps I found that the needs were no different than other organizations. However, the solution sets required a lot of mental agility on my part because the organizations often had significant financial constraints. That’s not to suggest that the only way to solve for HR opportunities is to throw money at the problem but they were often operating with bare bones infrastructure to begin with and usually lacked some of the foundational tools or equipment that many of us take for granted. The amount of capital they had to invest in technology, materials and/or staffing paled in comparison to their for-profit peers. That experience shaped significantly the approach Mike and I take with our Watershed clients; our hallmark is offering simple solutions that can scale over time and are sustainable.
10. HR Revolution Middle East Magazine: As a consultant, educator and a trainer who applies lots of change management across her daily work, and as a parent, how do you advice parents to apply change management with their children?
Karen Guzicki: One of the most frequent change management principles that I apply to my work, both professionally and as a parent, relates to ensuring people are able to have a degree of control over whatever change they may be impacted by. I have a saying that I like to use, “people buy what they build”. Where reasonable, I like to give people an opportunity to help shape solutions. By being a part of the process, they are more likely to endorse and show commitment to the outcome. For clients that might mean having them provide feedback on potential solutions for consideration or having teams collaborate on communication plans or change timelines. With respect to my children it can be as simple as giving them two choices for dinner and letting them pick which one they prefer I cook. It’s not about giving people the option to opt out or to have full control – it’s about inviting their participation and curating choices to bring them along with you.
WHAT A GREAT INTERVIEW! THANK YOU DEAR KAREN.