In this episode of Redefining HR, I spoke with Northwestern Mutual’s executive vice president and chief HR officer, Don Robertson. We discuss Don’s career transition from finance to HR, how his business acumen informs talent strategy, Northwestern’s use of people analytics and how the company maintained employee engagement during the pandemic. 

Don’s career started in finance, where he became a certified public accountant, followed by several years in sales and business operations. But about 20 years into his career, as Don was leading a sales organization at Hewlett-Packard, he was asked to oversee a sales development program. This program quickly found itself placed under HR.

“One of my mentors, Marcello Perez de Alonso, was the head of HR at Hewlett Packard. She really wanted people in the HR organization that actually had a business mindset. And her strong value was, HR really should support the business and drive the business,” Don says.

While this wasn’t the career path Don expected, he’s grateful for it, and he’s been in HR ever since. 

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Taking a New Approach to Talent Strategy

One of the most significant changes I’ve seen in HR is how the industry views attraction, engagement and development. Today, HR leaders are increasingly focusing on skills instead of roles and job titles. 

Northwestern Mutual has embraced this approach, looking to drive talent decisions based on skills and capabilities, which “really levels the playing field and takes a lot of the hierarchy out of things,” Don says.

To support this, Northwestern Mutual has begun moving away from a job requisitions approach and toward talent pools. “It’s much more about the skill and the experience that you have than the title you may carry or who you may know,” Don says.

Don is leading the HR function to think differently about talent, job roles and hiring, and he wants the entire business to think differently about this, too.

“We’re actually working with business leaders and really defining what is the critical success factors and skills and experiences that role needs to have,” Don says. “And then we’re designing a career pathing process that kind of matches against skills and capability, rather than roles and titles and levels.”

This new way of thinking also affects how Northwestern creates career mobility within the organization.

“We created an internal talent marketplace, where we'll look at opportunities and roles and skills, and we'll then look at people in our system that are interested in that, that are highly regarded and we’ll match that up,” Don says.

Leveraging People Analytics for the Business

One of the pillars of modern HR is people analytics. At Northwestern Mutual, Don and his team utilize data in many ways to make intelligent decisions. 

“We do a lot of employee surveys, we get feedback, and we do a lot of correlations between data in our surveys and data in what we see in the organization. We build data into our metrics, and we’re very outcome- and metric-oriented,” Don says. 

Though data can be disruptive, it can also help leaders have difficult conversations about decisions that affect real people’s real lives. The key is to ask, “How do you be data-informed versus data-led?” Don says. “ And I think maybe that's the art of being able to understand how and where to ask the right questions to get the right data to support the right decisions.”

Maintaining Engagement Through the Pandemic

During the Great Resignation or Great Reshuffle, engagement for many companies significantly dropped. But this wasn’t the case at Northwestern Mutual. But because its culture puts people first and prioritizes transparency and authenticity.

“We really are very focused on letting our employees know what’s going on,” Don says. “We’re very honest with them about the challenges we have. And make it very clear to them how much we value them.”

Throughout the pandemic, Northwestern Mutual has tried to meet employees’ needs, whether it was care packages, extra vacation days or virtual celebrations. The important thing, Don says, is to show how much you care about human connection.

“We don’t have a product; in a sense, we sell what we do. It’s our people that make the difference for us,” Don says. “And so I know that a lot of companies say that, but in our case, we really spend a lot of energy and time on it.”

People in This Episode

Don Robertson: LinkedIn