Workforce talked with Gary Schulze, director of organizational development and training, about HR. The highlights:
Q: What’s your professional background?
A: I have a B.A. in psychology and international relations from New York University and an M.A. in foreign political institutions from Columbia University. My other experience includes: volunteering in the Peace Corps (West Africa), being the director of safety and personnel for PPG Industries in West Africa, assisting the director of public affairs for Time Inc. and being the director of national and international seminars for The Young Presidents Organization. I’ve also worked in the training division of the American Management Association, been the corporate director of executive and human resources development for McGraw-Hill Inc. and now I’m the director of executive development and training for the MTA.
Q: How did you get into the field of organizational development?
A: Before coming to the MTA, I worked for the American Management Association (AMA) helping to establish its in-house training division. The AMA provided me with an opportunity to learn about organizational development and management training while working as an onsite consultant to a number of Fortune 500 companies. I then joined McGraw-Hill where I created its companywide executive, management and supervisory training system. McGraw-Hill assigned me, on an executive-loan basis, to work on a six-month project for the Mayor of New York City examining how the city trained its commissioners and executives. This brought me to the attention of the chairman of the MTA who was looking for someone to start up a [management level] training-and-development system similar to what I had introduced at McGraw-Hill.
Q: What do you like most about working for the MTA?
A: The MTA is the largest transportation system in the Western Hemisphere. It’s challenging and exciting to work for an organization with such a broad scope of managerial positions dealing with everything from subways to bridges and tunnels. Our service operations affect millions of customers every day and the efficiency and effectiveness of our executives and managers is critical to our success.
Q: What’s the most challenging aspect of helping develop talent within the MTA?
A: One challenging aspect of the job is developing programs to bring our managers up to speed on the new technologies impacting the transportation industry. Another challenge is trying to schedule training and development activities around the busy schedules of our managers. The MTA is a crisis-driven organization providing services 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Q: Which development issues have been key lately?
A: A major HR challenge facing the MTA is how we can identify and develop high-potential managers across the organization. To accomplish this, we introduced a computerized MTA-wide executive succession-planning system that tracks high-potential employees (including graduates of the Future Managers Program) and serves as an internal search system. Other important MTA challenges are the need to train managers to deal with our increasingly diverse workforce and to get the entire organization to become more customer-oriented. Finally, like most organizations, we have gone through a number of downsizings and consolidations to enable us to do more work with fewer people and resources.
Q: What’s the most important HR lesson you’ve learned over the years? A: An important lesson I learned early in my career is the importance of “completed staff work.” Never turn anything in to your boss unless you’re absolutely convinced it’s the best job you can possibly do. No misspelled words, wrong titles or grammatical errors. If you follow this rule, you’ll save yourself a lot of career grief in the future.
Workforce, February 1998, Vol. 77, No. 2, pp. 66-70.