Author: Rita Pyrillis

Ashley Goldsmith

Rowing through crocodile-infested waters in a flimsy canoe is not everyone’s idea of a dream vacation, but for Ashley Goldsmith it was the trip of a lifetime. She describes her experience on a safari along the Zambezi River in Zimbabwe as “the most exhilarating, frightening and slightly crazy thing” that she has ever done.

It wasn’t a trip for the faint of heart.

“Hippos are very scary,” said Goldsmith, chief human resources officer at HR software vendor Workday Inc. “They’re right there giving you all the signs that they don’t want you there, and then they go underneath the water and you just don’t know where they are. I had more adrenaline in an hour there than in a month in my normal life. It was fantastic. I can’t recommend it enough.”

She applies the same derring-do in her career. The word “crazy” has also been used to describe some of her job moves, according to Goldsmith, who joined the Pleasanton, California-based company last November. Among them was her 2007 decision to quit a key executive position at The Home Depot Inc. for a job as head of HR at a small medical company in Tucson, Arizona. She had started as a temp at the home improvement retailer in 1995 and within 12 years had worked her way up to vice president.

‘I remember going to my boss and saying that I’m going to a 600-person company as head of HR. … He looked at me like I had lost my mind, and he said, “You’re going to a popcorn stand.” ’

— Ashley Goldsmith

“I remember going to my boss and saying that I’m going to a 600-person company as head of HR,” she said. “He looked at me like I had lost my mind, and he said, ‘You’re going to a popcorn stand.’ But it turned out to be a wonderful career move.”

Later she jumped industries again and went to Polycom Inc., a Silicon Valley-based developer of video conferencing systems. She now lives in San Francisco with her husband and their two French bulldogs.

Goldsmith, 41, has surprised many in the course of her career, like her co-workers at a Home Depot store in Georgia where she was assistant manager. At the time, she was part of the company’s new executive leadership program, which rotated high-potential employees through a variety of roles. At age 24 with a college degree but no retail or home improvement experience, she joined the company’s ranks of orange-aproned workers.

“I was in my 20s and I didn’t know anything about home improvement, and yet there I was in a leadership role and you can imagine,” she said. “They looked at me like I was crazy.”

Growing up as the only child of a single mother in Marietta, Georgia, Goldsmith seems to have inherited her work ethic from Mom, who she said “worked incredibly hard to create a positive future for me.”

The Outsider

Goldsmith, at a petite 5-foot 3-inches tall, stood out immediately among the burly tradesmen who made up most of the sales staff. Adding to her outsider status was her psychology degree from Vanderbilt University. Most of the employees had high school diplomas only, she said. Today, Goldsmith also has an MBA from Northwestern University.

“Back in those early Home Depot days, if you had a college degree we were told not to ever talk about your education because most of the employees didn’t have it,” she said. “It was really a good thing to work your way up. So the fact that the only way you could get into the leadership program was with a college degree, made people look at you with suspicion.”

So Goldsmith made it her mission to earn the respect of her colleagues, working in every department and volunteering for the overnight shift, which frequently entailed restocking merchandise and rearranging displays — a job that is much harder than it sounds, Goldsmith said.

“You crawl out from the racks looking like you just walked out of a chimney,” she said. “So they’d be walking in in the morning, and I’d be walking out at 6 a.m. dirty and looking like I had worked really hard. By far, that was the biggest credibility-earner.”

By the time she left six months later for her next assignment, she made some good friends and earned a traditional Home Depot farewell.

“One of the things they do whenever someone leaves a Home Depot store, and I hope they still do this, is that everyone in the store signs your orange apron,” she said. “They gave me an apron and it had so many signatures — there were probably 200 people in the store. It was such an overwhelming feeling.”

That kind of initiative was no surprise to Cindy Lubitz, the supervisor who hired Goldsmith while she was a temp. Lubitz was in charge of launching Home Depot’s leadership development program and in need of someone to help her organize printed materials when Goldsmith arrived. When her temp assignment ended, Goldsmith called Lubitz at home and invited her to lunch.

“When she was leaving she said, ‘I’m just out of school and I’d like to talk to you sometime about what you do,” said Lubitz, who now runs her own talent management consulting firm in Atlanta. “A week later she called me at home. I had just had a very busy day at work. She asked me to lunch and I said, ‘Sure, or what if you come back in and help me full-time? That’s how she ended up with her first job.”

She worked with Lubitz for two years as a talent management analyst, and when Home Depot launched a leadership program for high-potential employees, Lubitz nominated Goldsmith.

“Ashley has a really nice balance of qualities,” Lubitz said. “She’s really bright and, relationally, she’s very strong. She’s someone people like working with.”

But one of her biggest career challenges lay ahead in 2005, a year after Goldsmith was promoted from head of HR for HD Supply — a distributor of industrial building supplies formerly owned by Home Depot — to vice president of HR for Home Depot.

Hurricane Katrina had struck the Atlantic Coast and traveled to the northern Gulf Coast, causing death and destruction in New Orleans and Mississippi and other areas. The Southeast had endured several hurricanes the year before, so the company was well-stocked with essential materials like sandbags and plywood, but no one could fully prepare for Katrina, she said.

Home Depot booked hundreds of hotel rooms in the region for volunteers from other stores and for local employees, many of whom manned the stores with skeleton crews until the last possible second, according to Goldsmith. Because banks were shut down and workers were unable to cash their paychecks, the company deployed armored cars to the stores to dole out cash. Meanwhile, back at company headquarters in Atlanta, Goldsmith and other company leaders coordinated workforce and rescue efforts. All told, Home Depot donated millions of dollars to Katrina recovery efforts.

Goldsmith had proven herself in a time of crisis, which is not hard to imagine given her eagerness to consort with crocodiles and other wildlife. It is that cool head that makes her a good leader, according to former colleague Elisa Gilmartin, chief human resources officer at Polycom, where Goldsmith worked before joining Workday.

“Ashley is incredibly consistent under times of stress, and she was consistent in her leadership,” Gilmartin said. “She doesn’t get ruffled. She’s also incredibly smart, agile and a benevolent leader.”

In Stride

Goldsmith describes her leadership style as collaborative and agrees that she usually takes things in stride.

“I don’t tend to fly off the handle,” she said. “It doesn’t mean that I’m not stressed out internally, but there’s no point in letting that emotion run rampant through the organization. I don’t think it helps get you where you need to go.”

It is precisely those qualities that make her an ideal fit for Workday, said Grant Bassett, the company’s vice president of global talent. The developer of cloud-based HR software has been growing rapidly since it was launched in 2005 by David Duffield, the founder of PeopleSoft Inc., which was acquired in 2004 by Oracle Corp. in a hostile takeover. The company has been giving its competitors a run for their money ever since, becoming one of the fastest-growing HR technology vendors in the country. Its most recent quarterly statement reported revenue of nearly $128 million.

‘She’s really bright and, relationally, she’s very strong. She’s someone people like working with.’

—Cindy Lubitz, Home Depot

“We’re proud that we hire people who are great at what they do, but they are also really great people,” Bassett said. “We look for humility and humanity. Culturally, this place is built on bringing your whole self to work.”

“What’s interesting to me about Ashley is that she grew up grounded in HR principles at Home Depot, but she also has a business presence that gives her a seat at that proverbial table. She’s extremely sophisticated about business. She doesn’t see HR as a transaction.”

Goldsmith said that although she “fell into” HR as a Home Depot temporary worker, she developed a fascination with the power of people to help a company succeed.

“HR is such an interesting part of driving the business, and to me it is the most complicated variable,” she said. “Humans are challenging, and I like the complexity of trying to figure out how to harness this incredible asset, all these talented people, and help them not only achieve business goals but help them feel satisfied with their work. It’s an intriguing problem to solve.”

The idea that HR might have to fight for a seat at the executive table seems odd to Goldsmith. She has never thought of HR as anything less than a critical and strategic part of any business.

“What’s more strategic than how you leverage one of the most expensive variable costs in a company — your people?” she said. “I think we have an opportunity now more than ever to be strategic with technology. It allows us to not spend on low-value transactional items and gives us ample opportunity to do strategic work by bringing us more analytics and data.”

It was that passion for the potential of technology to transform HR that drew Goldsmith to Workday, a company that she said has “changed the game for HR.”

She met co-founder and CEO Duffield while she was at Polycom. Workday was seeking new business and had invited Goldsmith and other executives to spend a day at the company. The technology impressed her, but she said that Duffield’s business philosophy inspired her.

“He said, ‘Happy employees mean happy customers,’ ” she said. “I loved that it was the first thing he would say to a customer, that their employees are that important. I thought this was great coming from a CEO and a founder.”

The message resonated for Goldsmith, who still remembers the lessons learned working on the sales floor at Home Depot.

“That’s where I learned about the importance of the customer and the importance of the people that you work with,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if they went to Harvard or never went past eighth grade. If they’re the ones helping the customer, then they’re the ones that matter.”

It’s a lesson that she’s unlikely to forget. She has her signed orange apron to remind her, which hangs in a frame over her desk.

Mary Barra, seen here in January 2012, will become the next CEO of General Motors in January 2014. Photo by John F. Martin for General Motors.

It wasn’t only women who cheered when General Motors Co. appointed Mary Barra as CEO on Dec. 10, making her the first female CEO in the male-dominated U.S. auto industry. Human resources professionals also had reason to celebrate — she is one of the few HR professionals to reach the pinnacle of the corporate ladder.

“It’s also an important signal to HR professionals that if you’re interested in a career path that extends beyond HR you need to have experience in multiple facets of the business,” said author and consultant Sue Meisinger, who is the former president and CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management. “For many HR pros, their capstone is to be the head of HR. This shifts the sights of many in human resources.”

Barra, 51, executive vice president of global product development, began her career as an intern at GM 33 years ago. From there she moved to the manufacturing floor as a manager and worked her way through several key positions, including vice president of global human resources from 2009 to 2011.

Her promotion to head of HR was also seen as groundbreaking. Barra had no human resources experience. She has a degree in electrical engineering and an MBA from Stanford University.

“You’re seeing people with HR experience going into executive jobs and people without HR experience going into HR jobs, and I think that’s really interesting,” said Theresa Welbourne, a professor at the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California.

It also signifies that the male-dominated industries are disappearing, Meisinger said.  

“Much of the attention that she’s received circles around the fact that the car industry is seen as a male domain,” she said. “This signals that there aren’t many companies anymore that are either male or female. That’s why Marissa Mayer and Meg Whitman got so much attention when they became CEOs. There aren’t too many women leaders in the tech industry.”

Barra is viewed as a leader in the company’s turnaround since emerging from a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2010. She replaces CEO Dan Akerson who will retire in January 2014.

“This is a woman who is clearly qualified for the job,” Meisinger said. “It’s great succession planning on the part of GM.”

Rita Pyrillis is a Workforce senior editor. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Pyrillis on Twitter at @RitaPyrillis.

In 2008 the Society for Human Resource Management was in the midst of a makeover. Its well-respected president and CEO was retiring after six years, and the organization was attempting to shed its administrative image and rebrand itself as a global HR thought leader. At that time, Workforce took an in-depth look at the initial stage of the transformation in an article titled “SHRM at a Crossroads.”

During the past half-decade, SHRM emerged from the depths of the nation’s worst recession since the Depression with a growing membership, flush coffers, an increased focus on pushing its political agenda and a heightened global presence.

And according to current SHRM President and CEO Hank Jackson, the organization has done so by remaining steadfast to its mission. “Our society has grown to become the largest human resources organization in the world because it has never lost its focus on the original principles: Serve the members. Give them what they need to assist employers and employees alike. Advance the profession by protecting and promoting its professionalism,” he wrote in the April issue of HR Magazine, the association’s publication. A spokeswoman said that Jackson was not available to comment for this article.

While most SHRM members are content with the direction that the association is heading, the chorus of critics who say that SHRM has lost its way seems to be getting louder.

In a recent Workforce survey on HR associations, a number of participants said that SHRM is focusing too much on profits and increasing membership and not enough on the needs of its existing members. Others still criticize past actions by SHRM’s board of directors, such as its 2005 decision to pay board members and allow them to travel business class. Others say that SHRM has shifted its focus from helping employers and employees to representing the interests of employers only. And others took SHRM to task for not doing a better job in elevating the status of the profession.

Just over half of the respondents—51 percent—indicated that they are satisfied with the direction that SHRM is leading the HR profession, while 40 percent said they are unsure and 9 percent indicated dissatisfaction. Of SHRM members, two-thirds were satisfied.

Comments like these were typical: “They seem more focused on increasing membership than on improving the profession. The meetings of local chapters seem to be focused on the interests of entry-level HR people and networking rather than on real professional development through in-depth discussion of the issues” and “SHRM has become too big and too commercial.”

Still others praised many of SHRM’s efforts, including education, lobbying and some of the things critics have pointed out, like representing the needs of small employers and entry-level professionals. “Need to make sure that we remain focused on what’s fair for the employer and employee, omitting any political-party agendas,” one respondent writes. “So far, I believe SHRM has been able to do that. Also, the recognition and respect HR professionals now receive, I believe, has been partially achieved by SHRM’s efforts.”

The majority of respondents—67 percent—said they are satisfied with the organization overall, and many praised SHRM’s efforts in education, lobbying and meeting the needs of small employers and entry-level professionals.

Criticism of an organization as large as SHRM—it has 265,000 members worldwide—is probably inevitable. But many SHRM critics are respected longtime members who have been deeply involved in its activities, like Barbara Hobbs, an HR director in Tallahassee, Florida. She has been an active SHRM member for 30 years and is a past president of SHRM’s Jacksonville, Florida, chapter. She says that she is disappointed with some of the association’s actions.

“They’ve forgotten about the small employer and are geared more toward the global economy,” Hobbs says. “And I don’t think they should be spending the kind of money that they do in travel for board members. Somehow SHRM has gone astray. As my grandmother used to say, ‘They’ve become too big for their britches.’ “

Some argue that the entire HR profession is at a crossroads as it struggles to establish itself as a strategic business partner and shed its image as a bureaucratic policy pusher. John Boudreau, research director at the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California, says that SHRM reflects that transformation.

“There’s been lots of questioning of what the profession needs to be,” he says. “Every professional HR association has done work on that. There has been an upwelling of this discussion in the past two to three years. Our evidence suggests that there’s been progress, but whether or not it’s been quick enough for the aspirations of the profession and to meet the needs of its constituents is an open question.”

The role that HR plays has come under greater scrutiny in part because the recession and its impact on the workforce have led corporate leaders to “look at what this profession can deliver” in terms of strategic thinking and leadership, Boudreau says.

Steve Miranda, who was SHRM’s chief human resources officer from 2005 to 2011, says that during his tenure the association began rebranding itself to reflect changes in the business landscape. Its programs were becoming more sophisticated and more global in perspective, he says.

“There were incredible pressures being placed on HR professionals at the time,” says Miranda, who is now managing director at the Cornell University Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies. “Our courses and conference programming had to rise to the next level. We had to up our game. HR was split into two camps: the administrative and the business strategy. HR was undergoing a change, and SHRM’s offerings had to reflect that.”

According to Bob Carr, SHRM’s senior vice president of membership, marketing and external affairs, SHRM has continued to evolve.

This year the association launched five strategic initiatives designed to increase membership, particularly among senior-level executives, and promote professionalism through professional standards and competencies, Carr says.

Last fall SHRM launched the CHRO Initiative, which aims to attract more senior-level members by establishing networking groups, or “hubs,” in cities around the world. Chief human resource officer hubs are underway in 15 cities, including Atlanta and New York in the United States, and Manila in the Philippines, according to a SHRM overview of the project. SHRM also plans to beef up membership in California, which has a large number of SHRM chapters and affiliates and a unique set of employment laws, Carr says.

Other initiatives include promoting SHRM’s nine HR competencies, or professional standards, which include relationship management, ethics and leadership, among others. Last year SHRM introduced performance management standards to give employers a uniform way to assess and evaluate employee job performance. The standard was approved last year by the American National Standards Institute, a nonprofit organization that oversees the development of professional standards for a variety of companies and institutions.

Attracting more senior-level professionals, however, has been an elusive goal for SHRM.

“The CHRO issue is a conversation that they’ve had since day one and will continue to have ongoing,” says China Gorman, who was SHRM’s chief operating officer from 2007 to 2010. “The strategies to engage more HR leaders in the organization will ebb and flow. Having CHRO support is important because many of their employees are members. Is SHRM ever going to be successful at programming for the Fortune 500 CHROs? I don’t know. But as long as SHRM continues to provide the best services for those entry- and midlevel and senior professionals, it will have the support of CHROs.”

John Haggerty, a senior lecturer at the Cornell’s ILR School, says that SHRM serves “a very important purpose” in exposing entry- and midlevel professionals and those at small companies to industry leaders and knowledge.

“I’ve always thought of SHRM as fulfilling a need in the industry to provide those without solid academic credentials the opportunity to learn a trade,” Haggerty says. “A lot of SHRM’s membership is made up of all sorts of professionals who are not Fortune 50 HR people, and the whole thing about a seat at the table is being played out more often in large companies. That’s where the more strategic HR work gets created. SHRM exposes people in smaller organizations to those best practices.”

While there is little doubt that SHRM is a powerful force in the HR industry, its efforts to be a thought leader have not always been successful.

Last year its proposal to standardize a set of HR metrics, such as employee satisfaction and money spent on training, was torpedoed by an association of CHROs. The HR Policy Association, or HRPA, a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying organization representing 335 of the nation’s largest corporations, strongly opposed the measure, which called for the data to be shared with the public. The HRPA argued that it would overburden employers and expose proprietary information to competitors. SHRM withdrew the proposal late last year.

Some say that SHRM’s effort to be all things to all people has compromised its cache. Anyone who coughs up its $180 annual membership fee can join, whereas organizations like HRPA and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development in the United Kingdom are much more selective. HRPA’s annual CHRO Summit is by invitation only, and the CIPD only admits those who pass rigorous testing.

“If you want respect as a profession, you need to limit the numbers of the people you let in,” says Bridie Fanning, a Milwaukee-based consultant who is a member of both SHRM and the CIPD. “Look at law and medicine. You have kids coming out of law school, and there are no jobs. It’s great for the law schools but not for the profession. And then you look at the medical profession, and we don’t have enough doctors. A business strategy is that you say yes to some customers and no to others. SHRM doesn’t know who it’s saying yes or no to.”

Carr concedes that SHRM’s membership strategy is to be inclusive, not exclusive, but he sees that as a strength.

“The strategy behind it was that we didn’t want to disenfranchise people,” he says. “When we were founded, HR was a growing field, and we wanted to make sure we were as inclusive as possible. We wanted access for everyone. Then you reach a point where you want to be seen as the best in your profession, and that’s where certification comes in.”

Carr points out that only those who pass the HR Certification Institute exam can become a credentialed HR professional. The institute offers three main credentials—the Professional in Human Resources, Senior Professional in Human Resources and Global Professional in Human Resources. SHRM sells test preparation kits, but HRCI administers the exams.

While 127,439 practitioners have an HRCI certificate, according to the institute, just how much weight those certifications carry is unclear. In the U.S. some companies, like Netflix Inc., don’t ask for the credentials when hiring, while in the United Kingdom, “You rarely see an HR job that doesn’t require CIPD certification,” says Fanning, who wrote her master’s thesis on HR professionalization in the U.K. and the U.S.

CIPD certification is not required by all U.K. employers, but “they do have a high degree of currency in the employment market, with many employers considering the credentials to be desirable,” says Katy Askew, a CIPD spokeswoman. She says that a CIPD chartered membership, which is awarded to practitioners who pass a rigorous exam and have three to five years of HR experience, is equivalent to a master’s degree in the United States.

While the CIPD is the only HR association in the U.K., there are several in the U.S. in addition to SHRM and the HRPA. Among them are International Association for Human Resource Information Management, which has 1,700 members and National Human Resources Association, which has 1,200 active members.

And there are divisions within SHRM itself.

In 2010, a group of former SHRM leaders who were concerned about decisions made by the association’s board of directors formed a splinter group called the SHRM Members for Transparency. It is a small but powerful group made up of past presidents, former board members and HR leaders like Gerry Crispin, Jac Fitz-enz, Mike Losey and others.

Among their grievances was the board’s 2005 decision to pay its members and allow reimbursement for business-class travel for board members. Other key issues included the large number of board members without HR credentials and the association’s inability to hire a president and CEO in a timely fashion after the departure in 2010 of Lon O’Neil, who took over after Sue Meisinger retired in 2008. The job went unfilled for nearly a year before SHRM hired Jackson as then-interim president and CEO. His lack of HR credentials was also a point of contention for the transparency group.

The group even ran its own candidate in the fall 2012 board elections, but she lost.

Many SHRM members dismiss the criticism as sour grapes.

“I know that there are people out there who like to take potshots out there, but I think very highly of the organization,” says Dave Ryan, HR director for Mel-o-cream Donuts International Inc. in Springfield, Illinois, and a SHRM member since 2001. “Do they make missteps? Of course they do. But they’ve done a lot of good things for this profession. Folks were jacked up last year at the leadership conference about board members traveling to India or South America first class, but that just seemed like sour grapes to me.”

SHRM officials, including Carr, are undeterred by the criticism. “Aren’t those the sort of the inherent tensions in a democracy?” he says. “We are open and inclusive so we will have people with a wide range of views. What we should be or shouldn’t be, what we should do and shouldn’t do who we should be, all that resides with our board of directors.”

As we noted in our survey, about two-thirds of SHRM’s members are satisfied with how it’s leading the profession. Eventually, however, leaders will have to answer the questions of who, or what, SHRM should be if they want to move beyond the crossroads.

“The issue of SHRM’s relevancy is not much of an issue if its membership is growing,” says Miranda, SHRM’s former CHRO. “The real task for SHRM is figuring out what it doesn’t want to be. No organization can be good at everything.”

Rita Pyrillis is Workforce’s senior editor. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Pyrillis on Twitter at @RitaPyrillis.