People First As An Operating System

Most HR functions are running the same playbook: deploy the engagement survey, launch the action plan, wait for the scores to move. And they don't. Or they do, but the business outcomes don't follow. 

That's because we've confused a symptom for a disease. Engagement is the fever. Lack of clarity is the infection. And no amount of recognition platforms, wellness apps, or pulse surveys is going to fix a workforce that doesn't know what winning looks like.

This episode is about what actually works — not as theory, but as proven operating practice. Tony Sarsam is a four-time CEO who has delivered results in every case by building what he calls a people-first culture. Not soft. Not HR-adjacent. A performance culture with people as the engine. Jackson and Scott sit down with Tony to pull apart exactly how he does it, what it really means to declare "people first," and what CHROs can start doing this week — even without CEO buy-in.

If you've ever sat in a room where "people are our greatest asset" got a standing ovation right before a round of layoffs, this conversation is for you.

What You'll Learn

• Why engagement is a lagging indicator of clarity and investment — not a driver of performance — and why optimizing for it directly is one of HR's most costly mistakes
• What "people first" actually means as a declarative operating system — and specifically what it is not
• How to build a statement of identity with a signature strength, and why at least 10% of the org must be involved in crafting it
• How to pressure-test your KPIs using the 15-second cashier rule: if a frontline associate can't grasp it in 15 seconds, it's not the right goal
• What it looks like when the CEO functions as chief culture officer — and how people strategy leads the board agenda instead of trailing it
• How to handle the high-performer culture killer, and why strong ratings for them are one of the most corrosive decisions a leader can make

Key Quotes

"Engagement isn't the disease. Lack of clarity is the disease. Engagement is the fever."

"If it takes me more than 15 seconds to explain to a cashier what that goal means, we failed."

"I wouldn't say people are our greatest asset. But after creating a people-first culture, I'd say: these people are our greatest asset."

"What interests my boss, fascinates me."

Sources for Statistics Cited

• Global engagement fell to 21% — Gallup State of the Global Workplace: 2025
• $438B in lost productivity — Gallup State of the Global Workplace: 2025
• 51% less turnover in engaged organizations —

Transcript

Tony So if we have a goal — if it takes me more than about 15 seconds to explain to a cashier what that goal means, we failed. They have to be goals that everybody can understand so that they can see themselves in the mission, they see themselves in the goal. And they can quickly convert those to, "Well, if I do this, that will actually help us get better at that." And so it's a struggle, but it is — it's beautiful when it works.

Jackson Hey there, senior leader, and welcome to the Talent Sherpa Podcast. This is where senior leaders come to rethink how human capital really works. I'm your host, Jackson Lynch, and today I'm joined by my co-host, Scott Morris. He's a former CHRO with the scar tissue to prove it, a genuine believer in the power of leadership, and the founder of Propulsion AI.

Hey Scott, I want you to imagine walking into a board meeting and saying, "We need to invest more in our people" — and then watch the CFO's eyes glaze over. Because I think that phrase has really been ruined. It sounds soft. It sounds like something HR says when they want to sound smart but can't actually connect their work to quantifiable business outcomes.

But here's the thing: I worked for a guy early in my career who has proved all of that wrong. He has demonstrated that "people first" is, in fact, an operating strategy.

Scott I have heard the emptiness of that statement more times than I can tell you, and I am so excited to have this conversation today. But before we dive in, do us a favor, folks — subscribe to the podcast, leave us a comment, or drop a quick review on your preferred platform. It's how we grow the pod. It's how we keep it sharp for senior leaders.

So, Jackson — I know who you're talking about, and we're going to bring them on in a few minutes. That's what's known in the business as a tease. But first, let's set the table for why this matters so much right now. I think we need to challenge some of the conventional wisdom about how we even talk about people and performance, don't you?

Jackson I do, because every CHRO has heard some version of "people are our greatest asset." It's on the wall, it's in the annual report. But I think most of the time it's meaningless. The moment margins get tight, that asset becomes a line item to cut.

And the standard HR response to this is to talk about engagement. We've talked about that on previous episodes, but the Gallup 2025 report shows that global engagement continues to struggle — it fell to 21%. Of course, everyone wrings their hands, consultants sell surveys, and we all nod along because engaged employees must be better employees, right?

Scott Well, the data seems to support it. Gallup says that engaged organizations see 51% less turnover. They see 23% higher productivity. Those are real numbers.

Jackson Think about this. We measure engagement and we see that companies with high engagement also have better performance. But what if engagement isn't the thing that's actually driving the performance? What if engagement is just a symptom — a byproduct of something else?

Scott What I hear you saying is we may be chasing the shadow instead of the substance.

Jackson Exactly. What if the actual causal mechanism is something different? What if it's clarity? What if it's a genuine investment in people? What if it's the leadership expectations set for operators? And engagement just happens to rise when you do those things well.

Scott That might account for why so many companies run engagement surveys, implement recommendations, and see absolutely zero change in business outcomes. It's because they're optimizing for the metric and not for the thing that produces the metric.

Jackson Right. They're treating engagement like the end state. But engagement isn't the end state. Performance outcomes driven through people is the end state. Engagement is just a measure — and depending on which survey you're using, not even usually the best one.

Scott What's the alternative, then? If we stop chasing engagement scores, what do we chase?

Jackson I think there are two things. First, clarity. Do people know what winning looks like? Do they understand the expectations of their role? Is there a shared definition of success — and is that definition specific enough to act on?

And second, genuine investment in the culture. Not pizza parties, not wellness apps — with all due respect to my friends in total rewards. I'm talking about actual investment in capability and development toward a defined outcome. In people leaders. In creating conditions where people can thrive and do their best work. And I think that all starts with hiring and demanding leadership throughout the organization.

Scott I think you're right. And I think the argument is: if you get clarity and investment right, then performance follows. Engagement might rise too, but that's not why you're doing it. Engagement isn't the end state. It's a symptom of a strong performance culture.

Jackson Gallup estimates $438 billion with a B in lost productivity from declining engagement. But what's actually causing that lost productivity? Is it that people aren't engaged? I don't think so. I think it may be more that they don't know what's expected of them, they don't have the tools they need, and they're working in chaos.

Scott Gallup's own data shows that only 46% of employees feel clear about what's expected of them at work. That's less than half — and that's down from 56% in 2020.

Jackson More than half of the workforce doesn't have clarity on expectations. I personally doubt those expectations are all outcome-based, even when they exist. No wonder people aren't engaged. Engagement isn't the disease. Lack of clarity is the disease. Engagement is the fever.

Scott So the intervention is not "improve engagement." The intervention is create clarity and invest in people. If you do that, you get better performance — and engagement comes along for the ride.

Jackson And that's where most HR functions are stuck, candidly. They're running engagement surveys because they're supposed to. They implement action plans that treat symptoms. Meanwhile, the underlying cause goes unaddressed. Nobody is asking: Do our people actually know what they're trying to accomplish? And do they have what they need to accomplish it?

Scott I'm a guy who has screwed up engagement surveys in about every way you can screw them up across 25 years of doing this. And the question I came to in the mid-part of my career is: What's the operating system that actually gets you the results?

HR consultants are pushing faddish best practices. Performance reviews are stuck in the 1940s. Engagement pulse surveys rain down without any link to business outcomes. And don't get me started on recognition platforms — I like the concept, but they're all treating symptoms. None of them gets to the root cause.

So what does it look like when somebody actually focuses on the causal mechanism — clarity and investment, not engagement theater?

Jackson To answer that question, that's why we have a guest today. Tony Sarsam is a guy I used to work for. He was the president of Nestlé USA's direct store delivery division when I worked there. He's the best leader I've ever had, candidly. And he built the world's largest frozen DSD network, serving Nestlé's pizza and ice cream businesses.

We then acquired Kraft Pizza, and the whole deal had synergies tied directly to people cost — primarily having fewer people, paying the ones who remained less, while uprooting almost every part of the employment proposition. And when we were done, not only had we overdelivered the synergies and delivered them early, we had the highest org health scores across Nestlé. How does that happen? The answer is Tony Sarsam.

Since then, Tony has been a CEO three times. At ReadyPack Foods, he reversed six years of declining sales and grew revenue 50%, resulting in a successful exit. At Borden Dairy, he led a restructuring that preserved 100% of frontline jobs — which, having gone through that, is really hard to do. And at SpartanNash, he delivered record adjusted EBITDA three years running and drove a 192% total shareholder return before the company's recent sale to C&S Wholesale Grocers.

Here's what I want our listeners to understand: Tony didn't drive those results by chasing engagement scores or the latest HR fad. He achieved them by creating clarity and genuinely investing in people. He calls that "people first" — and the performance followed.

So Tony, with that really long wind-up — welcome to the Talent Sherpa Podcast.

Tony It is a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jackson So Tony, Scott and I were just arguing — and you may have heard some of the pre-work — that engagement might be a symptom, not the cause. That the real driver of performance is clarity and investment in people. How does that resonate with how you think about it?

Tony I think it's spot on. Whether you call it a symptom or part of the outcomes, engagement is something you get when you make the right investments and create the environment where people can do their best work.

I've often likened it to the discussion we used to have about organizational morale — which was sort of the surrogate for engagement before we knew that longer word. I remember coming to the conclusion that morale wasn't really an outcome either. Think about a great baseball team. I watched my favorite team celebrating in downtown Los Angeles a couple months back. They seemed to have really great morale — finishing each other's sentences, high-fiving, looking like the most collegial team ever. And why? Because they won. And how did they win? They pitched and they hit well. How'd they get there? They practiced.

You build this thing a brick at a time, from the very foundation. When you create a winning performance culture by engaging people, they will be engaged. And they're engaged because they understand and embrace the mission — and they're performing and winning.

Scott Tony, I want to dig into what Jackson alluded to a second ago — this philosophy you call "people first." I worked for an organization who said their philosophy was people first, and I have to tell you, I was disappointed across the board. When you walked into SpartanNash or ReadyPack, you weren't saying "let's improve engagement" — you were saying something else entirely. Let's unpack that.

Tony Yeah. It's important to be clear and very simple. I made a declaration that we were going to be about people first. I defined what that was, and then I immediately went to work showing people what it was.

The thing about "people are our greatest asset" — it's almost laughable when you hear it. But people first — and as you can imagine, people are going to say, "I've heard that before, show me what it really means." It takes a while to get true believers. But it's important to do the work, just like I mentioned with the baseball team.

When I say invest, it's not just about money. It's investing emotionally. It's investing time. It's investing — really — your career in this mantra that nothing is more important than the people who work here. You are the most important person to me, and I'm going to make sure this organization values our people first. And you earn it.

Scott Tony, make that simple for me. When you say "people first," what does that actually mean in concrete terms?

Tony It goes way beyond "you're important." Early on in an organization, I actually take time to define what people first is — and what it is not. I think you often learn what's right more effectively by knowing what something isn't.

So — what it's not. First, it's not "person first." People is plural. It's not about solving individual needs or issues. It's about how we, as an organization, optimize for the people who work here.

And it is absolutely about performance. There's no stronger performance culture than a people-first culture — that's at the heart of it. Some folks say, "Well, if it's about people first, it's about who's bringing the potato salad to the picnic." No. People first is about getting a great organization staffed, trained, and ready — creating the environment where people can do their best work. And what matters is that best work.

I would never say "people are our greatest asset" as a generic statement. But after creating a people-first culture, I'd say: these people are our greatest asset.

Scott What's the biggest misconception you have to get past when you talk to other leaders or teach an organization about this?

Tony The biggest one is that they feel it's a trade-off between focusing on business results and focusing on individual needs. It took me a while to get that past my board in multiple companies. They'd hear the message, say, "We love that, but we want to make sure you also have good performance." And suddenly I have to start over: this is about performance. It's all about performance — in the short run and the long run.

Scott My example from where I was disappointed with "people first" was this huge misconception that we were going to hold on to people who weren't necessarily performing. Can you talk about the balance between moving people out and supporting people within the organization?

Tony A performance culture has to have the right players on the field. The odds that everybody is the right player are really, really low. You're going to have folks who don't perform in one job who might move to another job. But you have to know that — not in a visceral way. You have to know it with real metrics.

Part of a people-first culture is getting real visibility into results, reviewing them, and having explicit accountability for what everybody delivers — every function, every team, every person.

I have no issue with using performance management systems to do that. One thing that's popular in HR is that approximately every 27 months we change our minds about how to do performance reviews. My favorite is when they swing back and forth. Not too long ago it was in vogue to say annual reviews aren't enough, so let's do quarterly reviews. And I'd ask: What was wrong with the annual review? The number-one answer was that people weren't really doing them. So — you weren't doing one, but you're pretty sure you'd do four?

The problem is doing one. If you have any meaningful performance discussion — here's what you're accountable for, here are your metrics, here's how you performed, great job or you need a little more help — if you do that one thing, you've outperformed most management in terms of what kind of feedback they provide. The mechanism isn't terribly important. What is important is that you pick metrics that matter, make accountability clear, people understand the consequences. And real consequences are really challenging to instill. Most organizations don't have them. People get fired for fraud, but not for poor performance.

Scott Two things seem to come out of this, Tony. One: this is not a soft strategy, this is a performance strategy. Two: the role of clarity in the whole thing.

Tony Yeah. We start with clarity about what's important for the organization very broadly. I take my teams through a process of developing what the important deliverables are by function — distilling that all the way down to the team level — and ensuring those accountabilities are clear, simple, and not too many.

Then we have a process for reviewing the review, so to speak. In all my organizations, I've used a performance curve where there's a certain number of people who can get above expectations and a certain number by decree who will get below expectations. Really, really challenging to do. Every organization has wrestled with it. But it forces you to acknowledge: here's a person I think has great potential, but they didn't have a great year. They didn't deliver the numbers we agreed on. So I need to figure out how to get that person back in the saddle. Or if they continue to stack up disappointing years, you need to move on.

The vast majority of the time — and I'd guess 95-plus percent — when someone hasn't performed well and you need to make a move, they know it's coming. Absolutely know it's coming. Because there are no surprises in an organization where you have great clarity and visibility.

There's a clarity piece on an individual basis, but also the question of what goals the organization is chasing. That's very important. The organization has a simple template: here are the things that are going to make us successful this year — and I can see myself in those numbers.

Jackson I want to push back a little on what you said about not managing underperformers well. While that's absolutely true, I'm not sure that's where I would start inside an organization. I'd start with having adequate performers in roles that have outsized impact on outcomes.

But all of that comes back to your point about having a strong understanding of what things matter most. When we worked together, we built something — I can't remember what it was called — a statement of identity. The work that Andy did with us. Can you talk about mission clarity and what that statement of identity is, and why it matters?

Tony Great point. You don't start a conversation with "here are the things that'll get you fired." You start with mission clarity — that overarching thing I mentioned a few minutes ago.

I've used Group Dialect four times to do this exact same task. What I find is that you'll go into an organization and it could run the gamut. Sometimes they have a pretty good mission statement and you need to tweak it for the realities ahead. Or you look at it and say, this is a do-over. I'd say that's run about 50-50 in my career.

Bringing people in and having them write the story about their identity as an organization — what's going to matter to us? We start with the long-range vision: what's the mission we're on every day, every week, every month as we move forward? What are the core capabilities we need to hone? What are the behaviors we value most? And then, finally — the signature strength. What is the difference we make for our customer? And it has to be uniquely defensible because of who we are and what we do.

What I do is make sure at least 10% of the organization is involved in crafting that. At SpartanNash, for example, we had 20,000 employees — I had 2,000 people who participated in focus groups and surveys. The words we mined came from the organization itself, and we synthesized those into what we called our "winning recipe." And then everything that winds up on somebody's performance appraisal, on the wall, in the break room — it all comes from that statement of identity.

Jackson We did that back in the Nestlé DSD days, and it was about reliability — which wasn't the sexiest thing to rally around. But even with that degree of clarity, you could create the story. I've shared it on the pod before: the guy who had 26 stops, his truck breaks down on the first stop, and he has it towed to the next 25. That's reliability. You create the stories around it. We actually brought him to Disneyland with his family. The identity that builds in the organization is really, really powerful.

Now at ReadyPack, if memory serves, it was all about bowls per minute. Tell me how you landed on that as a signature strength.

Tony Well, it wasn't technically the signature strength, but we found that in order to separate ourselves, we had to be much more efficient. We already had solid innovation and a market lead on our key product. But to invest in the things that were going to work for our customer, we needed more margin — and we couldn't charge more.

So the opener was this: we were selling salad bowls. If we could increase the throughput on those, it really turned on a lot of profitability. We got the whole organization focused on BPM — bowls per minute. Every plant had individual goals. They'd celebrate when they hit a benchmark. It was exciting to see.

Think about that guy who had his truck towed. Why did he make that decision when a lot of other folks would have said, "My truck broke down, we'll get them tomorrow"? Because he embraced the mission. It was embedded deep in the culture that we were going to serve that customer — we talked about it in terms of our signature strength, and we tied it to his performance review and compensation. It was natural.

Same thing with bowls per minute. When I got to ReadyPack, they had struggled for a long time to improve throughput. Once it became something owned by everybody, the blinders came off. People started figuring out how to actually increase line speed. In one of our manufacturing plants, bowls per minute was up something like four times over the few years I was there.

Scott Can I clarify something? It sounds like the signature strength, the way you put it into practice, becomes a metric. Do I hear that right?

Tony Not necessarily a metric — it's how you define what difference you make for your customer. That can be stated at a level higher than a metric. But we would always populate metrics underneath it to tell us whether we're making progress.

Same thing with core capabilities — they have to have metrics beneath them. In this case, the difference we made for our customer was delivering great innovation across the country, and that was only going to be unlocked through a move on profitability. That's why BPM became the natural metric. But on your identity statement, you'd have a statement about the difference you make. The metrics then change year in and year out about how you unlock that.

Jackson One of the things I see in organizations I've coached or been inside directly is that when I ask what's important to them, they pull out a dashboard with 47 metrics on it. The worst I saw was 122 pages that would go out every Sunday night for the leadership team to discuss Monday morning.

That's where I go back to the work you and I did — the Frito-Lay influence — of focusing on a small number of critical KPIs and talking about those incessantly. How do you take most companies' buckshot approach and pull it down into a short list? And how do you balance the hard measures with the cultural elements?

Tony It's a real struggle to find a small number of things that can make you successful. But it's critically important that you do.

What I do is task my executive leadership team with taking the first crack. Invariably, they come back with too many, and they're too complicated.

What I tell folks as we're constructing the list: I tell them five. I'll accept a little more than five if we can't get there. One year I had as many as nine — and I'm still embarrassed that I allowed that to happen. On average, six or seven.

And they have to be measures where, if we hit each one — or are in range of the aspiration — then practically speaking, no matter what else happens, we're going to have a great year. Always have the superordinate goal: EBITDA, for example, will likely be on there.

The other thing I remind them: I'm going to talk about these every day. Every period video to the field, every town hall, posted in every plant, every distribution center, every store. Everybody needs to understand them. So if it takes me more than about 15 seconds to explain to a cashier what a goal means, we failed.

They have to be goals everybody can understand so they can see themselves in the mission, see themselves in the goal, and convert them to: if I do this, I'll actually help us get better at that. It's a struggle, but it's beautiful when it works.

If your goals are really, really complicated, they're probably not the right goals. The right thing to do is usually pretty straightforward. I press my team to offer that gift to the organization.

Jackson Let me double-click on that for our listeners. First: if you have too many KPIs, you don't have any. It's like the old adage that if you have two quarterbacks, you don't have one. Second: we talk a lot about the clarity mandate — making sure everyone knows what's expected of them at work. That's the first and most important question on the Gallup survey. Truncating your numbers to the ones with outsized impact, and making sure they're translatable throughout the organization — that creates a shared focus and consistently reinforces what matters.

So Tony — how do you pick which ones to include? Are they all clear performance measures, or are there people implications mixed in? How do you balance the what and the how?

Tony We'd always want at least one that makes a statement about our care. Often that's safety. We'd couch that in terms of caring, not in terms of saving money on workers' comp.

And we'd look for: are there any other things in our process that are holding us back from the people equation? Coming out of COVID, one I used a great many times was overall retention. If you had a retention goal among your top five, that would obviously elicit a lot of activities to actually help retain people. Not a difficult concept — we don't want people to leave. Pretty straightforward. And there's a lot any frontline supervisor can do: be part of the welcome, the training team, give feedback.

Beyond that, we'd have one or two things that are key levers to unlock overall sales or profitability — those superordinate goals. Bowls per minute would have been one of them. So we'd have a couple of process inputs that are really important, and then one or two things that are key levers to unlock overall performance.

It's not a real science. There's a little bit of art in figuring out the balance between inputs and outputs. But once it's up on the wall, you stare at it and say: if we did those things, do we think we're going to have a great year? And if the answer feels like yes, then we're going full steam ahead.

Scott I love it. Built on business performance first, thinking about how we use the workforce to achieve it, and it creates a spot where everybody fits.

It sounds to me like people first, for you, is built on two foundations: mission clarity, evidenced by a statement of identity and a signature strength; and performance clarity, achieved through five to nine KPIs.

Let's talk about who owns what. When the three of us were talking before the show, you said something that really stuck with me: the CEO has to be the chief culture officer, not the CHRO. What does it actually look like when the CEO owns culture?

Tony Great question. And I want to spend some time at the end on: what if your CEO isn't going to be the chief culture officer? What do you do?

But the real answer: if you're going to make rapid progress on culture, people need to see it at the top. There's no substitute for that. Sometimes CEOs abdicate this — they tap their CHRO to do that work because, hey, the word "human" is in their title, right? But if it's really important, it has to be important to the CEO.

One of my mentors told me early on: what interests my boss, fascinates me. So if I said something was sort of important, it became really, really important to the people who worked with me. It's harder to do that when the CEO is indifferent or feels they can't be bothered.

So I drive a very aggressive agenda. I'm out front. I talk about the importance of people first. In all of our meetings — from executive leadership team to town halls — we always start with people. At a board conference once, I asked how many had people on their board agenda. I was shocked that not everyone raised their hand.

On our board agenda, we do not review financials first. We review a cultural update first. That discussion is led by me, not by our CHRO. I lead the discussion about what happened, what we accomplished in moving the culture forward, recognition events we held, things we did in our communities. That's how we start the conversation. And it makes a real impact when you say: I'm going to start with that, and then we'll get to the financials.

Jackson We've talked a lot about understanding the altitude of the mandate by where the HR and people stuff shows up in the deck. If it's at the front and it's a different lens on the strategy, it's clearly high altitude — it's connected in, part of the business agenda, not running adjacent to it.

But there are so many board decks where the people slides are at the bottom, and they're the ones that get compressed when there's not enough time and someone needs to take a phone call.

So let me ask you this, Tony: if the CEO owns culture, where's the value-added of the CHRO in a people-first environment?

Tony The CEO doesn't own culture — the CEO is the chief culture officer. So the CEO leads culture, but everybody has their own role in culture.

When I bring people into my organization, I look for: is this person going to be able to fit within a people-first environment? Not everyone has that background or training, and a lot of people can't articulate it when you talk to them.

We all own it. I'm going to be the chief culture officer, but I expect my team to take the torch and do their part.

What does the CHRO do? They run the machine. We decide we're going to invest a certain amount on training — that's a big strategy. The CHRO plays a disproportionate role in composing what we're going to do, how to schedule it, how to get people access. The tools that bring the big ideas to life are primarily owned by the CHRO.

I bring in a lot of new people in transformational endeavors — usually 80 to 90 percent of my team is different within a year, year and a half. I use one recruiter to do that. And I hold that recruiter accountable to put together the team, not just to hire a bunch of individuals to check boxes.

The team has to reverence the mission and know that their role is to move this people-first orientation forward. The details of who does what aren't so important. At ReadyPack, I had my CIO lead the statement of identity work because he had the energy for it, liked it, had done it before. So he did a great job.

If you get a great team with the right mission, they'll all want the ball at the end of the game. A highly disproportionate amount of my people-first activities in my last two organizations were parked in communications, for example — and it just made sense.

Scott Tony, I know Jackson and I have lived this. There are CEOs who are really good at talking the game about culture and how important people are — and then reward things that run completely opposite to that narrative. Can you talk about the nonverbal stuff? What should CEOs be doing in the chief culture officer role that signals, beyond words, that culture is real?

Tony It's a very rich topic.

There's a certain point in people's minds between when bad behavior is that person's problem and when it becomes your problem. If someone two layers below me is not practicing people first — practicing bad behaviors — and that goes on for six, nine, twelve months in a row, that is 100% my problem now, because I've allowed it to persist. So you have to move quickly to get people aligned. As people can't step up, they're best off being part of the alumni association.

But there are so many moments of truth where you have an opportunity to demonstrate something. At SpartanNash, we had an associate who was shot and killed in one of our stores — and a customer, the same day, by a shooter. I got on the phone with the team, and this was the first tragedy of this magnitude since I'd been at SpartanNash. The team went into shock — and then they went into the old playbook. They started talking about what we were obligated to do, the cap on insurance recovery, and so forth. And at one point I had to stop the conversation: "Guys, I want you to stop being that and let's be human for the rest of this call. What really makes sense for the families?" And we got to a very different place.

I talked to two other retailers who had the same thing happen, and they started with how they managed the cost of the calamity. What could be less people-first than that?

I'll share one more — on investment. When I was at ReadyPack, we learned we were on the cusp of not being a viable business without our creditors. I presented my plan, which included giving big pay raises to the frontline. The board lost their minds. We had just survived a union campaign in one location, and we had not given real raises for years.

A board member suggested profit sharing after we hit our numbers. I told the chairman: after four or five years without pay increases, you have surrendered the opportunity for that kind of creativity. What we need is good old-fashioned investment — here's what people need in their lives, here's the signal they need from us that we care. They hemmed and hawed and finally said, look — your plan didn't work, let him try his. And we wound up having a great outcome.

That was an important moment of truth. I could have gone back and presented another idea to make everyone comfortable. Or I could get right back in the grill and say: here's what we need to do. The worst thing that could happen is they fire me. I was looking for a job when I found this one.

What you'll find — and this happens from a forklift operator to the chairman of the board — they will test your resolve. They're going to test: are you really serious about this? You've got to practice those moments in your head. What principles am I going to stand for? And always stand for them. That makes a big difference to the organization.

Scott Tony, that's an incredibly good example at the top. But when you get down to the frontline — I'm pretty sure you'll agree — that's where you make it or break it.

What do you do with an operator who hits every single number you want but destroys people in the process? The high performer who's a culture killer.

Tony Ultimately, destroying people doesn't give you great results in the long run. Culture killers are the folks who are in a job just long enough to get good numbers, do damage, and move on before the aftermath comes home to roost.

In our accountability reviews, the process elements weigh heavily. I remember one guy who was a director, killing it on the numbers — but his reputation on the people side was not good. He had not done the things we'd asked in terms of people first. And we gave him a "needs improvement" — because we knew those results weren't sustainable. That's another thing you've got to be true to: if process matters, and someone is doing a lot of damage to people, that becomes the thing — above whatever short-term results they may have achieved.

Jackson Going all the way back to our PepsiCo world, I think we were one of the first companies to formally separate the what from the how in the performance management process. The rubric was complex, but the instinct was sound.

And to Tony's point — you have to make the right call on people who are leaving dead bodies on the side of the road. Because culture is, among other things, decision residue. And the decision residue of who you tolerate is really important.

Now, one of my pet peeves is going to conferences and listening to stuff so pie-in-the-sky that you can't possibly act on it. So at the risk of doing that to our listeners, Tony — what would you say to the CHRO who is nodding along right now and thinking, "I'd love to work for you, but my CEO is never going to go for this"?

Tony I'd tell them to grow where you're planted. I built these tools by practicing them on my way up through organizations. In some cases I had good modeling. In most cases I did not. So I tried things, learned from them, took some risks. I did things the organization wasn't doing — but I generally got good results, so people said, "That was interesting, maybe others should do it."

Here's one around clarity and visibility: everybody has that option. Everybody can create better clarity. Better visibility about what matters. Feedback loops that are instructive about what needs to change and that recognize people for what they've done well.

I held operators accountable for what I call the 2x fund. The accountability was: every year, you have to make work twice as fun as it was the previous year. Obviously subjective, but people had to talk about it — what did you do to make it more fun and engaging this year? I did that as a mid-level manager, and I carried it with me all the way.

Creating visibility, creating real accountability with the people you work with, creating an environment where people can see that you care about them — that you create fun and recognize great results — people can do that. And they can start changing culture from the middle.

At PepsiCo, we had a handful of outside folks come in. They didn't always know what they were doing. But the culture was so strong because the middle of the organization owned it. People can make a big difference as a frontline supervisor or mid-level manager. There's all kinds of things you have access to, to start creating that people-first movement on your own team.

Scott Let me drive us to the playbook, which we do every episode — the things a CHRO can start doing right now, this week. Tony, what's the one piece of advice you'd give?

Tony Visibility about performance. From the CHRO's perspective, that's mostly about performance reviews — how we summarize performance. I allow people to take the ball and run with it. If I wanted my CHRO to take a bigger stand, they had the freedom to say: here's how we can project results more clearly in our warehouse organizations, for example.

The key is making sure performance is visible and people are being held accountable in a way that holds the team accountable. And my CHROs have always worked as part of the team, with this notion of mutual accountability — not afraid to stir it up with the rest of the leadership team. Everybody needs to be able to say: we need to get better at this. Here's where I can help. I can help on the performance management side. I can help find better tools for how you give feedback to your frontline supervisors.

Simplify, simplify, simplify. Get the simplified version of how you get performance feedback and visibility out there. That's what I'd work on as a CHRO trying to rebuild.

Scott Here's something I've picked up listening to you: you can't have 50 KPIs. Get down to the things that really matter. Cut the list to six to eight KPIs that are really tied to what's going to make you a better business. And driving that as a CHRO — that's something we can start doing now. How many KPIs are there? Are they the right ones? Do people really understand them?

Jackson And if you want to be part of the business agenda, that conversation has to be had with the CEO, CFO, and the board. Because the CEO's instinct is to put in everything that matters, and the CFO will probably expand on that.

The thing I would say you can start doing tomorrow: test the clarity. Have you defined what winning looks like for your team this quarter? You don't have to do it for the entire organization. Do it for yours. Best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago — second best is today. Best way to drive your organization is to do it enterprise-wide. But if you can't do that, do it where you have control.

If you define what winning looks like for your team this quarter, that answer will tell you whether you have a clarity problem or a broader alignment problem.

Tony, where do you think these efforts get the most resistance?

Tony A number of places. It can be challenging for the CHRO to suggest to an operator that they need to do things differently. Mutual accountability is challenging — if we're going to do something and I need you to participate in this way, that can be hard. C-suite folks are often alpha personalities, and it's hard for them to say, "Okay, I'll do it your way."

So sometimes you've got to step back, model things, show people. That's probably the best way to get it moving forward.

Jackson How you have the conversation with operators about being more focused on leading — I get it, that's hard. I've had the trepidation to have those conversations myself. But here's the reality: our role is to look at the organization through a talent lens and figure out what are we trying to accomplish and what constraints from talent are getting in the way. If you frame it that way — by being more simple, focused, and clear with people, we'll get more alignment around what's important, which will ultimately turn into better performance outcomes — that's a different conversation than "I want to give you feedback on your style." That's an absolute showstopper.

Let's move now to the most important part of our sessions together — the Talent Sherpa summary. Which, as most of you know, means Scott says things. And what he said today was amazing to me. "Bowls per minute will set you free."

Scott I have never said that, but I have a different interpretation of that one.

All right — here's the summary.

Number one: people first is a performance strategy, not a soft strategy. If you follow Tony's system, he delivered 192% shareholder return and 40% turnover reduction at the same time by making it an operating system.

Second: engagement is a symptom, not a cause. We have got to stop optimizing for engagement scores.

Third: clarity is the foundation. If you're following Tony's system, you need a statement of identity with a signature strength, and five to nine KPIs that really define winning in a business context. And here's the most important part: if people don't know what's expected, nothing else matters.

Fourth: the CEO is the chief culture officer. HR enables it, HR challenges. But if you don't have CEO buy-in yet, build the proof in your own domain. Make the results undeniable and work the equation that way.

Tony — what did I get right? What did I miss?

Tony You nailed it. The one thing I might add is the subtle importance of making the declaration early — that "I and we are about people first." It's a challenge. It sets up everything you just said. Now I've got to deliver on that declaration in a way that proves it was reality.

Jackson And the takeaway for me links all the way back to where we started today. We've been treating engagement like it's the goal — when it's not. It's a thermometer. The actual goal is performance through people. The mechanism is clarity and investment. If you get those two things right, you don't need to worry about engagement. All of that will take care of itself.

Tony, thank you so much for being so generous with your time and insights today. It's been a masterclass, no doubt. Where can people follow you and learn more about your work?

Tony I have a blog — Tony Sarsam. You'll find it there, with a handful of my musings on life and people first.

Jackson Thank you so much for tuning into the Talent Sherpa Podcast — where senior leaders come to rethink how human capital really works. And like I say every week, this is so much fun to do with you all. A quick shout-out to one of our favorite listeners: hello, Suda from San Jose — thank you for being part of the Talent Sherpa community. And we think everyone listening, whether that's in Bangkok, Thailand; Hillsboro, New Jersey; or Moscow in the Russian Federation — Spasibo.

Scott If you enjoyed today's episode, do us a favor — please subscribe, hit that like button, or leave us a review on your favorite platform, whether that's Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. It's free. It's a small favor you can do for us, and potentially a big favor you do for someone else.

Jackson If you're a CHRO wondering where to start your AI journey, don't forget to check out Propulsion AI at the cleverly titled www.getpropulsion.ai. They're building a team of AI teammates to help human capital leaders focus on what matters most to the business.

Scott And if you are a first-time or emerging CHRO, don't forget — Talent Sherpa is your ultimate guide for HR leadership, for tackling the high-stakes peaks of business leadership. From the best-selling Substack that Jackson writes to deep-dive coaching sessions, it's your Sherpa up the CHRO summit. Head over to mytalentsherpa.com or subscribe to book a coaching session today.

Jackson And thank you, Scott. And thanks again, Tony. Best leader I've ever worked for, bar none. And thanks to everyone listening. Until next time — keep raising the bar. Keep finding your signature strength. And keep on climbing.