Building a Culture of Change Leadership
Introduction
Michael Daehne: Hey y’all, welcome to Inflect. I’m Michael Daehne, and on today’s show, I’m joined by Biron Pickens, Vice President of Organization Effectiveness and Change Leadership at McKesson. Biron and I first got to know each other last year when we collaborated on a digital transformation and change leadership workshop.
We immediately hit it off based on our shared values around people and change. I hope you enjoy our conversation today, in which Biron talks about some of the trends he’s seeing and change strategies he’s employing at McKesson, some lessons he learned from his time at Southwest Airlines, and some sage advice he got from a mentor.
Hey Biron, how are you?
Biron Pickens: I’m well, Michael. How are you today?
MD: Good. Thank you so much for taking the time to join. I’m really looking forward to our conversation.
BP: So am I. Thank you for having me. I appreciate the opportunity.
MD: Yeah, for sure. For our listeners, why don’t you start with a little bit of background about yourself, your career journey, and your current role?
BP: Absolutely; Biron Pickens here. I am a Dallas, Texas native, and I don’t know if that says much or not enough. But I’m from Dallas, Texas, and came from a small family, super small, only child and only grandchild. So, you know, lots of love and lots of attention. From a background perspective, I grew up in the arts, but also, doing a lot from an academic perspective. I played classical piano, starting at the age of four, and played through high school, which helped pay for college.
In terms of schooling, I got my undergraduate degree from Southern Methodist University, majoring in philosophy and psychology. I soon got a graduate degree, as well, in industrial and organizational psychology. My journey has been unique and interesting, but I will say I feel as though everything has gotten me to where I need to be in life right now.
It’s been great. From a career perspective, I think I have a story to tell there all the time. But, you know, my initial thought was, hey, I’m going to go to law school and that’s going to be my thing. It looks great on TV. I was ready to go and rock it out in the courtroom. I had an internship my junior year of college, and I realized it was not what it looked like on TV.
So, I decided to look into consulting and started my career at Amdocs. That was an opportunity for me to learn more about technology implementations, system integration, and program management. From there, I started realizing that I love the work, programmatic work, but then I also love understanding the people journey, the employee journey, which then got me into this realm of thinking about what I didn’t know at the time was called change management.
Fortunately, I had a leader who said, ‘What you’re looking to do is actually interesting, it’s emerging. I can’t tell you much, but it’s called change management. You might need to look into it.’ So, I looked into it, and I think that’s where my journey started to pivot. After being at Amdocs for approximately seven years, I had the opportunity to work on so many implementations: the launch of the iPhone, the launch of U-verse, which has now evolved into fiber and all the things that we use as modern conveniences.
Then I transitioned into a career at Neiman Marcus, leading their change management function. And it was unique because, at the time, I knew about Neiman Marcus, the luxury retailer, but there’s a business to run behind the scenes. I worked at Neiman Marcus to help with their omnichannel transformation, bringing Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, Last Call, and the online stores to a single platform, helping to bring about one process for buying, one process for planning, and to make the customer experience more seamless. I was there for about five years as well and enjoyed it, but I felt like there was just something more that I was ready to do and embark upon.
It just so happens Southwest Airlines unlocked an opportunity. The timing just aligned, and that’s where I’ve been able to get a lot of exposure in my career in terms of change management, employee experience, and also looking at culture, since that’s one of the things that Southwest is known for. After being at Southwest for almost six years, once again, I felt like that was going to be my forever home. However, I got this phone call and it’s an opportunity at McKesson, which is where I am today.
I knew of McKesson, but I didn’t know all about McKesson. So after I had a chance to better understand the mission and what McKesson wanted to do to evolve the landscape of healthcare and the fact that I could have a role from a change leadership perspective, it was like, absolutely, I have to do this.
I currently lead, our organization effectiveness and change leadership function. As the vice president of the space, I’m responsible for overseeing all of our organizations and companies and ensuring that we’re focused on the most strategic initiatives. I also deploy my team to help drive those initiatives forward so that we can evolve our products or the company’s culture, as well as continue to optimize the talent landscape that we have. My team is also responsible for organizational design, strategic facilitation, operating model optimization, and all of those things. So, there’s no shortage of work, to say the least, but I must say I really enjoy the work because it’s purpose-driven. And that’s what matters most to me at this point in my life.
MD: What an awesome overview, not only of your career but also a little bit of background about you that I didn’t even know. I’m also a pianist, maybe not as classically trained as you are, but maybe for the next recording, we can play a duet instead of talking about change management and talent management.
BP: I think that’s awesome. Let’s do it.
Reflecting on Southwest Airline’s Culture
Michael Daehne: I want to come back to your work at McKesson in a little bit, but before that, you mentioned Southwest, and you mentioned that, for a lot of people, myself included, view Southwest as a shining example when it comes to culture and investing in your people. Can you share a little bit more about what you learned about people and culture at Southwest that has influenced your work today?
Biron Pickens: Absolutely. It was difficult to leave Southwest because it’s a company where I learned a lot. I had a lot of growth opportunities, and I was exposed to phenomenal leaders such as Bob Jordan, Linda Rutherford, Lauren Woods, and Whitney Eichinger, who taught me a lot about leadership, culture, and the power of vulnerability as a leader.
First and foremost, I became a better leader at Southwest Airlines. I understood what it meant to be a leader rather than a manager. That distinction is important because you have to lead from an emotional standpoint. You have to want to connect with your employees, and you also have to have a mindset around strategy, empathy, and what’s needed to motivate your people.
From a culture standpoint, Southwest is where I understood how important culture is to an organization. Culture isn’t something that you can expect to just happen on its own. It is intentional, and you have to continue to invest in it. You have to think about the how, almost more than you think about the what.
Southwest ensured that decisions around hiring and investments were always centered around the core components of the culture to maintain alignment with that culture. Thinking about my subject matter expertise and the environment as well, Southwest gave me a different perspective of what it meant to be in this space to help navigate the people experiences in a corporate environment.
Southwest was awesome, and I’ll be honest with you: everything you read about Southwest is true. I thought that it might be not so true, but when I got there, I was like, ‘Oh, this is legit.’ Southwest is a truly loving, friendly, fun-loving, but also dynamic environment that puts the customer first. Southwest defines the customer as the internal customer, which is your employee, and the external customer, which would be the passenger.
MD: What a testament to what a good company culture looks like is when people who leave and go on to other places rave about their experience. Hearing you say not only ‘Here’s what I learned,’ but ‘Hey, they’re walking the walk. I saw it. I felt it on the inside.’ That kind of endorsement, even as folks move on and go to other stops, is how you know it’s real and not just something that gets written about.
BP: Exactly. I’ll just say that being there also helped me make different decisions about my career and where I choose to lean in and to be. My role is always important, obviously, since that’s the reason why you join a company, but also the culture of the company. Homing in on the culture and dynamic, to me is equally as important as the job that I would do.
Learning the Culture to be an Effective Change Leader
Michael Daehne: Building on that, when we’ve talked before, you’ve said, ‘Hey, across those different industries, companies, organizations, the thing that transcends all of it is it’s all about the people. There’s kind of some commonality there.’ But to your point about the uniqueness of each organization, how do you learn that when you come into Neiman Marcus, Southwest, McKesson, etc., what is your approach to learning the culture and the nuance there so you can be an effective change leader?
Biron Pickens: My first lesson was from a mistake early on in my career, and I learned from it. Go in without assumptions. Go in being curious. Go in asking thought-provoking questions and connecting with people who have tenure and people who are relatively new so that you can begin to get a balanced perspective. Go in knowing that you’ll know your space, which will be your subject matter expertise, but there is a practicum that has to happen. And in order for that to be successful, you really need to understand the history of the company, the change history of the company, and where the company wants to go and the mindset that the employees have.
This allows you to begin to understand: How do I need to approach this? What story, what narrative do I need to help co-create? How do I need to encourage leaders to sponsor the change or to begin to plant seeds, shift culture, and show up the right way to have the right vision, but also to establish trust since that’s non-negotiable anytime that you have a change in an organization.
MD: Let’s talk a little bit more about your McKesson work, which is how we came to know each other after collaborating on some things. Tell me more about some of the trends you’ve seen in your time there or some of the big change initiatives you and your team are involved in or leading.
BP: Definitely. I’ll start with the trends piece. Coming into an organization, I knew I had to support the change management aspect and there will always be projects, programs, initiatives, organizational design, and all the other things that we do. One model that I live by: change leadership is not my job; I just happen to be the subject matter expert that can help with the big C, change. Change leadership is leadership. Being able to navigate change, being able to support your people. To me, that’s just a core component of leadership, just like being able to communicate effectively.
That goes to the shift that I’ve started to see at McKesson, where it’s less about me just going in and supporting a project or my team going in and supporting the business. And more around how are we building change capability? How are we building and strengthening the change muscle of our people leaders since they have the closest and most direct contact with employees day to day?
But then, through that, how do we help the employees expand their change capacity so that we collectively can have a change-capable and a change-ready organization? A lot of the conversations have shifted from, ‘Hey, we still need you to support initiatives and projects,’ to ‘How can we begin to focus on the enablement piece by enabling our people leaders as well as our employees?’ We have almost 60,000 employees; there’s no way I could touch every single change that happens within the organization. So, how can we leverage that enablement opportunity to help scale what change support could look like in a large organization?
MD: I think that is such a crucial point. Sometimes, when we’re working with clients on these really big projects like implementing a new ERP or modern analytics or whatever their capability is, folks will say, ‘Hey, I need a change lead. Give me one change resource. It’s in the budget. I can have one change person.’ And I’ll often say, ‘Hey, we can do that, but let’s think about what that person’s job is.’ It may be more about being a change coach, an enabler of change, or an advisor because change is everyone’s job.
And that’s not an easy answer because everyone wants it to be one person’s job or one department’s job, but it’s like, ‘Hey, change is leadership,’ to your point. So, all of our leaders and all of our individual contributors need to think about their roles for themselves and the people they’re managing, leading, and working with to bring about sustainable change.
I love that you and your team were thinking about how to be that enabler, equipping your colleagues to be great change leaders and change agents.
BP: Yeah, the thing that I learned across my experiences at companies and just being a human myself is that no one wants change to happen to them. People want to be able to go through the change, feel a part of it, and also have a voice and stake in it. And I think that’s part of my responsibility and my team’s responsibility is to facilitate that process. That to me is super important.
Organizational Change from AI and Digital
Michael Daehne: What about all the AI and digital talk? As a change practitioner and someone who puts people at the forefront, what are your feelings on it? What are your reactions? Are you worried about that? Tell me more about where your head is at on all the fancy new technology.
Biron Pickens: I don’t know if it’s how I started my career, but I love technology and the advancements. I think it’s great. I always obviously think it comes with a risk, you have to think about what are the unintended consequences. But with this AI digital topic and where we are today, I feel good. As a change practitioner, when this topic comes up, what I think I’m more encouraged and inspired by, especially in more recent conversations I’ve been a part of, people realize now how much change management is crucial for this type of shift in the workplace and shift in our overarching environment and society.
People are now coming to me asking, ‘Hey, what tools do I need to effectively lead this transition?’ This is definitely going to accelerate how people work and how work gets done. I’m pretty sure more technology is going to continue to come and I need to be thinking about what’s next. I’m encouraged because people are now coming to me with a different talk track.
I’m beginning to think about how I can help shift mindsets. I think that’s the most important support that my team and I can provide right now: not to be afraid of this new era of artificial intelligence and technology. When people hear about these advancements, they automatically think about the movie Terminator and how everything’s going to just go away that’s related to humans.
I don’t see it that way. I see it as an augmentation of helping us work smarter, allowing us to focus our skills and capabilities on the most strategic and value-add things. And taking away some of those manual things that also can become a time suck. I think if people begin to see it from that lens, they will likely be more comfortable and feel less of a threat. That’s part of what I want to help leaders communicate to their teams, as well as what I want to be able to amplify and reinforce. All in all, I feel motivated by it.
MD: I totally agree. I think in this evolving landscape with all the emerging technologies, I always say the organizations that are going to thrive are the ones where the CIO and the CHRO are best friends and where their teams and their orgs are in lockstep with one another. Historically, those two functions haven’t always been viewed as key collaborators.
The questions around ‘How do we use AI? How do we use this modern cloud technology and modern analytics?’ I think the broader question, which you’ve done a really good job in your organization asking, is ‘How does it need to affect or change our operating model, our organizational design, roles and responsibilities, and the way we collaborate?’
Approaching it from an opportunity perspective versus a threat and thinking about how we equip and empower the humans within our organizations to thrive with the evolving and emerging technology. That’s going to be the hallmark of organizations that really lean into this trend and thrive in this new world.
BP: I agree. I will say that I’ve also been encouraged by the partnership of our CIO and my leader’s leader, the Chief HR Officer. I think we know to defer to the technology expertise and talk to the CIO when it’s really surrounding that piece. But I think we also focus on capabilities and the skills that are needed. And we’re having those types of conversations in parallel, and we’re connecting those conversations.
As you said, a huge piece that I find as an enabler to this transformation, or this transition, would be ways of working. My team focuses on that when we look at operating model transformation, as well as optimizing your operating model, and beginning to think about who are the decision owners and how work gets done.
Process ownership, what processes make sense, and what processes might need to evolve. Are people positioned to be team-oriented and to have cross-functional collaboration? So that, to me, is the other piece that I’m beginning to focus on because it’s important. Without that, you really can’t expect the technology to work the way it’s intended.
Pearls of Wisdom for Managing Change
Michael Daehne: You hit the nail on the head, it’s about connecting the dots between those different disciplines and thinking about it in a holistic way.
MD: Biron, my last question about work, and then I may have a couple lightning round questions for you: a lot of the folks that we work with and that may be listening to this podcast are executives who are embarking on or in the middle of really hard change. Big transformation initiatives, hard and difficult times of organizational change. You’ve led a lot of these, you’ve been through a lot of these. Do you have any pearls of wisdom or tips or tricks you would share with folks who are in that position?
Biron Pickens: I would. And the first thing I would say: although there are frameworks, and I have the subject matter expertise just based on years of doing this, ultimately, it’s quite simple. So don’t overengineer it, first and foremost. I think first, it’s about being present, open, and transparent.
It’s also communicating clearly and effectively, and being okay with repeating the message more than you might want to.
It’s also having a vision, seeing the future, and taking the time to get alignment, get buy-in, and ask people for their perspectives. Although their perspectives may not change your decision, at least you know what to be mindful of and how to better position things because you now have input from others.
The last thing I would say is to seek to get feedback, but also seek to understand where your employees might be. And if you could just do that at the highest level of an organization, that, to me, I think will set the tone for what leaders need to do for their teams, but then also allow the team members, your employees to feel, connected, seen, heard, but also to have trust, which is most important.
MD: Great advice; thanks for sharing that.
Lightning Round
Michael Daehne: Okay, I’ve got a couple of lightning-round questions for you before we wrap up.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Biron Pickens: Ooh, that’s a tough one, but it’s a good one. Seven or eight years ago, I had a mentor who helped me at a crucial time in my career. And what he said to me is that value isn’t always having the answer or being the loudest person in the room. Sometimes, value is being the connector, or sometimes, value is stating what hasn’t been said.
When I heard that, it unlocked this pressure that I used to put on myself to always have to say something. I feel as though we have enough of that in corporate America. Value is what you see yourself bringing to the table and it may look different than how another person can provide value. It’s not right or wrong; just lean into it and own it. So was the best piece of advice I think I could have received at the time that I’ve carried forward into where I am today.
MD: That reminds me of an old quote about when you’re in a meeting and everyone feels the urge to speak up. I think the quote is, “Everything that needed to be said has been said, but not everyone has had a chance to say it.” So I think your mentor’s advice is so good. There are other ways to create value and the way you connect, interpret, listen, and support versus always being the one having to talk.
BP: Exactly.
MD: What do you like to do outside of work?
BP: You know, I like to stay busy and active outside of work. So that answer could vary depending on the day, but I love anything focused on wellness or fitness. I like to work out. I typically work out six days a week. And it’s not about being vain and looking good, although you want to look good. It’s really investing in your body and staying mobile, but also finding the best stress reliever. To me, working out is a stress reliever, it allows me to stay centered. I think my team knows when I work out because I tend to send the most creative, ‘Hey, have we thought about this?’ emails while I’m working out. For me, it unlocks my creativity, and that’s the reason why I’m passionate about fitness outside of work.
MD: We all have to find our outlets for stress relief, right? So that’s a good one, and good for long-term health too.
What about books or podcasts? Any good recommendations from things you’ve heard or read recently?
BP: The book that I am reading now is actually related to this conversation of wellness and fitness, and the name of the book is Outlive by Dr. Peter Attia. I followed him on Instagram years ago and it just so happened that he moved to Texas. He was on Good Morning Texas one day, and I’m like, ‘Oh, I know this guy.’ He published a book focused on longevity and healthy aging, and it primarily focuses on scientific principles, but there are so many other components that he includes, such as the psychology of sleep, the psychology of stress, things you can do to stay active, to stay fit, but also to help ensure your cognitive abilities stay for as long as we want them to.
The other piece that Attia talked about that is so interesting to me is centenarians, which are your people that live past 100, and examined the things that they have done early on in life to help them stay active and mobile, as well as have all of their cognitive faculties. Some of these people are 107 years old. I’m really into that right now because I want to age in a very healthy way, and there are so many stressors in life. I feel like that’s the best gift I can give myself.
MD: That’s great. I’m going to have to check out that book.
My last question for you, I always like to ask folks this: What would you be doing if you weren’t a change practitioner and a people leader? What’s that other, you know, ‘Hey, maybe I would have been doing X.’
BP: Ooh, that’s a good one. Alright. So there are two answers to this.
I could possibly see myself being an attorney because I now realize there are so many different ways to approach that field. Full circle to the start of our conversation, now that I have exposure, it’s like, ah, okay, that actually is possible, and I actually could do that well.
To be honest, if I were not doing this, I would like to be an executive coach and a life coach. That is something that I just find the most passion and satisfaction in is being able to coach, support, and help others. That is already a part of what I do today, but I think I would just do that even more.
MD: I love that. Well, if you ever decide to go into that, I’ll be your first client. Because I have always appreciated your energy, insightfulness, and empathetic leadership style. I think anyone, myself included, would be lucky to have you as a coach.
Conclusion
Michael Daehne: I so appreciate you taking the time, Biron. I really enjoyed our conversation.
Biron Pickens: I enjoyed the conversation as well. And I’m going to hold you to it. If I decide to actually go down that path, I’m calling you first.
I’d like to express my appreciation for you and the work that you do. I know our paths crossed when we wanted to get some insight into people, digital, and how you need to think about the people side of it. I have also appreciated your pragmatic approach and your openness to be the expert, but also to hear from others. I’m just glad that we’ve been able to partner on this, and I hope we have more opportunities in the future.
MD: Likewise; let’s do it. Well, thanks so much, Biron. I appreciate it.
BP: Absolutely. Have a good one.
Mentioned
Books & Podcasts:
Outlive – The Science & Art of Longevity by Peter Attia and Bill Gifford: https://peterattiamd.com/outlive/