How One Top HR Leader Leads a Giant Workforce

You may hear about chief people officers, chief HR officers and other C-Suite-level talent executives without knowing what they do in their day-to-day work. Well, LinkedIn News Editor Andrew Seaman sat down with Christopher Shryock , senior vice president and chief people officer of Sam's Club, to find out.

Christopher leads a large workforce that ranges from customer-facing associates to software engineers. He talks about how he approaches his work and leads such a large and dynamic workforce. The two also discuss how he goes about hiring and developing new hires into great talent.

You will find a transcript of the episode below. You can listen to the conversation above or on Apple Podcasts by clicking here .

TRANSCRIPT: How One Top HR Leader Leads a Giant Workforce

Andrew Seaman: If you work in a corporate setting or for a big employer, you'll likely hear the term CPO, CHRO from time to time. They stand for chief people officer and chief human resources officer. There are other terms used, but what do these people do, and how do they lead giant workforces? Well, we're talking all about it on today's episode. From LinkedIn News, this is Get Hired, a podcast for the ups and downs and the ever-changing landscape of our professional lives.

I'm Andrew Seaman, LinkedIn's Senior Managing Editor for Jobs and Career Development, bringing you conversations with experts who, like me, want to see you succeed at work, at home and everywhere in between. Leading large workforces is no easy task. In addition to managing day-to-day life for employees, you're also responsible for hiring and everything else that goes into a workplace's culture. These responsibilities usually fall to people in the C-suite called CPOs, CHROs, and a few other terms.

To learn a bit about what someone in that role does and how they successfully manage such a big responsibility, we're talking to Christopher Shryock, who is Senior Vice President and Chief People Officer of Sam's Club, a membership only retail division of Walmart. Christopher has had an incredible career with a strong background in talent development around the world, including more than a decade at Pepsi. He joined me to talk about his role as CPO of Sam's Club, from hiring to developing great talent. Here's Christopher.

Christopher Shryock: Fundamentally, it is about ensuring that we have enough of the right type of talent to win, that we have the talent and the capability to win and execute our strategy. That is the thing I feel like I am fundamentally accountable for as a chief people officer. If you're in a CPO role, you have to be a business leader and you have to be an HR leader. So I think about myself first as really just a member of the leadership committee at Sam's.

What will make the business win? It's really basic and really fundamental. But understanding for us in the club channel or in the retail space about where we want to play, how we're going to win, and not only being able to help answer that question in a macro sense, but even business by business, function by function, and ensuring that what we're doing, that the sum of those parts is really greater than the whole.

So I think about myself first as kind of a business leader. I think then the second component is really about being an HR leader, having opinions on the capabilities of the talent that we do have. And that really informs for me and for my team, where can we and should we compete as a business, and what is it that we're going to do to help them get there? And that leads what I feel like is to the third part of my role, which is about having an agenda that is really clear and really concise.

Someone said to me in a previous life, "If you can remember the following, the main thing is to keep the main thing as the main thing." And that really brings a lot of clarity and purpose. And if you can continue to talk about that and not change that every six months, that really engenders, I think, a lot of followership. And most importantly, a lot of not only clarity for my team, but clarity for the business in terms of the value we're bringing and how that's going to ladder up to what we're trying to do as a Sam's Club organization.

Andrew: And in that ecosystem where you are part of the leadership team and you're trying to get all the associates to move together, all the employees, how do you actually make all of that sort of work?

Christopher: I would describe Sam's as a people-led, tech-powered omnichannel retailer. And that people-led piece up front, that is really, really important at how we want to run our business. It's a membership warehouse club, so people are paying money to shop with us. So what that means is we work hard to anchor the culture on being member-obsessed. So every single thing we do starts with that. So when we have a trade meeting on Monday morning, the first thing we talk about is not what were our sales over the weekend, where are we on the latest supply chain transformation and how are we thinking about competition? No. We start that with, "What are our members saying?" We collect all kinds of data in terms of how they feel, what's the feedback we're seeing, what are people literally just emailing us and telling us we're doing well and we're not?

So then I think, for us, that's where you can start to fold in what we do as a business. So if you are member-obsessed, then that means that you are going to offer great quality items and the right curated assortment. Because people pay to shop with us, we don't want them to have to do the hard work in terms of what to buy. We will pick the very best things and put it in front of them so we've done the hard work for them. You have that quality, you have that assortment, you have the best prices in retail. You do that. You grow membership income, you grow revenue, and you can invest that back in associates in terms of wages. You can invest that back in associates in terms of tools and resources to be able to do their jobs. You can invest that back in terms of associates around how we are developing them. How we're helping to give them a career.

And if you do that, you're going to have associates that are member-obsessed and you kind of start all back over. I would say the connection between investing in your associates and being member-obsessed, that really hinges on us living and breathing and emulating the values we have in the company on a day in, day out basis. So holding ourselves and everyone that works for us to a really high standard of performance. There is nothing more important than that member for Sam's. It is the anchor point for the entire business.

Andrew: When you get on the ground, when you're trying to hire into that culture, into that ecosystem, how do you challenge your managers and everyone who has a hand in that to make sure that they're bringing on the right people?

Christopher: I'm really proud that we've made sure that we have embedded that in the leadership expectations we have for any associate at any level. Now, obviously, that's going to mean something different if you're a CEO versus working the member service desk inside of one of our clubs. But those values are really embedded into all of the leadership expectations we have in terms of being a culture champion, having strategic thinking, being able to collaborate and influence, et cetera, et cetera.

So we've got a really clear set of behaviors or really leadership competencies that the values are embedded, and that's one. Number two is when it comes to the hiring piece, all the way down to the frontline, we really start with getting a good objective view of the people we're hiring. So we use assessments all the way down to hourly associates. We will look at things like personality, situational judgment, even some basic cognitive ability for more senior roles.

So we've got a really good barometer in terms of, is this a person that is likely to succeed in Sam's Club? And is Sam's Club likely to be a good employer for this person? We complement that by making sure that we have good behavioral-based interview questions for our managers so that we're able to bring and get that qualitative insight in terms of how people may be as associates, as managers, as leaders. And we make sure, finally, that we have some diversity in terms of the panels that are actually interviewing these associates.

And by diversity, I mean that in a literal sense of male, female, black, white, et cetera. But more importantly, diversity in terms of functions, experience, et cetera. And I think when you couple all of those things together of some quantitative data, some qualitative questions and some diversity of perspective that is looking at these candidates, I won't say that it's easy to make sure you always hire the best person. I would say that those three things in combination make it easier to ensure we're hiring the best people possible.

Andrew: We'll be right back with Christopher after this break.

Andrew: And we're back with Christopher Shryock, Senior Vice President and Chief People Officer at Sam's Club. When it comes to the actual hiring process, the vast majority of your workers, I assume, are frontline just because of sheer numbers.

Christopher: Yeah, absolutely.

Andrew: What is the hiring process like for them? How does it start?

Christopher: It depends a little bit on the area, but what I would say is if you want to work at Sam's Club and you are willing to work hard, we have a place for you here. If you walk into a Sam's Club, you're going to see a row of TVs down the entry into the club, and probably every 30 seconds or so we'll flash up there what it's like to work at Sam's Club, and here's a QR code if you're interested in applying. We make it really easy to communicate who we are. And if you want to work, there's a really easy way you can do that.

When we have those openings, we would provide you with those really simple assessments. We would bring you in for an interview and kind of make a call. We make offers pretty much in 24 hours. Especially on the front line, it's really, really key to have a seamless process, and that's what we've tried to do, is make this easy, make it clear what the process is, make it fast in terms of getting offers to people.

Andrew: That's great. And especially for people who maybe they get laid off or they get let go, that's a great lifeline for them. One of the things that I like about places like Sam's Club and your parent company, Walmart, and full disclosure, where I grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania, they were sort of the only game in town when it came to large retailers or club store. So I've known people that have had long careers there. They may have started as an associate, then they go up into the cash room or something like that and they maneuver. But how do you see creating opportunities for people who maybe they're an associate and they really are showing incredible promise? How do you encourage a long tenure at Sam's Club?

Christopher: We try to hire great people. The second thing is we want to pay people really competitively for the roles that they're in. Because it doesn't do you a lot of good to start talking about long-term career paths if you're paying $12 an hour. That's not going to go very far. Number three is then giving people the tools and the resources to actually do their jobs and do their jobs well. We have invested a lot, especially at the frontline, in terms of tools and apps and technology so that we can run those clubs on handhelds. Nobody's going to stay anywhere for very long if they don't even have the ability to do their job well and do it simply. The fourth element is we work really hard to make sure that we have great managers. Managers that know how to identify, they know how to manage, they know how to develop talent, they know how to reward talent.

Because if you're paying well, you've got great tools and resources, but you work for someone that's not great, you're not going to stay with us very long. And then finally, how do we work to develop the associates we have and to give them careers? And I think we look at that through a lens of how are we developing them to do their jobs today? So we have all kinds of programs and development that give people that are first time managers the skills they need to be managers. We have a lot of programs in development, so for the folks that are working in the fresh department, hey, here's the right way to decorate a cake. To cut a ribeye. Same thing for folks working on the membership desk. So we want people to feel like they're well-equipped to do their jobs, and we want people to feel as though they have clear paths moving forward.

There's a manager-in-training program, which helps people to get from hourly team lead roles to salaried manager roles by, over a four-week span, working them through all the different areas in the club. It's why we have programs like Live Better U, which is a way that people can get certifications, GEDs, associate's degrees and, most important, college degrees free of cost so that they are enabled to give themselves the right skills and, to a degree, the right credentials to continue to advance.

I think you've really got to look at that tenure piece, not just on how do you give people opportunity to move up through, but you've got to start with the basics of hiring great people, paying them well, giving them the right tools and resources, letting them work for great managers, and then you can come onto developing them for the jobs they're in today and developing them for the jobs they want to do in the future.

Andrew: And I assume because Sam's is such a large organization, it's not just a retailer. There's digital jobs there, there's logistics jobs, there's a ton of different opportunities because basically that's just what it takes now to run something the size of Sam's Club and also at the scale you do.

Christopher: A hundred percent. What I would say is 75% of the folks that are in managerial jobs at Sam's Club today, they started as hourly associates. So we have a pretty good track record of pulling people through the system. We have a lot of examples of those people that started out collecting carts that are now VPs or higher, running some of these other functions and areas.

I mean, the woman that is the Chief Merchant for Sam's Club started as an intern. Doug McMillon, the guy that's the CEO of Walmart, started by unloading trailers in the summers when he was in high school. So we have tons of examples of people being able to pull their way all the way through, not just into incrementally higher frontline jobs, but, as you said, into merchandising jobs, into product jobs, into tech jobs, into HR jobs, et cetera.

Andrew: For people who are interested in a career at Sam's Club, what is your top piece of advice for them, and where do you see people trip up most in the process?

Christopher: I think one is it's just people not doing their homework. So if you're going to interview for Sam's, you probably would've wanted to go into a Sam's and shopped it, or gone into a Costco or any other retailer and have just a little bit of a sense for what it's really like. I think the second thing is, and there's a real cultural element to this at Sam's of, at least my experience when I was interviewing here, is I felt like I just kept stumbling into people that were really smart, that were really driven and really humble.

So one of the things I see trip people up is when there's kind of a lack of humility, that is probably not going to be a great fit. The third thing I would say is it's really just interview basics 101, which is be specific. When you're answering a question, give some context, talk about what you did, talk about why you did it, talk about what was achieved. I don't even think that's really a secret, but I don't always see that even in the interviews that I'm involved in and that I'm a part of.

Andrew: Before I let you go, you've obviously had an incredible career yourself, and you've worked under some really great CEOs and legendary people. What has been the best piece of career advice that you've received along the way?

Christopher: It's being really focused on three things when it comes to having a career. The first thing is deliver results in the role you're in. I see it all the time that people are so concerned about their next job or the one after that, they just forget to be great in the job that they're in. I sit in a lot of talent reviews, and if somebody comes up and the first thing that we ask is, "What has this person delivered in their current role?" And if there's not a very good answer to that question, we're moving on to the next person pretty quickly.

I think the second thing that I've gleaned and garnered from folks, spend time on how you collaborate and how you influence. I mean, jobs and organizations are really complicated. People have multiple managers and dozens of stakeholders, and you got to manage in a matrix, and jobs are not going to get simpler. So being a really great collaborator, having a pulse on the company, having external networks, listening to understand, not listening to respond, these are things that I really, really encourage people to do. Because then you're focused on that group success versus an individual agenda, so that collaboration piece.

The final piece I would say from a career advice perspective is the focus on talent. People who are successful, number one, they take their own development seriously, and they take the development of others seriously as well. And the truth is, I don't always think that companies are stocked with folks that are great developers of talent. Even on basic things like providing clear, unambiguous and compassionate feedback, it's not a towering strength of a lot of folks. And the folks that can do that well tend to be the ones that get ahead. You do that, you're likely to have a long and illustrious career ahead of you.

Andrew: Thank you so much, Christopher.

Christopher: Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it.

Andrew: That was Christopher Shryock, Chief People Officer at Sam's Club. Remember, it's up to you to put our advice into practice. Still, you always have a community backing you up and cheering you on. Connect with me and the Get Hired community on LinkedIn to continue the conversation. Also, if you liked this episode, please take a moment to leave us a rating on Apple Podcast. It helps people like you find the show. And don't forget to click that follow, subscribe or whatever other button you find to get our podcast delivered to you every Wednesday, because we'll be continuing these conversations on the next episode. Right here, wherever you like to listen.

Get Hired is a production of LinkedIn News. This episode was produced by Alexis Ramdaou. Rafa Farihah is our associate producer. Aasaf Gidron engineered our show. Joe DiGiorgi mixed our show. Dave Pond is head of news production. Enrique Montalvo is our executive producer. Courtney Coupe is the head of original programming for LinkedIn. Dan Roth is the editor-in-chief of LinkedIn. And I'm Andrew Seaman. Until next time, stay well and best of luck.