Savannah Hobbs: Transforming Organizations Through Transparency, Culture, and Leadership

In a recent conversation with Savannah Hobbs , Vice Chair of the Organization Development Network and prominent leader at 1000heads, her passion for organizational development (OD) and its intersection with internal communications shone brightly. Savannah's journey from a results-oriented marketing background to a leadership role in OD offers invaluable lessons for organizations striving to reduce turnover, enhance culture, and build sustainable leadership strategies.

The Journey to OD

Savannah’s career began in marketing, where she honed her skills in driving results. However, her pivot to OD stemmed from witnessing rapid and often damaging organizational changes. This experience sparked a passion for creating sustainable, human-centered strategies that align with business goals. She credits her marketing background with instilling a results-driven mindset, while OD brought a deeper appreciation for internal and external communications—a combination that uniquely positions her to address organizational challenges.

Tackling Turnover with Transparency and Curiosity

Savannah believes turnover stems from two critical issues: organizational silos and disconnected or over-burdened leaders. Without a systems perspective, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees.?

To combat this, her approach emphasizes:

• Exit and Stay Interviews: By aggregating themes from exit interviews and conducting stay interviews at critical milestones, Savannah’s team identifies patterns that inform actionable strategies. For example, through data analysis, she discovered that employees often leave around the two-year mark. This realization led her team to conduct stay interviews at this pivotal stage, gaining deeper insights into employee experiences and identifying ways to provide better support and development opportunities.
• Data-Driven Insights: Comparing metrics year-over-year, and within and across departments and employee experience benchmarks, helps pinpoint areas for improvement and ensures resources are allocated effectively.?
• Transparency: Leaders often resist transparency, yet Savannah sees it as the most impactful strategy for reducing turnover and building trust. Communicating processes and outcomes to the whole team diffuses tension and fosters collaboration.

She also notes that while financial incentives are important, employees increasingly value development opportunities, leadership access, and being actively involved in decision-making processes, such as shaping culture initiatives that align with organizational goals.

Addressing Burnout Through Signaling Practices

In line with national trends, burnout has emerged as a key challenge with employee retention in Savannah’s organization. After performing an organizational assessment to understand the issue more deeply—applying an OD approach that works to address causes, not just symptoms—they learned remote work, while providing important flexibility, has made it more difficult to see early signs of burnout and intervene to support employees. This led to a refreshed remote working policy that both prioritized flexibility and enhanced visibility and signaling processes for employees to communicate their state of well-being openly and proactively. By identifying burnout early and offering targeted support, Savannah’s initiatives helped retain talent and foster a healthier work environment.

Building a Resilient Culture

For Savannah, culture transformation starts with a simple yet profound question: How do employees feel about their culture today? Her methodology includes:

• Custom Interviews and Metrics: Tailoring questions based on leadership goals helps organizations direct their investments toward meaningful initiatives.
• Formal and Informal Networks: Savannah emphasizes the importance of understanding both formal communication channels and informal interactions (like “water cooler” conversations). Empowering key connectors in informal networks drives innovation and improves processes.
• Eliminating Duplication: In Savannah's creative services organization, 1000heads—a Social Transformation agency specializing in data, analytics, strategy, and creativity—time is money. She drives the bottom line by increasing transparency to decrease duplication, freeing up time for innovation and enabling better processes, which ultimately leads to greater ROI and a stronger alignment with client goals.

Savannah’s belief in transparency underscores her cultural initiatives. She encourages leaders to lean into informal feedback by actively engaging with what employees share during casual interactions, such as "water cooler" conversations, and using these insights to address underlying concerns. In addition to fostering informal feedback, she also leverages formal feedback mechanisms by increasing data collection and better understanding trends. This dual approach turns potential challenges into opportunities for engagement, growth, and informed decision-making.

Reaching Leadership Through Trust and Integrity

Savannah emphasizes that trust and integrity are essential for OD professionals working with leadership, whether as an internal or external consultant. For example, as an external consultant she advocates for having the courage to walk away from deals that compromise integrity or when leadership isn’t ready for the change.

Readiness for change is something all OD practitioners have to prepare for. In many circumstances, the needed change is the harder path that leaders were hoping to avoid. In order to be effective in these moments, Savannah says you need to have integrity in your process. Believe in the recommendations you make, and ensure they come from sound data and analysis. If you can do this, and build a trusting relationship with the client or leader, you have the best chance at a successful change initiative.?

Sustainable Leadership: Building Capacity and Modeling Behavior

Savannah’s leadership philosophy centers on building capacity within teams. “If you’re doing it right, you’ll work yourself out of a job,” she says. Key strategies include:

• Modeling Behavior: Leaders must consistently demonstrate curiosity and inquiry. For example, structuring meetings with inquiry before evaluation fosters open dialogue and collaboration. Another example is modeling good behavior when dealing with conflict, setting a standard for constructive and respectful interactions.
• Reintroducing Apprenticeship: Shadowing, role-playing, and mentorship programs are vital for developing leadership skills, but have become less common. Savannah advocates for their return.
• Reflection Practices: Encouraging leaders to reflect regularly fosters self-awareness and alignment with organizational values.

Tying OD to Measurable Outcomes

One of the biggest challenges in OD is demonstrating its impact on the bottom line. Savannah highlights the need for strong contracting and clear metrics, recommending Flawless Consulting by Peter Block as a vital resource for practitioners to effectively set up initiatives and relationships for success, including:

• Turnover rates
• Employee satisfaction surveys
• Productivity measures
• Attendance
• Use of resources

By framing OD initiatives within measurable outcomes, practitioners can build stronger cases for their value to stakeholders.

Advice for Aspiring OD Practitioners and Leaders

When asked for advice, Savannah’s response is both practical and inspiring:

• Develop Curiosity: Be more curious than the average person. Savannah recommends Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein as essential reading.
• Learn Contracting: Peter Block’s Flawless Consulting provides a framework for setting up initiatives and relationships for success.
• Love the Organization: A genuine connection to the organization and its people is crucial for impactful OD work.

For leaders, her advice is simple but profound: Invest in OD professionals and embrace their guidance. All leaders should understand and incorporate OD principles into their leadership toolbox.

Conclusion: A Call to Action

Savannah’s insights remind us that effective organizational development is as much about humanity and curiosity as it is about data and metrics. Transparency, collaboration, and a genuine love for the people within an organization form the bedrock of sustainable success. Leaders and practitioners alike should take her words to heart: start with love, stay curious, and never shy away from the hard work of building better organizations.