Sam Hammock on why the system, not the person, needs fixing

What this conversation is about

Sam Hammock joined Glenn Llopis on Personalization Outbreak as chief human resources officer of Verizon, and she spends the episode pointing at the machinery rather than at people. Glenn opens with his own framing, that leaders and cultures suppress individuals without knowing it, and she takes it straight to the design of work itself.

Her opening claim is the line at the top of this page. What follows from it is a one-size-fits-all approach that, as she puts it, rarely fits all and almost never does. The pandemic exposed that, especially for working parents, and she is clear that if the system does not get fixed, the same problems keep returning.

Getting back in, and what stands in the way

Women, she says, are still made to feel they have to choose between family and work: you can have it all, but not at the same time. For those who stepped out, the obstacle is the pace at which skills and networks move on. Verizon helped build a community for women re-entering and advancing, deliberately not owned by any one company, with free resources, peer support, a learning platform that matches people to content, and partner organizations, because no single employer could solve it alone.

She insists men belong in the equation too, since they are making many of the hiring and training decisions. And she points at the ordinary structure of a day: even a conventional nine-to-five starts before children go to school and ends after they come home, which tells you the system was not designed around the people living in it.

The silver lining she takes from the pandemic is that the rigid version briefly stepped aside:

"And what if we did allow people to know and empower them that they actually have the skills, the ability and the knowledge of how and when and where to do their job." — Sam Hammock · 00:10:09

Five questions, and the one she stopped on

Glenn put his five questions to her on air: who do you let in, how do you see those you let in, who do you let them be, what do you let them do, and how do you let them do it. Hammock stopped on the third:

"And I love this who you let them be? What an awesome question, Glen, who we let them be." — Sam Hammock · 00:11:43

That is the hinge of the interview, because it moves the conversation from what people are permitted to do to who they are permitted to be. Glenn named the condition those questions are answering:

"in the age of standardization, the institution, the business defines the individual." — Glenn Llopis · 00:12:15

A whole lot of art, very little science

Pressed for action rather than awareness, Hammock goes after the talent system, because that is what actually distributes opportunity. Every company has one: performance management, talent ratings, formal succession planning. Ratings drive pay, promotions and who gets considered for what comes next. Then she says the quiet part:

"It is a whole lot of art and a real little amount of science." — Sam Hammock · 00:18:18

Potential ratings get the same treatment. Someone decides whether a person can move one level or two, or run the company one day, and that judgment flows into the plan. She likes a good process, but if the major inputs are subjective, the organization has a serious problem, and no amount of goodwill elsewhere corrects it.

Her proposed fix is to bring more science in. Employees already tell their employers about their skills, aspirations and experience. Her challenge is to use that data inside the talent system instead of relying on impressions, and she frames the imbalance in terms any executive team understands:

"we'd all be winning. If we were obsessed with employee experience, like we are our customer experience and our bottom line." — Sam Hammock · 00:20:23

Safety, and taking a risk on yourself

Glenn asked what it will take to shift from suppressing people to unleashing them. Hammock’s answer is culture, and specifically trust, which she says is missing in many places. People need psychological safety before they will throw ideas out or experiment, and experimentation means getting a lot of things wrong. Her instruction to leaders is to stop talking about failure being acceptable and show it: let people see you fail, and celebrate it, because it means someone tried something new.

On the relationship between a mission and the people who carry it, she is unequivocal:

"I think the mission doesn't exist without the people." — Sam Hammock · 00:25:12

Culture does not happen because someone wrote it on a piece of paper, she adds, and neither does a mission.

The last turn is her own. Hammock came into human resources from finance and accounting, and she almost declined the move because it sounded soft and not up her alley. She took it, and the function turned out to be the one that has changed most. Her advice to anyone eyeing a door they are not sure about:

"take risks on yourself. And if it doesn't work, guess what? There's a million other opportunities out there." — Sam Hammock · 00:26:17