- You are listening to the HR Mixtape, your podcast with the perfect mix of practical advice, thought-provoking interviews and stories that just hit different so that work doesn't have to feel, well like work. Now your host, Shari Simpson. - Joining me today is Kim Nemkovich. She's the senior HR business continuity manager at Amazon.
She started life in retail and e-commerce in HR about 16 years ago and in the last few years has found her wheelhouse in building teams and driving work culture improvements. She leads with humor, empathy and tears. Her ultimate goal is being authentic and genuine to help her team deliver results. Kim, thank you so much for jumping on with me today. - Thank you so much for inviting me, it's a pleasure. - So you pride yourself on not being the run of the mill HR person.
So I thought we could kick things off by maybe you sharing a memorable incident or moment where your unique approach to HR really shined. - Yeah, absolutely, it took me a while to find my HR style. For a long time, I didn't know if I could actually cut it in HR, because my first HR job, I was very different than my peers and the other folks that had the same role and so I tried to be more like them. I felt uncomfortable doing that. And of course I was then second guessing my own intuition.
And so over time, I really found that when you find your HR people, so to speak, the ones that you see yourself in, it really helps you find your own voice and be confident in who you are because there's just so many different types of people who work in HR and you want to find the ones that help you find your own voice as well.
So one of the things that I've experienced and focused on a lot is development of my team and the teams I work with, just trying to impart whatever knowledge or learnings I've gained over the years, and I was conducting a mock interview with a leader that was up for promotion, helping the format of their responses, digging in from our data and results and just really trying to test him, and at the end of the mock, before I could stop myself, I told him there was no way in hell
I would ever promote him, and a little aggressive, a little little forward for HR and certainly probably shouldn't have used the H word, but then I went into telling him all the things that he did wrong, and he just kind of sat there in shock knowing he had done poorly, but maybe not ready to hear just how poorly and then I told him all the things I recommended he should do to prepare, and that was gonna be an additional 40 hours of work on top of his current 60 hour work week.
And so he kind of whimpered out of my office and looked defeated, and two weeks later, he shows up and he's got this huge grin on his face, and he'd passed the interview loop and got promoted and he told me that the direct feedback that I gave him was his catalyst, like if it hadn't been delivered that way, if I just said, well you could really do these things, he wasn't gonna take the same like aggressive approach to really reformatting everything and taking a different approach.
So that part is like exciting for me, cause I'm glad he got promoted and I wanted to help him. James is a great manager, he still is to this day. But what I love most about that is now I still have people that reach out, other leaders in the company that say, hey, I talked to James, I'm going for promotional interviews. He really recommended that I mock interview with you based on your feedback you've provided him.
- What a great testament to how HR can show up in a really transparent way and I'm sure that you delivered that message with compassion, but also very clearly so that James was prepared to hear it. I think sometimes we sugarcoat things and people sometimes just need that really authentic raw information to be able to hear it in the moment so I love that story. How have you taken some of those tactics and used them for really building your own HR team?
- I think in a lot of ways, it's that forward openness that gives the team the opportunity to understand where they're going and what the right approach can be. And if I'm not direct with them, it gets wishy-washy, and I've gotten that feedback before too, where I'm not really clear on what the deliverable is and what you want from me, where I'm thinking, oh, I'm telling them to think big and make up their own plans and decisions and so it really...
Without that directness, it really can be challenging not just to build the team, but also to give them the right guidance to help them feel confident in what they're going to do. - I know that throughout your career and your messaging, you have mentioned leading with humor and empathy and maybe occasionally tears. I'm curious, how do you see these aspects shaping the culture and companies that you've worked with? - Oh, I love this question.
So one of my favorite quotes is laughter through tears is my favorite emotion and Dolly Parton, that was her character in the movie Still Magnolias who said that and I definitely funnel her into my life in many ways, both personally and professional, but I think my approach is wearing my emotions on my sleeve.
I share my fears and my excitement in equal measure with the teams and I found that by humbling myself in front of others helps them to feel open too and these human feelings are what gives the business life, that's what helps show why we spend 40 or more hours a week together with these folks by choice and then how the company's policy is applied by these humans is what shapes the culture.
So it's not just this policy shapes the culture, it's how we take it, interpret it, and apply it in a variety of different ways. And like I've worked in retail customer facing HR roles, I've worked in distribution or fulfillment center roles, and for the last four years, I've been in more virtual and traveling roles supporting a logistics network and in each of those, I've experienced happy, sad, angry, and even scary moments with my coworkers and with my directs.
And in many of these situations, I've needed to be the voice of reason and take the appropriate action and if you haven't already shown the team your true self, they don't trust you in those moments and that's the thing I try to impart on my leaders within the organization, like be yourself. Show who you are and don't feel like you have to separate your personal and your professional lives. You are one person and it all applies in those spaces.
- There's so much truth to showing up as your authentic self and in all the ways that you're messy, I've shared on the podcast a little bit about my sons. I am a military mom, I have three kids in the military, and my youngest just went to bootcamp in June and that was a hard time for me. It was the first time I've been an empty nester and going through not having children at home anymore and being able to show up at work and say, you know what?
I'm a little soft emotionally this day, so this is the level you're gonna get out of me today has been one of the most things I've appreciated with the work I do and the supervisors and the teams that I work with, because I do have that space to show up as my authentic self. As you've worked with your HR teams, I think sometimes we can fall into...
Lots of people can fall into the Monday morning blues or the Sunday scaries or whatever the catch phrase is and I always think of office space when she's answering the phone and like the whole-- - Case of the Mondays. - Case of the Mondays, how do you keep your HR team motivated with some of the tactics you've talked about? So they go into Mondays with a full cup and their cup stays full throughout the week.
- It's a challenge, and it depends on how your team is set up and how interactive you are. My team right now, we're all virtual. So I sit in my office at home, they sit in their offices at home. Fortunately we're gonna meet this week and see each other in person, which is nice, but it's about staying connected through each of the different, like, ways that we run off separately during the week. So we have a team meeting each Monday and being virtual, it helps us connect.
We discuss our plans, the challenges that we're facing, and I like to try to understand like, what can I either remove from their plate or change or deprioritize to help them feel like they have the time and energy and support to get through that week. I like to find out about their weekend, what did their kids' fifth birthday party, how did it go? How'd the cake turn out, I have one person on my team who makes these beautiful cakes and so always asking about those. Did they go camping?
How was the trip? I have a Denver Nuggets fan who was very excited very recently because they won the championship. So it was kind of asking more and understanding more about their personal lives and doing it because you care, I think makes an impact too and that's one of the challenges that I try to help our leaders overcome is you don't just ask to get a result. You ask because you care and if you don't care, it's gonna show.
But I try to make sure that we're talking about both personally and professional. Kind of hearkens back to the previous question you asked me. We're the same person. We're just doing different things in our personal and professional lives and so I try to maintain it to that week cause you're right, it's 40, 50, 60 hours depending on what's going on of trying to tackle the biggest problems that we've seen in our careers.
And so on Wednesdays, I have the team recap their project statuses and outline their challenges for the rest of the week so that I can jump in and escalate, get our leadership involved more to solve more problems. And at the same time, we've built out some mechanisms for engagement that help us to connect and learn about each other. So if we don't have the mechanism, it's just gonna fall by the wayside because it's not in our top goals or priorities for the company or for our team.
So like, we'll try things... Last week, we had World Music Day, everyone shared their favorite songs and why they loved it in our Slack channel and we made it into a playlist and now we all have it to enjoy and listen to everybody's songs and kind of get to know each other and understand what people do to decompress or why they love a song or things like that.
And I think one of the things that's had the most longstanding impact, about four years ago, I started something with one of my previous teams and it was called a Thankful Thursday call. And we would each jump on, it was at the end of the day and we would say one thing that we are professionally thankful for and one that we're personally thankful for and it was just such a great way to wrap up our Thursday and be ready to just finalize the week on Friday and go in with a positive attitude.
- How have you supported your employees when they're empty? And a lot of times in HR, we can reach that where we've given so much, we have empathy burnout, we have compassion fatigue, and we still are giving high discretionary effort. And so we walk into our HR leader's office and safe space, and so you kind of lose yourself for a moment. How do you help people engage when they're in that moment because HR can be a very taxing role to be in.
- Oh absolutely, I can't count the number of times that someone's cried in my office and I cry with them. And I don't know if that's helping, but it certainly connects us. I feel their pain when they come in, and I think a lot of HR professionals have that same impact of you sit there and you live in that moment with them. And then it's really kind of up to me to find out what can help them through it. First is listening. I think so often, we're problem solvers, we wanna make everything better.
I'm always like constantly like, what do you need? What can I do, how can I do it? And I'm like, when do I ask that for myself? And so I try to flip it and say, okay, let me hear what they're saying. Let me see if there are things that are pressing in their statements that could be impacted by something I do. Can I give them an extra day off? Do they need to finish out the day? Do I need to send them a little care package?
I had a girl, bless her heart, she lost two weeks worth of work because her computer crashed and we were launching the training that she had created the following week. Mini heart attack, I think back to college and all the papers that I lost because I fell asleep cause I stayed up way too late trying to write them, but in her instance, like she had no... There was nothing that could be done except we needed time and we needed space to get it done.
And we expanded or not expanded, extended out the time so that we could get her that extra time to pull it back together. I sent her a little care package, it was something simple. She lives 1,000 miles away, but that's the joy of things like DoorDash and GrubHub and all of those where you can... If you have somebody's address, you can send them a little package, a little treat. And so sent her some caffeinated drinks, sent her some desserts, sent her a card.
Trying to help her see that I've got her back and whatever she needs, I'll do it and while there was nothing we could determine on that call that I could fix, here's something to show like, you're doing a great job, you're gonna get through this and wherever I can help, let me know and I think it's those moments of listening, asking the question of what can I do? Also knowing that a lot of times people won't say, oh, here's what I need or here's... Cause they're in it, they're stuck.
And so taking what they've told you and trying to find ways to solve their problem when they're just too deep in it. - Yeah, there's so many times you can be just so deep. And as you were sharing that, that story about her losing all of her stuff, I felt that in my soul, cause I have been there where you've been working so passionately on something and the second time around just isn't as good, let's be honest. Like you kind of gave 100% the first time around.
And not that it's gonna be bad, but it's like when you take a test and they tell you not to go back and change your answer cause your first answer's probably the correct one. You've shared a lot about your journey and about your approach to building your HR team, but you kinda fell into HR, which a lot of us have who are in the HR space. I'd love to hear your story and how you got into HR.
- Yeah, it's interesting because when I was in high school, college, you're going through that career search of what do I wanna do, what do I wanna be when I grow up, I didn't know that HR existed. I literally didn't know what human resources meant. I knew companies had them, but I was never... It just sounded, hmm, I don't know, okay. So when I went to school, I went to school for graphic design. I planned to move to the big city after that and get a job in graphic design after college.
I went to Youngtown State University, which is a smaller state school in between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. So I figured I'd land in one of those two. I ended up landing in Pittsburgh and after I moved there, I actually ended up doing an internship in San Francisco with a graphic design firm and I found that I really didn't like creating designs for other people.
That control freak in me, learned that other people in my opinion had horrible taste and I could not stand that they were ignoring my professional advice. Like I went to school for this, I know what I'm talking about. That young confidence, that bravado that you have. So when I moved to Pittsburgh and was completing that internship and I was like, oh man, I don't know, now I've gotta search for a different career.
I started working for a big box retailer and I was overseeing a couple different departments while I was searching for what am I gonna land in? My supervisor there actually identified that maybe I'd be a good fit for their executive leadership program and I was like, leadership, what's that? And so I started taking some of the classes that they have and eventually I actually interviewed for their salaried leadership roles and was fortunate enough to get that.
And then they asked the question of, well, which role do you feel is best for you and they've got all the I'm in retail so it's sales floor, logistics, guest experience or customer experience roles. Anybody who worked where I worked will now know exactly which company I'm talking about cause I said guest experience, just spoiler alert.
But after working there for a while, I was like, I saw that HR was the role that got to drive engagement and fun and they were always talking to the team and getting to share positive messages and it's different everywhere, but it was like, I wanna have that experience where I can focus more on people than on a process. I didn't wanna set planograms and run a register or that sort of thing.
And so between that and seeing that they got to be on conference calls, which I thought was so cool, little did I know how uncool they are, but as I went through that process, I was like, I think I wanna do HR and either fortunately or unfortunately enough, they put me in it. They're like, okay, we're gonna let you do this. Like you've never had a leadership role before. Put me in HR, which I don't know, I don't know that I trust their judgment on that, but thankfully it worked.
And the rest is history. Since then, I've had probably... I should have probably done the math, seven or eight different roles in a variety of two different companies really that I've worked in HR for. Both large companies and both very different styles. And I think I would've never found this on the path I was on so I'm really appreciative that I tanked that internship.
Like it's a really good thing that graphic design was not my ending career because I think it would've been much shorter and I'm a better person for working in human resources. - If we could take anything away from that story, it's conference calls are not cool. I absolutely love that you had that mentality going into it because that warms my heart, cause I completely agree.
You shared throughout our conversation some really cool tactical things that I just wanted to highlight around supporting your team, send them a little something, a treat. It doesn't have to be this big grandiose gesture, it can just be like, hey, I'm thinking about you. I wrote down Thankful Thursdays, love that. I'm sure our listeners can totally steal that.
And then the last one, the teen playlist, think that is a genius idea because there's always go-to songs for hey, my workout go-to song, my chill in my office song, my fold my laundry song, all that stuff. Being that we're on the HR mixtape and you think about your own kind of journey, what would you say is like your opening track or your triumphant closer, like some of the things that you think of as those pillars for your HR journey?
- Yeah, when I think about that, this is a tough one because you think about 15 years and how do you boil it down to those three kind of sections of your life and I think the first part was so much growth, and learning and understanding what leadership is, and then human resources itself, I think that first part was trying to be successful by doing everything on my own.
I spent years thinking that I had to do all the work, and I finally learned that when I hit a wall, that I had to teach my team to take on new things, allow myself to step up into larger spaces and take on new challenges as well because if I was gonna try to run the world like Beyonce, who runs the world, I thought I was going to run it all by myself, but no, it's all of us if you use our resources appropriately and it took a... I mean, I wanna say it was like a four
to five year timeframe of me getting real close to burnout because I just tried to do everything on my own. I think as I was learning that I couldn't do everything by myself, I also then learned that my team's successes lead to my own successes as well. As a leader, you typically have far more tasks, or sorry, not far more, far fewer tasks that you accomplish. Like, I'm not ticking off a list of create this or do that.
It's more check in with this person, read up on that, follow up on this document. It's never the same... Personally, I get like nice dopamine hits when you check something off the list and it's less of that in a leadership role. It's the follow up, it's support, it's removing barriers and adjusting your mindset to supporting others completing their work as a game changer and that's, I think, where I really felt my ability as a leader expand a lot more.
I feel immense pride for the accomplishments of my teams. They're remarkable individuals that came together and they made so much impact and without me learning that they needed to be successful and that I was the barrier buster for them, they wouldn't have had the right support to achieve as much as they have. And then I think the closing track, it's about embracing failure as a teaching tool. None of us want to fail, it hurts. I know I get disappointed in myself, I'm my worst critic.
I think a lot of times we feel like we've let others down, we get nervous about our own ability to accomplish things. And so I take time after each project, whether it's a good project that had great results or one that had some opportunities that we're gonna need to work through to meet with the owners and talk about what did go well because even in bad projects or ones with bad results, there's still good things that come from that.
What could have gone better and how they're gonna apply, what they learned on future projects. It's simple follow up and check and correct, but I think I focus on talking about the tough stuff and then moving on. Don't belabor it. Get past it. Find ways to make it successful. Like, I know they say failing up is a bad thing, meaning you're not that great and somehow you keep failing up the ladder.
I think if this is kind of failing forward, so that doesn't have the negative connotation, using what we mess up to help us take the right steps down the path. - I love that, what a great outline for a future in HR. Start with growth, learn about developing your team and successes, and then leverage failure for continued growth as you continue your career. Love those, Kim, what a great discussion. Thanks for taking a few minutes of your day to chat with me.
- Thank you so much for having me, Shari. It's been so fun. - I hope you enjoyed today's episode. You can find show notes and links at the HRmixtape.com. Come back often and please subscribe, rate and review.