This is the Press Release written in the design and proposal phase of our March Extended Leadership team session in Hyderabad. Please read, reflect and leave your comments on the session, and your thoughts on how we did achieving this vision.
By integrating Amazon’s “Working Backwards” methodology with an innovative approach to developing leaders and mobilize employees, the India-based leadership team moved past the constraints and limitations they had been experiencing and emerged with new thinking about themselves, leadership and what success requires. Lloyd Wilky, Sr. Manager, HR Operations declared; “I am confident that this team will set the gold standard for quality and productivity in HR Operations that will inspire all of our global operations to provide exemplary customer service to our employees and produce benchmark results for Amazon.” Key to the transformation from lackluster results and a dysfunctional work environment was a three-day session with members of the HR Services Leadership Team aimed at unleashing their capability to be a collaborative, high performing organization. The workshop served as an inflection point to change the outcome of the negative trajectory they were on. Momentum will be sustained with ongoing individual and team support reinforcing the importance of a future-based orientation, commitments and new perspectives for designing and implementing their desired state.
During the session the participants:
● Began the work at hand with a focus on self-awareness and intrapersonal skills
● Examined and let go of perspectives that were holding them back as individuals and a leadership team
● Experienced a future-based leadership model
● Collectively rewrote their future to achieve breakthrough performance
● Worked backwards to identify the strategy, culture, processes, structure, employee engagement and metrics that would be needed to achieve their goal
● Designed and clarified the specific leadership commitments required to attain goals
● Adopted a language of leadership and practices to sustain positive momentum
Given the success of the engagement, senior leaders at Amazon are exploring how to replicate this workshop for other key Amazon teams who need to improve agility and performance. “This program makes a wonderful complement to the efforts and results we have achieved through a commitment to the leadership principle ‘Hire and Develop the Best’” said Suzanne Graham, Director, HR Services - Americas. “Given the significant investment we make to get the best people as employees, it is essential that we employ new methods that enable high performing teams to achieve results.”
The HR Operations team’s importance to Amazon’s strategy of providing high quality and great service experiences to our employees cannot be overstated as growth continues unabated. The impact of the work they do reverberates throughout our company, affecting everything from productivity gains realized when associates have excellent help with employment issues to the reinforcement of our customer service culture.
