Can you break traditional management structures and still drive exceptional results?
Steve O'Brien, SVP of People Solutions at Syneos Health, proves it's possible with his innovative "decoder ring" approach to talent leadership—managing 25 direct reports without a single scheduled one-on-one meeting.
In this episode, Steve explains how he balances efficiency with employee engagement, why decision-making should be pushed down to remove bottlenecks, and how psychological safety and autonomy drive performance.
Steve also talks about:
Connect with Steve on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevemobrien
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[00:00:00] Steve O'Brien: When you come to the conversation about defending an ROI or casting a vision, if it doesn't have a small degree of tension in it, or a little bit of you in there, right, that the customer didn't bring, you maybe want to revisit what unique point of view am I bringing.
[00:00:16] Dave Travers: So what does it really take for your business to attract world-class talent today?
I'm Dave Travers, president of ZipRecruiter, and on Talent All-Stars, we shine a light. On the people and the day to day processes behind recruitment and retention at some of the world's most influential businesses. Today's Talent All Star is Steve O'Brien, the SVP of People Solutions at Syneos Health.
Syneos helps biopharmaceutical companies with a wide range of services, from organizing clinical trials, analyzing data, to assisting with FDA approval. Before joining Syneos a few years ago, Steve spent time at big-name companies like Monster, Job. com, and IBM, and he has some really interesting insights into how to structure high performing teams and how to leverage technology to do it without losing the human touch. Steve, welcome to Talent All-Stars.
[00:01:06] Steve O'Brien: Hey Dave, thanks for having me.
[00:01:07] Dave Travers: Great to have you. So you have had a super interesting career that has touched a lot of technology and a lot of talent acquisition.
So take me back to where you realized that the unity and the synthesis of those two things was going to be a big deal for you.
[00:01:25] Steve O'Brien: So where was I? I was sitting in the cafeteria on July 3rd. I actually had, uh, unsurprisingly fallen in love with the talent side of that first and founded a, a surprising development.
I did a undergraduate degree in philosophy, not because I wanted to be unemployed. I planned to go to grad school that got interrupted by a relationship that then became a marriage. Uh, and so it was a really good interruption, but left me with a little bit of a curveball. What do I do with a, an undergraduate degree in philosophy?
Recruiting was one of those, uh, careers that really all they cared about is did you have a degree and could you do the work I was looking for, uh, about eight months in, I couldn't believe how fortunate I was that I stumbled into that. Right. They're like, why wasn't there a Fisher price recruiter toy or like some way to tell me when I was younger that this path was available to me, uh, I was taking my contractors out to lunch and beginning to meet their families and seeing the difference that I was making.
Uh, and not because I was appraising it, their, their, their wives and husbands were telling me and that ability to make a big difference in people's lives and do good work ended up being this really potent brew. So whatever it is that we're doing here, I want to do a lot of that. So I fell in love with talent and then started exploring ways that I could do talent at scale, right?
I loved making the individual placement, but what does building systems that produce talent look like? And we were in the early days of what became RPO and I got in early with a company called Kinect, uh, My background was the life sciences, and so I really loved the building large systems, building large teams, and that strategic integration with pharmaceutical customers.
Kinect eventually got bought by IBM, and that gave me an entirely new toolkit. I had really smart people with Uh, computer science backgrounds, folks that knew how to write and secure, uh, intellectual property and, and, and patents. And so I got the opportunity to work on the Watson program and, uh, you know, I'm not a technologist or a tech guy originally and started describing to them what I thought the principles of recruiting were, how I thought productivity could be described.
How I thought that we could identify patterns and requisitions. And that gave birth to my first sort of foray into HR tech and the synthesis of talent and structure and strategy and technology, uh, that Watson program was awesome.
[00:03:44] Dave Travers: Yeah. For those who don't know, Watson is, is AI before AI was cool in the current generation.
It was cool back then, but it was a, it was a different thing that IBM led. So, so give me. Now, like you talked a little bit about the impact you made and felt as you talked to not only the people you were placing, but the spouses, as you got into talent, now that you're a leader though, you're at Syneos, you've been at IBM.
Like you're a leader of real systems of scale, as you talked about before, how do you stay connected to the impact when it's easy all day as a talent leader to just be thinking about the numbers and the metrics, et cetera.
[00:04:23] Steve O'Brien: Yeah. For me, it, it anchors back to a belief I have about where high performance comes from.
I'll give you an example. And this, you know, for the listener is not actually how I do my planning. It's more illustrative, but when I'm building teams and organizations. I often do it from two vantage points and entirely separately. Uh, the first time I build a team, I do it from a very scientific and structural perspective, regardless of whether or not I think anybody's going to like working in that system.
What is the most efficient? And then I set that aside. The next is to design a system based on what would everybody want. What would produce the best culture experience? What do I think people would desire? And then I take the two and I sort of slide them over top of one another, and it becomes the decoder ring of where some good ideas might lie.
But the point of the story is that high performance is always an interesting balance between strong strategic systems and structural decisions and a deep appreciation of people. And so I don't know that I could drive a high-performance team if I succumbed to the temptation to be separate from them or to not be able to be plugged into what do people want.
So I tried to design roles that have autonomy, task variety, right? So monotony is pretty tough. And so how do I make sure that that's thought through when we're building these roles, task significance. If what I do doesn't matter, it's hard to get really rallied behind it, and then feedback, right? And so at a role level, there's a little bit of a code that helps you stay close and provide people what they want.
And then at the environment level, or culturally, self determination. Uh, that people are choosing their own path through the world that I create to, uh, psychological security. And I have some colleagues that really push the limits of, uh, of this one. Basically what it means is you don't have to have my opinion or an approved opinion to speak your mind.
It's really important. I just had a conversation last week with somebody that basically disagreed with everything I think, and I did have to call them afterwards and just say like, just so you know, I support, and I'm glad that you told me that you disagree with everything, um, but psychological security.
And then the third is belonging, right? The, the antithesis of belonging is the cliche. You're only as good as your last sale. If you're in a place like that, where your status on the team is that vulnerable, you tend to not have the security you need to be a top performer. So I stay close because one, you can't design without being close to what people are looking for.
And then two, there are some good patterns in literature about how to design teams that are high performing.
[00:06:48] Dave Travers: Got it. Okay. So I think there are several steps of that that sound intuitive, but putting it all together sounds hard and complicated. So I'd love an example. So you said, start out with. What's the most efficient, I think we can all imagine in theory what that looks like.
What the humans involved would actually want the most. Got it. And then you slide those two transparent visions on top of each other. And that's the, and then the decoder ring reveals itself. So that sounds amazing and magical, but give him an example of where you were able to, you know, use the decoder ring and really marry the, the humans and the efficient in a way that really worked.
[00:07:23] Steve O'Brien: So I just launched a team last year in a heavily matrixed operating model. Uh, it's 25 people, they all report to me. Matrixed operating models are very powerful from an efficiency perspective, a problem solving perspective, if you can get them to work. The problem is that I would then have 25 people all reporting to me, and I don't know that I would be able to survive being useful and effective for 25 people.
So what I did with a small group of leaders is sort of built a theory or a framework on what do we think people or employees want from managers? And is there a way for us to break that down into constituent parts that don't have to all come from me, right? So one thing that we know needs to come from a leader, if you experience harassment, discrimination, retaliation, you need support and authority, right?
So, okay. That's still mine. Another thing that you need from a leader is radical advocacy, right? That I'd care about your career, that I'm a champion of what you want, and I help you figure out how to be effective and efficient at pursuing your goals, right? These two things uniquely mine as a leader. We started wandering into things that I didn't really feel like they had to come from me.
Problem solving, right? Now we would typically call our boss and thought partner and work through the idea and I'd like to think that I'm a useful thought partner if they did call me, but I'm not necessary. The second is prioritization right now. If the goals aren't clear, if the deliverables are not documented, you do need to check in with somebody.
What are we doing next boss? But if you can define the goals and the deliverables, there is a degree of intuitiveness. About what needs to come next. And so prioritization could be provided by clear project planning. The third thing was interpersonal conflict, right? And so I don't like, I don't like my colleague that, you know, they talk to me bad or, you know, Jim keeps putting me on projects that I don't want to, uh, to be on.
This was the most speculative. I just basically said, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. I'm going to see what happens. But anyway, the gift of breaking it down this way is that we were able to put all 25 people into this matrix management environment. Everybody reports to me, highly leveraged, highly efficient, but theoretically, all of the people involved would still get what they want.
We're now 12 months in, I've got a lot of data, and I can tell you on a scale of 1 say, Thumbs up. It works. I get what I need. This has been a really good adventure.
[00:09:46] Dave Travers: Yeah. So in order to make that efficient, do all 25 of these people have a twice a week, you know, one-on-one with you? How do you manage that?
[00:09:53] Steve O'Brien: No one-on-ones. Tell me about that. Yes, we do quarterly performance reviews. Goals and careers are managed on a quarterly basis. One-on-ones are replaced with a project structure. And so all the work that the 25-person team embarks upon is in a project format. And so you have one-on-ones with a project manager or a project leader.
Various people could be playing that role. It's not a job title. It's an assignment, right? But during that project, if I'm a project manager, I might have a one-on-one with the consultant for the purposes of. Driving that project forward, problem solving, interpersonal conflict, thought partnership, right?
Things that they can do. And then once a quarter, I go through with the team members in a degree that most probably haven't experienced before. A very detailed review of what are your goals? How do you describe them? How did you decide on them? What are you doing to pursue them intentionally? Is it effective?
And then providing them feedback. So we collect a lot of documented qualitative feedback. Uh, shout out to ChatGPT. It's way more than I can process. I don't try and process it. One of the great features of ChatGPT or whatever your company uses for generative AI is tell me the themes, right? Dump the data in there.
Tell me the themes. Wow.
[00:11:11] Dave Travers: Wow. Okay. So no one-on-one structurally based on reporting, but 25 direct reports with each having a quarterly. Performance review.
[00:11:22] Steve O'Brien: That's right.
[00:11:22] Dave Travers: Incredible. So for somebody thinking about, I need a bold rethink of how I manage my team, what would you advise them in thinking about adopting a model that might feel radical to them?
What are they going to be the pros and cons of doing that?
[00:11:37] Steve O'Brien: So the con, uh, and I don't mean this as a reason not to do it. I mean it as an awareness is it does generate tension. And so I had a colleague that I've worked with for a long time, let's say, and we got to a point in the first four to five weeks where I could kind of see in their eye that like, if there was a high ledge to push me off of, they're like, it would have been an exercise in self control.
Like it is tough when you start changing how information flows, how decisions are made and how like the, the social economy of a teamwork. Like that's. Uh, and so the con is that you can't half-measure jumping into this, right? That said, if you want to explore, I think that there are some things that you can begin testing.
One is exploring as a leader, how do I push decision making down to my organization to the lowest level possible? It seems like an easy thing, it turns out to be really hard. Uh, one, because For employees to embrace their role in decision-making and problem-solving, as opposed to being a vessel for direction.
And two, for you as a leader to become familiar with, what are the constituent parts of my gut, right? Like, I know what my decision is, but why is my decision what it is, right? And so you practice being able to verbalize and explore. Well, here's why. Here's what I think the principle underneath of that is, and you can begin doing this as a management technique without needing to commit yourself to a matrix model or 25 people reporting to you.
And it's really, really effective at building capability and engagement in your team. The second thing that you could look at, start testing how information flows. So one of the biggest changes in a matrix is information doesn't flow vertically as much as it flows sort of horizontally and diagonally.
These are new muscles and it's uncomfortable for teams when the answer doesn't come from the boss or the direction doesn't come from the boss. And so long before you commit to different reporting lines, you can start not answering questions. And you can start asking them, what do you think that we should do?
Or who have you spoken with before you called me, right? Just these gentle pushbacks that begin building those muscles in your team to prepare them for the possibility that whether you want to just stick with these changes or one day move into a full matrix, that way it's not as much of a cannonball.
Into the matrix model, but a little bit of a, sort of a, a graduated step.
[00:13:56] Dave Travers: What I love about this is that it's bold and what is really a trap when people are thinking about changing how teams work is by taking two tentative a half measure and it's so easy three weeks later after some, you know, tentative change was announced that everybody's reverted to the prior thing.
And so doing something really clear and really different will drive, you know, real results and start to flex different muscles that people didn't know they had or didn't know they needed.
[00:14:27] Steve O'Brien: If you've heard the story of, uh, you know, burn the boats or something like
[00:14:31] Dave Travers: Cortez. Yes, absolutely.
[00:14:33] Steve O'Brien: If you need commitment, burn the exit plan, right?
[00:14:36] Dave Travers: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Okay. So the thing that I think that it raises that's really interesting, obviously you've risen throughout your career to where you're now this leader of 25 people. At an organization at Syneos, where you have tens of thousands of employees making thousands of hires a year. And you've risen from that individual contributor talking directly to the, not just the person, but their spouse about the impact you've had on their lives to now running this big organization.
And so talk to me about for one of those 25 people or somebody else listening to this, how do you think about making that transition now? How would you advise someone given that you've lived through it and now you're coaching people through it? How do you make that leap to be a leader?
[00:15:19] Steve O'Brien: When I'm coaching leaders, I am encouraging them to develop their own point of view on these topics.
I am more than willing to share with them my experiences and convictions, but it is essential as they take that step that they're not operating off of the points of view of somebody else, but beginning to take ownership. So the first is if you haven't first, you must, and then develop exactly how you do prioritize the development of others.
Your question professionally needs to pivot. And for many, it's natural away from how do I demonstrate how good I am to how do I make others better? And what I then become obsessed with as a definition of how good I am is how good I am at making other people good. And so you, you, you sort of like de center yourself, right?
And then the second is a strategy for balancing the, what I think of as permanently in conflict leadership priorities. And, and I say that so that. I cut off at the pass any intuition that there's some game that makes them all the same. I don't think they're all the same. I think they're legit in conflict.
And those three things are, I believe as a leader, you have a responsibility to the individual that you're leading. Uh, you have a responsibility to the environment, and that's a combination of culture. Board structure, team dynamic, right? And then you have a responsibility to the finances. Most of the time, we're not playing with our own money.
We're playing with someone else's. And it's been given to us with trust and expectation. We're going to do a specific thing excellently with that money. And so we've got to balance these three priorities because sometimes they're intention, right? And so those are the, those are the two things that I really encourage leaders to develop crisp points of view on.
How do you become a builder of others? And then what is your perspective in navigating permanent tensions that you're going to have to figure out how to navigate as a leader between these three priorities?
[00:17:12] Dave Travers: I think the last point is so interesting because I think so often finance and how do I deserve the financial resources to enact my strategy or continue my operations as seen as this like extra burden that is separate from the core mission.
Yeah. And in fact, it's like the oxygen that powers the entire, uh, living being of your organization. And so no matter whether you're the CEO or whether you're the talent acquisition leader, or you're an individual contributor, there's an investment that you require, and it's always your job to make sure your finance person, CEO, whoever it is, you can explain to them.
In crisp detail, in a crisp summary, here's the three or five steps to think about the money you're putting into me, or my machine, and the return you're getting out of it. And that is so powerful for people to think about. One of
[00:18:09] Steve O'Brien: My experience working with talent acquisition leaders, one of the most consistent areas of opportunity is exactly as you're, you're describing, embracing the privilege and the amazing opportunity is to advocate for and defend what that money's doing.
And then the very deep relationship between that privilege and vision. So it needs to be something before you start, in my opinion, talking about mechanics of ROI and dollars, where are we headed, right? What are we going to set off to accomplish together? And then let me break down for you how we invest to do that.
And what the measures are going to be that tell us that we're doing it well, right? And so it's this dance between casting the vision and then leaning into the huge opportunity to say, whatever the size of the org, I more for effect, say, I want 30 million, right? What are you going to do with it? Tell me about what this is going to produce.
That's exciting, right? Uh, and hopefully it's aligned with the strategy of the company and, and a really incredible delivery of what strong talent acquisition leadership can deliver for an organization where talent matters.
[00:19:10] Dave Travers: Yeah. So powerful. So how do you, how do you think about like making that winning pitch?
Cause I think so often as somebody who's coming up as a recruiter, they can pitch a job, they can pitch a candidate, but pitching all of a sudden ROI cases of return on investment case is not as intuitive. The first time you're putting yourself out there saying, I think this is something we should invest in.
How do you even begin that?
[00:19:34] Steve O'Brien: If you've already done this as a TL leader, great. Right. But play along if you don't mind. Let, let go of the customer service. How many pickles do you want? Image that sometimes we can pick up in, in talent acquisition, right? Like, yes, we are in a service function. Yes, we are measurable and we produce a describable good filled requisitions at a certain time interval, right?
That said, uh, we are not in the food services business. And I know that we all know that what I'd encourage is that we are in a form of customer service that must embrace creative tension. An exploration of different ways to accomplish the business's goals when it comes to talent. Right. And so sort of step one is when you come to the conversation about defending an ROI or casting a vision, if it doesn't have a small degree of tension in it or a little bit of you in there, right?
That the customer didn't bring, you maybe want to revisit. What am I bringing? What unique point of view am I, am I bringing? The second is. Allow the vision to be co-created with the business leaders, right? So once you're sure that you're not showing up asking how many pickles, you've got a little bit of you, a little bit of creative tension, place into your strategy, things the business tells you that they want, right?
And make sure that if time to fill. Is super important and cost per hire isn't, don't make cost per hire the cornerstone of your project because you heard at a conference, financial efficiency is, is king right now, right? Like allow nuance and the business to tell you here's how I prioritize what it is that you do, right?
Once you've got a little bit of use and vision and you've got feedback from the business, then break it down into a very well understood system that has metrics that tie to what I'm spending, how the spend influences the mechanics of operation, and then what the key performance indicators are of that operation.
So for example, I'm going to invest in automation for entry level hiring. That is tied to a priority that speed as opposed to writing books about entry-level candidates is the business's priority, and they don't want all of their budget dollars going to that. They've got great development programs and so on and so forth.
They want their budget dollars going to. Management hires, right? And so you, you tie all these pieces together and then you share back, here's my strategic position. Here's the budget for that. And here's how it maps to the hierarchy of goals that you shared with me.
[00:21:59] Dave Travers: There's so much good stuff there, but the very first thing you touched on is having a little bit of yourself in there.
Which I think is especially relevant today is increasingly. We're all starting tasks by going to chat GPT and telling us what the answer should be and chat GPT doesn't have the U part in there, maybe in a future iteration, but not yet. But what makes that powerful is that the person you're pitching the ROI case to is going to get the sense of belief and authenticity that comes.
From this is something I really believe in. And this is something a little bit different than what the textbook might call for because you believe in it. The rest of what you say that matches the playbook and the textbook exactly will have more credibility because you left yourself in there a little bit and the listener can tell.
And you are going to be able to execute against it better because the pitch you're making is aligned with what you really believe rather than what you think are the right answers.
[00:22:54] Steve O'Brien: That's right. Another thing with having a bit of yourself in there, and you said authenticity, and I think that's right and so important, leadership can be disorienting and it's disorienting for two reasons, if not more.
To be at the top can cause a bit of vertigo, right? You're just like, what do I reference? Who is it that I'm, I'm sort of. Tipping my hat to with this decision and the answer is nobody, and that's scary. And then the second is when you own a function, if you're a head of talent acquisition or, or, or any function, uh, you're going to have disagreements with colleagues that you care about, whose opinions and dissent matters to you, but you don't delegate.
The decision-making to them because of that, right? Like you've got this peer network now where we disagree on some topics, and I need to be able to, with conviction, stick to what I'm truly persuaded is in the best interest of the organization, but not need to silence the dissenting voice, right? And so again, like if you're in that system, if there's some authenticity and some conviction in there, I find it a lot easier when you look around and say, Who do I look up to and you realize it's me, you're familiar with what it is that you're deciding on, you're in there and when you disagree with your colleagues, it's easier in my experience to disagree without being disagreeable when you have real great grounding in why you're making a choice, even if it's not what someone else recommends.
[00:24:18] Dave Travers: Couldn't agree more. Disagreeing without being disagreeable is so powerful. And that's exactly right. Okay. We always end these episodes with a, with a rapid fire, you know, let's assume that you're in the elevator, uh, Syneos and the CEO gets in with you and says, Hey, Steve, you've been here for a few years now, you know, we've got 60 seconds until we get up to the top floor.
You know, what should I be thinking about as I monitor the talent acquisition team over the next year? What should I be thinking about really matters in zooming out over a 12 month period and how should I measure it?
[00:24:52] Steve O'Brien: What's your vision on building a high-performing team here? And how do we make sure that the skills and attributes of high performance that you're prioritizing are baked into the way that we're selecting talent?
[00:25:02] Dave Travers: Love that. Twelve months from now, what's my decoder ring that I can tell we're doing it?
[00:25:06] Steve O'Brien: One is that we'd actually have a measurable way that we've integrated your high-performance components into our selection practices. Two, we can do qualitative feedback from your hiring managers to understand their experience with our hires and the alignment with the program that you've built for high performance.
[00:25:22] Dave Travers: Next question, back in the elevator again, 62nd clock gets reset. We're on our way up. You know, I spent a lot of my time interviewing potential team members and internal candidates for promotion. But I don't know that I'm very good at it. What's one thing I could do to become better at interviewing?
[00:25:38] Steve O'Brien: I like asking senior leaders areas of opportunity that they see in the team or the environment that they're in and then their role in them.
People that have a very clear developed point of view on the way that they could contribute to being a solution to the problem tend to be the kind of growth-oriented and team-oriented leaders that I like to work with. And those that have a hard time being articulate, you know, those that say that like, Oh, I'm too much of a perfectionist.
That doesn't mean that they're a bad person or a bad employee, but the. Kind of collaboration I'm looking for in the kind of ownership I'm looking for is often not exemplified by people that struggle to see their place in the solution.
[00:26:13] Dave Travers: Steve O'Brien. It's very clear why you're a Talent All-Star. Thanks so much for joining us today.
[00:26:18] Steve O'Brien: I appreciate it, Dave. It was a pleasure.
[00:26:23] Dave Travers: That's Steve O'Brien, the SVP of People Solutions at Syneos Health. You can find Steve on LinkedIn. We'll put a link to his profile in the show description. Thanks for listening to this episode of Talent All-Stars, and you can always find us on YouTube also. And if you know a great guest who'd be awesome for the show, send us an email too, talent All stars@ziprecruiter.com.
I'm Dave Travers. Thanks for listening to Talent All Stars. See you next week.