How Larry Ott built a talent engine that fuels business growth at Cooper Standard

Well, it's a great question. I've been thinking about that for about a week, and even though I've been at it for 42 years, almost 42 years, I couldn't think of one specific instance where I embarrassed myself that would make for a funny story, so I'm not going to try to do that. What I will say is I would advise everybody to be self-deprecating whenever you can, not take yourself too seriously. When you do have an embarrassing moment, make sure you're the one laughing the loudest and the hardest, and just be vulnerable, show your vulnerability, show that you're human, and just don't take yourself too seriously. Again, 42 years, I ought to have some embarrassing stories, but I just couldn't think of one. There are probably too many.

Well, first of all, at work I'm an open book. So Monday mornings, back when we were in the office every day, now it's usually Tuesdays, everybody in the office knows what I did over the weekend, everybody knows the funny stories, the mistakes I made, things that I was doing out in the yard if it's the summer, how bad my golf game was. And I'm extremely self-deprecating when it comes to golf. So I think it's probably my Monday or Tuesday morning explanations of the weekend that are the most telling relative to me.

Too embarrassing. Well, hello and welcome. It should be better.

Thank you.

I think what stands out right now, and the good news is it's fairly recent, but when I joined Cooper Standard 11 and a half years ago, and I'm not affixing the blame to anyone, but from a talent perspective there really was nothing. There were no processes, there were no definitions of high potential. We had a very weak performance management process which was there but it really wasn't utilized, and certainly not utilized for the right purposes. So with the help of a handful, what we call a small but mighty team of talent folks, we've crafted for the size of our company a very well-defined approach to talent strategy and talent management. We've built what we call Cooper Standard University. We've created rigor and discipline in our performance management processes, and recently took a lot of waste and effort out of that process in addition to system work, which makes it in my opinion the most lean performance management process I've ever seen. And I've probably experienced 10 in my career, 10 different processes. So we're very proud of that. We have a very good track record of internal fill at higher levels, so we build the talent pipeline very effectively. And I have the good fortune of working with a CEO, and I say with although I work for him but with him on this, I couldn't have a better partner in this area of the business than our CEO, who really takes it to heart. We have a couple touch points with the board every year where we talk about succession at the C-suite level, but then really talent management across the whole organization down into lower levels. So I'm very proud of the work that the team did. I'm far from saying that it was me. I had the good fortune of inheriting an open field, and then I at least was smart enough to take advantage of the open field.

Sure. Yeah, we used to have, you know, back in the day a five-point rating scale, and we ultimately did away with that because there were just too many gradations of rating and people got hung up on numerical ratings. Inevitably there were people negotiating their ratings because they knew we looked at ratings to try to assess how we did pay increases, bonus payouts, promotions. So it really became a non-value added exercise. We did away with that and went to a three-point system: exceeds, meets, and does not meet, whatever we called it. And then within that, we rated everybody on their goals on those three-point scale as well as our key capabilities, and then you would type in comments on all of those areas: the goals and the capabilities, and then put in an overall rating with more written words. So we spent a lot of time doing this, and in my case it's this two-fingered typist, so it was just very inefficient. It wasn't well-received, although I will say I've yet to see a performance management process that everybody loved. Sometimes they tolerate it, and maybe that's as far as you can get. But we took most of that typing out. We decided we were going to go to one rating, one set of comments, and that was it. Now, the success of this is based on whether you've got a feedback-rich environment, because the last thing we told our leaders and our employees was we expect you to sit down once a year and talk about this. What we expect is instantaneous and constant feedback. I think we've gotten a lot further down the road. Closing out 2024 performance management was the first year we used this abbreviated approach. We're putting together a team to further analyze it with some feedback from our employees for the out years, but in my opinion it's as lean as you can possibly get. Feedback so far anecdotally has been very positive.

Yeah, within our Cooper Standard University we've got functional colleges. So as an example, the HR College, I'm the dean of the HR College. And one of the metrics that we use is how many classes are taken. And probably a more important metric is the degree to which, and it's not really quantifiable so to speak, the degree to which the respective functional leader embraces their college. We don't have colleges set up in every function because we've got some functional leaders who have decided it's not a priority for them. When I talk about it with our leaders, the way I try to explain it is this is your way of crafting what you want the future of your workforce to look like. And what are the focus areas? Those are the things that you try to develop people relative to, and this is your way of doing that. If you don't do something, you're just kind of walking around in the dark and not influencing what your functional workforce looks like, what they're capable of doing, what their competencies are. You're just not capable of doing it. So those aren't real hard quantifiable measures, but we use them to the best of our ability.

That's a great question. The way I do it in HR and the way I encourage other leaders to do it is, you know, I spent a lot of time with my direct reports and I spend a lot of time in my management routines talking to a broad cross-section of our functional workforce. And based on my observations, I've identified a few areas that I think we need to be stronger in relative to HR. And I've got Communications as well. And the two that I've picked are business acumen and quantitative capability, analytical capability. So the courses that we run through HR College that are available and in many cases mandated for all of our 200 HR people throughout the company are based on analytical ability and business acumen. When anybody in my team asks me what I look for relative to HR people, those are the two things that I talk about, starting with business acumen. And if you're not capable of understanding what the business is trying to achieve, then there's no way you can help. And I look for HR people to be business people first, HR people second. And our CEO sets a great example with all of the C-suite. What he says to us and I pass it on to my folks is: when you walk into the room for our senior leader meetings, I expect you to take your functional hat off and check it at the door. That doesn't mean that you don't comment or represent during meetings, but first and foremost you contribute to the business. When the meeting's over, you can pick up your hat on the way out. But it's really business first. So that's the way I've done it in HR, and I've encouraged other leaders to think about where you've got gaps. In some cases you can look through performance reviews and it's pretty clear-cut where you might have, let's say in a technical area, technical gaps. So what are you going to create in your development processes to close those gaps? It's kind of as simple as that. Simple to say, simple maybe to understand, not always so simple to do.

Yeah, we partnered with an external source that really created a huge off-the-shelf list of courses, curriculum. So we did that. And in my small but mighty talent team, I have one training development guy who is, and if he ever listens to this podcast his head will get really large, but he's outstanding, he's absolutely great. So for certain things that we want to tailor make to Cooper Standard, he helps us with that. But we were able to find a lot of things off the shelf, reasonably priced. And a lot of our focus is on leadership, and the dean of the leadership college is the CEO. So that's a little bit about the execution. And then from there, I'll be honest, it's just again back to the leader. I pay very close attention, and sometimes I ask for lists of people who didn't attend the courses. And I have a gauge of people within my function who I feel are strong when it comes to business acumen, and the ones I feel maybe who aren't. And when I see the folks who aren't in those two capabilities and they're not attending the courses, it makes me scratch my head and question: does this person want to close the gap or not? Or are they what I would call a traditional personnel person? And that's what they were called when I started with GM 42 years ago. It was the Personnel department, and the way you made your name was being great at executing the processes. There was never, that I can remember back then, any discussion of being a strategic partner and helping leaders, top leaders, run the business. So I hope that answers it.

Oh yeah, yeah, I have plenty of those. I just don't think we have time. But I believe I've always believed in experimentation and trying things. What I tell folks is, you know, try some different things. You're not going to destroy the recipe of Coca-Cola, trust me. So in my last company as the CHRO, the mistake I made in trying to build my service delivery model is what we call it: I made too many assumptions. And I had a very clear-cut vision in my mind about what the HR business partner was there to do. When I talk about the service delivery model, I see three components: I see the HR business partners, those are the strategic partners lined up with leaders; I see centers of expertise like talent, HRIS, total rewards, comp and ben, those types of things; and then I see business services, and that's for lack of a better term the back office work, where you have trained experts who are efficient in what they do, they're very much responsible for the quality of the data that you've got in your HRIS. So you've really got those three pillars. And the one I was most focused on based on my observations of the team there was the HR business partner role. And again, I saw a little bit too much of, hey, this person's a great executor. I didn't see enough of this person helps me run the business and they're at the right hand. I had a leader back in GM who told me that his two most important people, and they had to be good, were the right bower and the left bower: the head of HR and the head of Finance. Those were the two most important, and I've never ever forgotten that. And when I've seen HR partners who merely look at it as an administrative task and go to meetings with a pad of paper and spend all their time writing down things that they have to run out and do, as opposed to raising questions like why is our inventory so high, why this, why that, more strategic things. So I just made some assumptions, and the mistake I made was I assumed people understood what I was thinking, and I wasn't prescriptive enough and I didn't build enough process to help people get there. So good news is I learned that lesson. I did it entirely differently at Cooper Standard than I did at Meritor.

Well, I think, you know, the other thing I tell folks in my organization is you want to be described as a business person who works in HR. That's the way you want to be described. And you know, I spend a lot of time with all of the leaders at our company, the C-suite leaders, and it's not typically about people issues per se. It might be leadership issues, and predominantly it's leadership issues. But it's not what people back in 1992 or 1983 for that matter would have been focused on. I think it's the quickest way to get and maintain that seat at the table. I always get really frustrated when I hear a CHRO ask me, 'How did you get that? You seem to have a good relationship with your CEO. How did you get that and how did you develop your seat at the table?' And I tell them the same thing: if you have to ask that question, it means you're not doing any of the right things. And first and foremost is again, understand what you're doing. When I interviewed the CEO for this current position, and he still remembers this and he tells the story, but we were talking about strategy and I said, 'Look, I tell my folks, and I believe this as well, if you're going to memorize a strategy, let it be the business strategy. If you have a question about the HR strategy, look it up.' And he has told that story in my presence probably 20 times. I meant it. It's what I meant. So I think HR leaders have to aspire to be described as a business person who chose HR.

Well, I think 15 to 20 years ago I was already very focused on this. At the beginning of my career, I think I had it figured out. I don't know what made me figure it out. I think I had a lot of training and education from a business perspective. I was well-schooled across the board, and I think I just understood that at the end of the day, if you don't understand what we do, then I'm not sure how you can contribute anything. To me it's as simple as that. And some key experiences that people need to have: if you're in a manufacturing company, go out and work on the floor. And I'm not necessarily talking about as an operator as a direct labor, I'm talking as a first-line supervisor. I did that for a very short time, I learned a lot in a very short time. I spent a number of years in the labor relations world at General Motors, and I tell people again, if you're in an organization where you have organized labor, then understand what that's all about. It's a huge component of the business. So I just for whatever reason understood those experiences and the things that I should learn at a young age. That said, I had some great mentors and some people who pointed me in the right direction, and I tell people I was at least smart enough to listen and follow in the right direction.

Yeah, well, and what I've said about that is learn from the bad ones. If nothing else, learn what you're not going to do when you become a leader. It can be very telling. And I had some who in some cases I think were just bad leaders. In other cases, I think they didn't have some of the experiences that I chose to have, so therefore they had a very narrow focus on what the business was. And this is back in the early days, my early days in General Motors. Some were great, and again some were just too narrowly focused and didn't necessarily have the best advice for young people coming up.

I mentor a ton of people. 'Ton' is an exaggeration. I mentor a lot of people, and I find that very helpful. The other thing is I'm a very transparent feedback provider. And I talk to senior folks in our company when I see something that I think is going to be an obstacle for them. I tell them, and I'm very, very frank. And what I've learned over the years is if you've built a level of trust with somebody such that you can give them feedback because they know you're trying to help them, then they accept and want more, and they'll ask for more. So for me, it's actively mentoring people. And I mentor people at all levels throughout the company. We have a formal process that one of our employee resource groups built in Champions, and every year I sign up for a couple more people. And the people I've had in the past, I tell them you can still talk, there's no sunset clause on these mentoring relationships. And I think mentoring is a great way. And in the process of mentoring, tell stories. I've always, and my father was a great storyteller, just a fantastic storyteller and a great joke teller too. But I learned the importance of storytelling from him. And it's probably, I don't know, 10 years ago was the first time I read something about how storytelling is a very valuable leadership capability and it's one that ought to be utilized. I couldn't have been happier here because I love telling stories, and I always kind of had this feeling: is this storytelling a waste of other people's time just because I enjoy it? And the research suggests otherwise. So mentoring and storytelling, I think, are two things that I really use well.

And the way we do it is, as a leader, and we have all of our director level and above, we strongly encourage everybody to mentor at least one person. So every year there's a request: who wants to sign up to be a mentor? And then on the other side, who wants to be mentored? And then we give people an opportunity to select, I think, the top three choices of who they would like to have as a mentor. And then one person in that employee resource group has the job to put that puzzle together. And I feel we do it fun. We do it with AI, but you have a person who's like plugging it together.

Yeah, we measure a lot of things, and certainly voluntary and involuntary turnover. But I'm a little bit unique, I think, when it comes to HR leaders, in that I'm very, very careful to draw causal relationships or claim we did this so then this happened, so therefore this is the cause, because there's so many factors at play every single day. I mean, our focus on development and the employees' 51% responsibility for their own development, certainly mentoring, feedback, experiential development, coursework, all these factors. So it's really kind of difficult to say here's the net effect of mentoring. It is though interesting, and I don't have numbers at hand, it is interesting to see how many of that leadership group that I defined, directors and above which includes plant managers, how many people sign up every year. That tells me a lot. I don't view mentoring as a nice to do as a leader. I don't view it as a nice to have. I view it as a requirement. And it's a leader's ability to give back for what you've been given. And most of us have had the benefit of mentors throughout the course of our career, so why don't you give back?