How curiosity can unlock talent success

About eight years ago, industrial growth company Fortive was created through a spinoff from global life sciences conglomerate Danaher. Since then, Fortive has completed a series of acquisitions and just last month announced it is spinning off a precision technologies segment.

With change can come talent challenges, but Fortive CHRO Stacey Walker says the organization is well-versed in the culture work needed to bring employees along on a transformation journey.

“When you do a lot of M&A work, whether that’s incoming or outgoing, the consistency matters and the simplicity matters,” Walker says. “We try to find a blend between the Fortive culture and the incoming culture as we integrate.”

Walker—who became Fortive’s founding HR leader in 2016 after a career that has included a decade at Danaher as well as HR leadership roles at Honeywell—recently shared with HR Executive what goes into Fortive’s culture strategy and how curiosity is driving talent and HR success.

Walker: We started working on the Fortive spin from Danaher nine years ago—very much focused on what we wanted to be different and what we wanted to continue. Danaher is a great organization with a strong culture. Rooted for us in the things we wanted to remain consistent was the focus on continuous improvement—a deep belief in better every day, which I think brings to mind this idea of driving to deliver better results, new insights, better solutions for customers, for employees and for others.

What we wanted to be different was ensuring we had a culture where people really felt like they could do very interesting work and that they were highly trusted and highly valued in that work. We stood that up through our values work and have continued that consistently.

HR Executive: How are you helping your workforce manage the change fatigue that can come with so many shifts, both internally and externally?

Walker: First of all, we’re trying to be transparent with them about what to expect and how expectations are shifting. Wherever you can, reduce the ambiguity. We don’t have all the answers, but we try to pose the right questions and provide clarity where we can.

We focus on skill development so people can better prepare themselves by their own learning, their own development and growth opportunities. We highlight those on a continuous basis, so they have the backdrop of what’s expected and how that’s shifting, but also a view to how they can build skill and capability. That’s deeply rooted in my own leadership philosophy, but it’s permeated across the organization, which is continuing to provide growth opportunities. This combination of skill development and also seizing these stretch opportunities helps people to thrive, but also to meet their own potential.

HR Executive: How does that learning extend to AI integration?

Walker: We started this work six or seven years ago with standing up what we call The Fort, and this is a core set of capabilities around AI and machine learning. We’ve been working both on opportunities to improve employee experience through AI and machine learning and delivering better solutions to our employees, as well as commercial opportunities. It started with an incubated group, servicing both corporate as well as operating company needs to deliver the solutions. And of course, over that period, we’ve built that capability. We’re really starting to see some of those solutions come to fruition, both in terms of what we’re doing to reduce friction points on workflows for our employees and also better customer solutions.

HR Executive: What role does employee feedback play in integrating AI into the workplace?

Walker: We have been very centered on employee feedback and the voice of the employee from the start, and that’s only grown over the course of the last year. We do deep census surveys every two years, we do quarterly surveys, get narrative feedback from employees on an ongoing basis. As we are working to establish a new workflow, a new solution, we’re actually experimenting and getting voice of employee work through that experimentation process. When you think about scrappy solutions to problems that are causing issues from an employee experience standpoint, we take those MVP kinds of solutions to employees, get feedback on them and iterate based on that employee feedback to get to better solutions and workflows and to address those high pain point issues.

HR Executive: You’ve said the No. 1 skill today’s employees need is curiosity. How are you working to instill that in your HR team?

Walker: I think it starts with modeling. It’s important that when I show up, whether it’s in a big or small environment, I’m modeling that curiosity—searching to understand, spending a lot of time in terms of my own personal development, trying to finetune my ability to talk less, listen more, ask better questions.

That’s really shifted. I think 10 years ago, I would have come into a conversation with a much more directive approach. Now I come in to search, learn, listen. Modeling is a really important component of that, and showing, frankly, mental agility in the moment. It has been liberating as a leader, in many respects, and has delivered such better solutions than I may have envisioned. The value is clear to me, and I think continues to be clear to the organization.

HR Executive: Who or what in your life has most influenced the type of HR leader you are today?

Walker: I would say my father. From as long as I can remember, my father was someone—he passed away when I was quite young, in my early 20s—who was always ensuring there was a real focus on people. He was someone who cared deeply about people. This was before we had the words for this idea of providing equitable opportunity for people, and ensuring they weren’t prejudged based on background or access to opportunity, but rather, that people were treated the same with the same kinds of access to opportunity, to prove themselves and to develop and grow. That upbringing deeply influenced me, personally and professionally, and that still continues today.