From Government to Growth: Lessons in HR Leadership Across Sectors

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Kimberly Williams: There's such a distaste for bureaucracy on the private sector side that sometimes it can feel burdensome, but sometimes you have to let people fall down a little bit before they recognize that. And so your goal is not to make a mistake so costly that it's really bad for the business, but one that just wakes people up enough that you can engage in a soft, friendly way to say, okay, let's rethink how we could move in that direction.

David Rice: Welcome to the People Managing People Podcast. We're on a mission to build a better world of work and to help you create happy, healthy, and productive workplaces. I'm your host, David Rice.

My guest today is Kimberly Williams. She is the Vice President of People, Culture & Compliance for Walker Advertising. Kimberly is a former public sector HR leader who's made the transition to the private sector. We're gonna be talking about some of the challenges and lessons learned along the way in that journey and how she navigated it.

Kimberly, welcome.

Kimberly Williams: Hi. Thank you for having me.

David Rice: Yeah, my pleasure. Given the sort of state of things at the moment, there's a lot of people that are gonna be making the move into the private sector from government service, or federal jobs due to the current situation.

I'm curious what initially motivated your move from the public sector to the private sector, and what did you want from that move when you made it

Kimberly Williams: For me, by the time I did that, it was trying to get away from a toxic work environment. And to be fair, that wasn't my entire public sector experience.

I definitely had some good years early on, but that I had moved into environments where there was some real abusive power challenges and now and being in DC I'm hearing that there's a ton of that going on right now, and there's a lot of folks who are really struggling. So I was just looking for nicer, friendlier people to work with and I had the good fortune to find that.

David Rice: Yeah, it's based on the news, I'd say that that's probably a common experience right now.

Kimberly Williams: Yeah, most definitely.

David Rice: So I think when you're on one side or the other it's easy to develop some misconceptions about what the other is, like when I'm, on the ground. What's the biggest misconception that you would say you had about private sector HR before you made the switch?

Kimberly Williams: Oh, I thought it was just gonna be the easiest thing in the world. That there's no restrictions, that you can just do anything that you want 'cause you don't have 9 billion regulations wrapped around you. But it's, there are those things, but I think it's, they're different, and so you don't have as many union agreements.

You don't have watchdogs looking over you. You don't have like really old rules that are very difficult to change in some cases. I've worked for places where we literally had to go out for a public vote in order to change some of our rules. And happily in the private sector you're free from that, but the executive pressure can be different.

You have a profit motive that you don't have in the public sector that can really influence things. Even legally, I find that in the private sector, they're far more worried about lawsuits than they might be in the public sector, so it's just a different challenge.

David Rice: That's interesting. I don't almost expect it to be the other way. Yeah. When we spoke before this, you had mentioned your federal resume, right? And you told me it was kind like a War in Peace novel.

Kimberly Williams: Yes.

David Rice: What were some of the key changes you had to make when presenting your skills and how you showed your experience to private sector employers?

Kimberly Williams: Yeah, it's an awful expression I learned in DC but I had to learn how to kill my babies or my darlings because what happens in, in the federal context is it's all about these price things.

Oh, I worked on a presidential visit, or I did these things that sound really fancy and it's many pages. You wanna capture absolutely everything. And so it's not uncommon to see resumes that are going up even I've seen them 20 pages long. And so obviously if you go into the private sector and present something like that, they're not even gonna look at it, so you're not gonna be able to get through there.

I think what ultimately helped me was getting some friendly feedback and some advice on the fact that these things that I thought were such career highlights or achievements aren't valuable to everyone else. And really trying to take that time to know your audience. And then ultimately to treat this as a marketing document, you don't have to put every single thing in there, they really only care about what's relevant to the role you're applying for.

David Rice: Yeah. I had a friend who I was advising through like a job transition process and she was working in pharmaceuticals and she was in like IT compliance, and she wanted to move into, I think it was cybersecurity.

We were going over a resume and I was reading it going, do you think that the person on the other end is actually gonna understand what this is? And that was, I think that's something that comes up anytime you're changing core areas, not just, sectors,

Kimberly Williams: yeah, absolutely.

David Rice: As someone who's never worked in the public sector it feels to me like there would be a lot of things that don't translate. So I'm curious, how did recruiters or hiring managers respond to your public sector background and the things that you did keep on there, and how did you learn to translate that experience for them?

Kimberly Williams: So I think really important is you get a lot of opportunities to engage in crisis when you're in the public sector. And so I know, for me, moving into the private sector during the pandemic, the fact that I was totally okay coming with communications very quickly, that I was so used to thinking through public optics, whether it was an external audience or thinking about moving towards an internal audience.

But then also doing a lot of policy work. I think there's so much more opportunity to do that public sector, and so we don't always see that in the private sector. So I found that a lot of executives, when I was doing interviews, really valued that there was somebody that would come in and be able to pick that up and run with that and take that pressure off.

And even in some cases, doing high level communications for other executives became something that was really helpful for me.

David Rice: What were, I guess when you think back, some of the biggest culture shocks, I imagine it's quite different, right? In terms of how people communicate, how people interact, the sort of departmental, maybe collaboration, expectations, things like that.

So I'm curious, what were those differences that you noticed when you moved into the private sector?

Kimberly Williams: A lot less formal. For me it was really fascinating to go from a public board meeting to a private one. Because a public board meeting, particularly at like smaller government levels, but even in the federal, like where you have far more formality and public input, whether they're experts on a topic or not, so you can just see outright rage come into these meetings and they get derailed and it takes eight hours while people talk about how terrible everything is.

And so much of it is focused on an external audience and how much they might perceive things. And then to go into a board meeting in the private sector where everything's buttoned up in an hour, questions all make sense. They're, very much tied to an understandable outcome.

And they're just very constructive and far more positive. So I think that was the key one I noticed there.

David Rice: When we were chatting before this, you had talked about safety and conversations and feedback culture. I'm curious if you can expand on how psychological safety compares between the two.

Kimberly Williams: Yes, interesting, 'cause they do show up quite differently. On one hand, like in the public sector, there's a lot more job security. After you get through probation and you are in tenure, it can be very difficult to terminate someone. And so on one hand you'll start to see folks that feel safe enough to speak out because they know that they're protected.

Then on the other hand, you also see a lot of bad actors who feel safe to maybe bully others 'cause they know it'll take you a year to fire them or things like that. So I feel like there's a lot more intensity that can show up with it there. One of the things I noticed in the private sector is. If there are difficul, it's really more job dependent.

So in other words, it's about your perceived value. So if you're a top salesperson or you're that engineer that came up with something that the whole company depends on, sometimes we'll see a different set of rules for those individuals than for everything else. But I will say one thing that applies in both is those who write the rules tend to write them differently for themselves, whether that's at the top of the private sector or public sector, there can be challenges there.

And so I think some of the skill sets are the same of wanting to know how to manage a, and know how to really engage and get buy-in on why it's important to take care of folks.

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In the public sector we talk about bureaucracy all the time, right? Like it's something that comes up when anytime someone talks about the federal government, they can make even small changes, take months, right?

In the private sector, there's sometimes the opposite problem, I would say. It's like constant fast-paced change to the point that like everybody just feels lost all the time.

Kimberly Williams: Yeah.

David Rice: So how do you make that adjustment? I'm curious.

Kimberly Williams: No, you're absolutely right. There's such a distaste for bureaucracy on the private sector side that sometimes it, it can feel burdensome. It feels unnecessary. HR can get a bad rap for Hey, we just.

I wanna hire my best friend, and you're getting in the way of that, et cetera. Sometimes what can be really beneficial are looking for what I call baby losses. And so the ideal scenario is trying to push things along, trying to show that you're supportive, trying to show that you yourself are safe and trying to sell the benefits of infrastructure.

But sometimes you have to let people fall down a little bit before they recognize that. And so your goal is not to make a mistake so costly that it's, like really bad for the business. The one that just wakes people up enough that you can engage in a soft, friendly way to say, okay, let's rethink how we could move in that direction, and so that people are really feeling why they need to do it versus trying to take a hammer and force people into accepting kind of rules and structure and understanding why that's.

Valuable and learning how to communicate like the importance of fairness across the board and to help people who are just so laser focused on one particular thing to start thinking about the impacts around the rest of the organization.

David Rice: Often the narrative is that the public sector can learn from the private sector. But I'm curious, do you think there's some lessons from the public sector that the private sector should maybe adopt or learn from?

Kimberly Williams: Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting, like all the conversations around pay transparency, were horrifying for the private sector, but everyone in the public sector has their pay posted online, right?

And so it's not shocking at all. And in doing that, it's, it's showing that you're accountable to the public, which you should be. It's their money. And they have a right to know about these things. But then it's also not that scary, and then it ensures a lot more fairness, which we all want.

I also think something that I've noticed in public sector that I am really grateful for is they teach you how to manage up, there's classes on it. There's a lot of mentoring around that, and I find that missing in the private sector. If you look at SHRM and these big organizations, like when they talk about crisis communications or dealing with workplace culture, it's always on rank and file, how to put out a training.

What do you do if the CEO refuses to do that? What do you do if your CEO's a bully? They're really silent on something so critical. And so if you're not able to manage up in those spaces, you're not really helping folks. And in some cases, this is why people distrust HR so much. 'cause they'll go to them in a panic and then HR is not helping 'em and some of this is that's why, so.

David Rice: Yeah, I can totally see that. I feel like sometimes one of the things that we lack is, and I, there are certain voices that do it well, but I would say that there's not a cohesive message around how to speak truth to power for HR people. And I think that's like kind of a key component of all.

What this role is meant to do. And yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. There needs to be more coaching on managing up how to be in that middle space 'cause it's so like here, just figure it out.

Kimberly Williams: Yeah.

David Rice: Yeah. I'm curious. Looking back, are there skills from your public sector experience that ended up being your secret weapon in the private sector or things that translated maybe in ways that you never expected?

Kimberly Williams: Yeah, for one, the right, for sure. There's just so much pressure, I think in the public sector to churn out good writing for principles for things that are public facing. And so I think my years there really stretched me in a way that I think put me under a lot more pressure and really helped with my communication skills that I don't think I could have gotten from anywhere else.

So I, I definitely feel like that helped. And then too, being in the state department, being in diplomacy, learning about leverage and how to negotiate with folks when you're on the wrong side of a power imbalance, I think there's a lot more opportunity in the public sector to really grow in those spaces.

Versus in the private sector, it may just feel like you're being pushed down and is just be quiet. There's no like support or conversation around that. And so I think that, that has been really helpful in my career for me, advocating both for myself and for others and for fairness and for policies and things like that, that I think of it really important.

David Rice: That's a really great answer. I hadn't even considered that, you might say that. So that's that's very interesting. If there was one piece of advice 'cause like I said, there's a lot of folks that are gonna be making this sort of transition. So as they do that, as they look out into the private sector world, if there's one piece of advice you could give them, what would it be? What was one thing that you wish somebody told you?

Kimberly Williams: Oh gosh. Yeah. Really going back to how you present yourself and show up. You have enormous value. You have very transferable skills that can go from one thing to the other. And when I was making that transition, there was no ai, there was nothing I could do to go on there and take my resume and go into ChatGPT and say, if I'm being reviewed by private company, whatever, how would they perceive this resume?

How would this tie into this role? And to remember, you just don't have to include everything that you've ever done. The only thing that really matters is. The key moments that really connect to what they need. And as someone who now like reviews resumes, on the other side of that, I also like to encourage people, like if you spent 15 years in government, but not all of those 15 years, were doing some specific skill, it's still okay, you did it.

You have that knowledge, you had that training, you had that ability. And so that real focus on number of years in the public sector doesn't always translate to the private sector. And so I can see what people can really do themselves in disservice. By eliminating some amazing gift that they have to bring by not including that because they're worried there.

David Rice: That's good advice.

Kimberly, thank you for joining me today. Before we go, there's a couple things I always like to do. The first is I wanna give you a chance to tell people more about where they can connect with you, find out more about what you're doing. If they wanna reach out, where is it Good to do that?

Kimberly Williams: Thank you so much. Yeah, so I'm an old Fuddyduddy. I'm not on a lot of social media, but I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. And so if you look for, my name is Kimberly Williams. There's a million of me, but I'm Kimberly-E-Williams. I'm also a spokesperson for End Workplace Abuse. So if you go to endworkplaceabuse.com, you'll see information about me there too.

My big love and my big passion is not just psychologically safe workplaces where things are civil, but really protecting people who were bullied, mistreated, humiliated, harassed, because this happened to over 50 million US workers. So I do a lot of work on trying to pass legislation in a number of states.

A lot of activism and policy work there. Also, working with a lot of businesses and organizations to co-sign legislation like the Workplace Psychological Safety Act, which is meant to prevent bullying in the workplace. And so far we've had 104 organizations sign on with us. And we're always looking for more.

So if anybody either needs help or is interested in supporting this effort, I hope you'll reach out.

David Rice: Definitely that's something we'll have to keep an eye on and maybe do an episode about in the future.

Kimberly Williams: Sure. That'd be great. Yeah.

David Rice: The last thing that we do on every episode is I give you a chance to ask me a question, so I'll turn it over to you. Ask me a question. It can be about anything you want.

Kimberly Williams: Awesome. Would you like to co-sign on the Workplace Psychological Safety Act with us?

David Rice: Yeah, of course.

Kimberly Williams: Okay, cool.

David Rice: For me it's a no brainer, I think that kinda work is obviously very important. Having been in a few toxic workplaces in the past, and seeing the impact that it had on the individuals who were on the end of it.

I'm thinking about it and I almost get a little emotional 'cause it was really heartbreaking to see the way that folks reacted and the way that it changed their lives, quite frankly. Not in ways that were welcome, or forced to transition that I watched somebody who was very talented at something, waste better part of a year of their life recovering from that. And that was awful. Yeah, I think it's a no brainer for me.

Kimberly Williams: And thank you for even saying that out loud. Two years ago people didn't talk about this. I'm really trying to normalize that, that people shouldn't be scared to say these things because we are seeing, this stuff.

It's very physical. People think that, it's like this invisible thing so they don't have to address it, but it shows up as cancer. It shows up as suicide. It shows up as homelessness, divorce. 61% of people who are abused at work have their careers destroyed. So the financial impacts are very real and they're now even showing that it leaves scars on the brain.

And that the level of PTSD that folks are getting from these is actually comparable to combat. We're starting to see more studies around that. And some folks that, we've worked with directly with vets. They were saying that the trauma of workplace abuse actually scarred them worse than combat because combat was expected.

Like they knew what they were going.

David Rice: Yes. There's no like a cat in combat.

Kimberly Williams: Yeah. And to me it's a pretty powerful statement that in the US we don't have the safety net. So when your job is in danger, your whole life...

David Rice: Your stress levels go through the roof. Trauma is the right word, I used to work with a gentleman who told me like, that job destroyed my life, or it destroyed my marriage.

I gained a bunch of weight. And it's all that stress weight. You can almost see it, yeah. And yeah, it's, I believe all of that, that it leaves scars on your brain. It certainly leaves scars in the way that you think and the way that sometimes you think about yourself, and it should just be a job.

It doesn't need to be all of that.

Kimberly Williams: Exactly. So true. Yeah. So true.

David Rice: Thank you for coming on today. It's been a great pleasure chatting with you.

Kimberly Williams: You too. You too. Thank you so much for having me.

David Rice: Everybody, until next time. If you haven't done so already, head on over to peoplemanagingpeople.com/subscribe. Get signed up for the newsletter. You'll get podcasts, as well as all the other cool stuff that we're working on around here, straight into your inbox. Got some additional newsletter sends coming, so that's gonna be fun.

And until next time, enjoy the transition and don't be toxic, okay?