I’ve never met anyone through LinkedIn before. Not a connection or recommendation, but because of the content they share. I was initially drawn to Kim’s social media candidness when SHRM announced its decision to remove equity as a top pillar. I asked Kim about her professional candor: “I know there's a lot of people leaders out there for whatever reason can't speak out.”
Kim approached the rest of our interview with the same bold passion for people and fearlessness in the face of change. After all my usual questions were through, we rabbit-holed through HR LinkedIn, SHRM’s impact on the industry, and what we want for the profession in the future.
Kim’s approach is anything but old-school—she's all about rethinking processes to genuinely benefit both businesses and employees. Her insights are refreshingly candid and show just how HR can play a pivotal role in shaping company culture and strategy.
Read to learn how Kim takes inspiration from engineering leaders, what HR as a practice means, and who she thinks is leading the future of people operations.
Kim: "Yes, my full name is Kimberly Christine Minnick. I go by Kim Minnick. My pronouns are she/her."
Kim: "Yeah, absolutely. I am a solopreneur, one woman show, fractional people ops leader at my very own company, Coach Traveler HR.
I've got my colleague and chief happiness officer [shifts camera to show a massive dog sleeping on the couch behind her] right here! It’s just me!"
Kim: "Yes, so when I was at a lovely little company called Studio (they're an online creative learning platform) I walked in and they had been doing sort of an engagement survey, but more like a business performance review. It was like this really cool idea, but it had room to be executed better.
So we reformatted how we thought about engagement surveys, and we kind of stripped away all of the stuff that we're used to in people ops land.
And what we did is we divided it into three areas. We called it our toy box. It was the business, our team, and your experience. In each section, we kept this idea of a performance review, and we had a rubric about like rating the business. We had very specific questions. How are we achieving our mission? ‘Here's what one means. Here's what two means. Here's what three means...’ So we could really understand how people were feeling about the business. And then we complimented that with, 'okay, now how is your day to day work supporting our mission?'
It had so many cool consequences. One, because we had these ratings so well defined, and we obviously weren't nailing everything (we were a new growing business). We really recalibrated what excellent was or what outstanding was.
So not just in this engagement approach, but in our performance reviews too. When people got kind of that “nailing it, number three, meets expectations” rating, they felt good about it because they were seeing some success in the business.
It also opened up business strategy conversations because we were asking about nuances on the performance, the goals, our vision, our roadmap, and getting consistent feedback on it.
We were able to incorporate the experience of our frontline workers who were meeting with the creative instructors who were helping design these courses. We were able to take that day-to-day frontline information and incorporate it into a better higher level business strategy. I was obsessed with it."
Kim: "Yes, I really love partnering with engineering leaders. I think the way that they have built, particularly like in agile shops, the way they have built a roadmap retro process really is such a great way to incorporate with feedback. So I love thinking about how they work.
One of the most inspiring conversations I had was with an engineering leader, Matt... we were talking about performance reviews and language and feedback and all of this. With his help, we kind of reformatted the language in our performance reviews. Instead of using “meets expectations,” we used “nailing it” to help those words land better. We were able to incorporate peer-to-peer feedback in their retro process. So developing a feedback culture started developing within the typical day-to-day cadence.
Yeah, I love looking to like our product folks, our user experience folks to really gain inspiration for how are our users, our clients, our employees experiencing people operations."
Ash: "I love hearing when there are intentional integrations of HR work within the day-to-day work of basically the users of HR which are employees."
Kim: "Yeah, exactly. Users of HR, I love that."
Kim: "I think that we know a lot of things that we don't let on because we can't, right? I think there's a lot of confidentiality in our jobs. There's a lot of really hard tough conversations where we're advocating for our teams for different outcomes for different budgets where we're banging our heads against the wall, and then the next day we're going to the employees and being like 'so this is why we're not doing that thing that I really wanted to do but I'm not going to let any of you know because I need to stand on the side of the business.' I think that's one thing.
I also think that like there's been this conversation like “HR is not your friend” I'm not. I shouldn't be, like I know your social security number. I have your identification documents. I have your banking information. Don't be my friend!
But do work with me as a trusted partner. The more information I have the better decision I can make and my goal, my objective, is to build a place where people can thrive.
So that does mean protecting the business so we can build a place where the employees can thrive. It's a really wildly interesting, delightful, terrifying balance to strike."
Ash: "Yeah, it's complex and you have a lot of stakeholders."
Kim: "Yeah, I always think about, do you remember when we were little, there was like those little pyramids and there was a bird that kind of balanced on it?"
Ash: "Yes."
Kim: "And you could like spin it around and hit it. I feel like that's a lot of our job is just trying to find that perfect balance.
And we fall and we stumble and we make mistakes. But like, I don't know what people else later who makes the same mistake twice. And I think we go very deep when we're thinking about impacts or options. And it's in service to our team."
Kim: "To me HR, people ops, whatever you want to call it, it's a practice.
And we are constantly growing, evaluating, learning, getting more information and iterating. It is not a stagnant career or a stagnant role. You don't get to rinse and repeat.
I don't know if it's my HR excellence or fortunately the folks that I surround myself with, but we are always looking to make safe, exciting experiments.
And I love people, leaders who are like, yeah, day work week, or, yeah, let's codify our culture. Let's move. I mean, I'm passionate about a digital first office environment where we're working, I think, honestly, mostly. like, I don't know, H.R. Excellence is such a funny thought to me, but I do think it's a practice. I think it's ever growing and ever changing. And I think that like breeds opportunity for excellence across the board.
Kim: Oh my gosh. Sooooo many people. So 🏡 Kim Rohrer ... sometimes we call ourselves “Kim-witted.” She's been a huge, huge support system for me.
Greer Procich, M.A., sHRBP - She's over at Flint, employee number three. Amazing.
Hebba Youssef - I recently met and engaged with what a phenomenal human being to like kind of challenge some of that status quo in a fun way.
Anessa Fike is an amazing talent acquisition turn queen fractional leader who I've taken a lot of inspiration from.
Elles Skony is building some amazing people, communities at Fractional People People.
Uh, Morgan Williams has been this huge.. Cassandra Babilya, Cassidy Edwards . Let me just shout out everyone that I know…
I really think there is this new… I'm going call it a clique right now, but really I think it's the next evolution of of people ops is... when we show care when we incorporate equity into our programs loudly and proudly, [and] when we build for the teams...
I'm trying to grow the team.
I'm trying to grow revenue.
I'm trying to grow the business.
I'm trying to grow individuals.
I think there's this, this next generation of HR leaders and people of leaders who are PUMPED to do that work. And I'm really excited to see where it goes."
