HR Star: Jason Lauritsen

A buttoned up corporate HR leader by day, a talent anarchist by night, Jason Lauritsen is hard to pin down. I mentioned that when I was at HREvolution in Chicago, I didn’t get to meet everyone and we can count Lauritsen among that group. Fortunately, we’ve been able to keep up via phone and e-mail since then.

I count him among one of the top minds among HR practitioners. Even though he works as a Vice President of HR for a bank, he is able to think outside of the box and see the bigger picture (something we constantly rely on consultants to illuminate for us). A person that can see the forest and the trees is certainly a valuable resource for us all.

Getting Started in HR

It all got started for Lauritsen like many of the folks I’ve interviewed: not in HR. He graduated with a degree in biology and philosophy. After college though, he went in a different direction. “I was mainly concerned about making money which led me into sales jobs,” he said. “I was good at sales and my selling skills eventually led me to a job in contingency search recruiting sales people for technology companies.” And that’s how he got his start in the talent game. After starting a couple different companies on his own, he found his passion in understanding the ways people and organizations interact.

That got him started in the first of several HR centric roles. There is one really striking thing that keeps him motivated and moving forward in HR. “I’m passionate about the strategic power of HR to not only align all of the functional areas of HR to attract and grow talent, but also to really fuel the progress of an organization,” said Lauritsen. If you’re a top HR leader and you don’t live and breathe that every day, it’s time to reevaluate your role in HR.

Wellness and HR Reinvention

His passion has led him to do some cool things inside and outside of his organization. For one, he is working on a project that incorporates more wellness initiatives into his workplace. While they have incorporated wellness into initiatives for the last decade, what they really want to do is focus down on program design and figure out what works and what doesn’t. “We have announced that we will be moving to plan next year where employee’s health premiums will be based upon their results on some key health outcomes that we measure through biometric screenings,” he said. And they’ll be providing coaching and support for those who wish to change with them.

Another program he has put together recently with a group of local Omaha HR leaders was the HR Reinvention Experiment. He hand picked a group of local HR leaders along with a group of both nationwide and local speakers and put together an event that was more unconference than conference. What was so interesting to me was that many of these HR professionals, who like many have never been widely exposed to social media, embraced the concept of the event and many of the progressive ideas presented.

It made me wonder if some of these ideals that progressive HR folks hold so dear are really that “out there” or if they are quietly acknowledged by most of the HR community but not implemented in their organizations.

Lauritsen said that his goal is to see the concept spread to other cities. When we talked about the event in October, he said if it could be done in Omaha, it could be done in 50 other cities across the country too. It took a committed group of people but the payoff was worth it.

Writing, Speaking and Social Media

He has also written a book with fellow Talent Anarchist Joe Gerstandt that will hopefully be released in the spring. “The book is about how the ‘It’s not what you know, but who you know that matters’ principle works,” he said. “The book will help people be more intentional about finding and cultivating the relationships they need in their lives to be more successful.” He also maintains an occasional speaker schedule (as much as you can when you’re also a full-time, in the trenches pro) and I’ve heard that he is very good.

He also is a pretty consistent writer including writing on his own blog, Talent Anarchy (a blog he shares with Gerstandt) and an occasional contributor on other sites such as ERE (disclaimer: I work for ERE, likes when he posts there and hope this will encourage him to do more). He is also on Twitter so you can follow him on there if he isn’t riding his bike across entire states. And I’m talking about you Rhode Island or Deleware, I think even I could handle that. Though luckily, I hear Iowa is fairly flat.

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