HR Star: Steve Browne

When you talk about Steve Browne to someone who knows him, you instantly know it. Their eyes light up when they talk about his local HR leadership in Cincinnati and Ohio. Or they’ll talk about his penchant for songwriting in the style of “Weird Al” Yankovic (and with quite the range going from Elvis Costello to Van Halen without missing a beat). His enthusiasm for the profession is second to none.

I’ve dealt with people who are enthusiastic about HR. Sometimes enthusiasm hides a lack of ideas or vision for the profession. And while cheerleaders are great, that’s not what Steve Browne is all of the time. He’s thoughtful about his positions, he gets the bigger picture and he knows HR’s value proposition inside and out.

Why is that? He worked with great mentors along the way. He said one of his first assignments from a former boss was to learn everyone’s name in 30 days or else. Or else what you may be asking? He’d be fired. No joke! So when the 30 days came up, not only did he know everyone’s names, he knew more about them than his boss. That was a light bulb moment for Browne. HR has to know more about employees than managers do. And not in some superficial way but in a way that keeps the business running smoothly.

Inside HR

One of the things Browne has been working on as Executive Director of HR for LaRosa’s pizza in Cincinnati is the idea of competency based hiring models for the restaurant industry. Now you might know the restaurant industry (especially pizza chains) as high turnover places where names and faces change every day and McDonald’s inspired processes keep the experience relatively consistent regardless of who is manning the pizza oven. So what’s the point of competency based hiring?

“You find people who want to be there and who want to work in your restaurants,” says Browne. And while that may not be forever, they want to get the most out of the relationship for both parties. Not only that, Browne says they’ve had great success internally by using the program as a way to open manager’s eyes to who their employees truly are. “Some of them love stability for their family, others love their co-workers,” he says.

The Conference Scene

When Browne was programming the 2010 Ohio HR Conference, he took to social media to find speakers. “I didn’t even check their references,” he said. What he had done though was built steady relationships with many of the folks who came to speak over the course of the last year and wanted to give programming a little different feel. “It was a huge risk,” he admits. He brought in folks to talk about all areas of HR in addition to a normal slate of speakers.

It paid off. Browne describes the dynamic nature of the speakers and how instant connections were made. As the 2011 Ohio HR Conference chair, he wants to do more of the same.

The HR Net

One of the first realizations I had when I met Browne was that he ran an e-mail list for HR pros. Now it is decidedly low tech and offers his brand of song madness to go with it (think The Rolling Stones meets Edna in HR) but he has been doing it for eight years and has amassed nearly 6,000 HR pros to the list from all over the world simply by word of mouth. And while this may not look like Facebook or Twitter, it’s as much a social network with hundreds of connections being built a month off the simple software.

To Browne, the response to The HR Net has been amazing. He said he would go to a conference or event and someone would come up to him and say “Hey, you’re that song guy from the e-mail! I love that!” He says it emphasizes to him the importance of not just providing people with dry information but also with something memorable. “It kills me when someone unsubscribes. They say, ‘It’s a waste of time!’ My goal is to know everyone on that list,” he says.

When he was introduced to me as a newbie to Twitter, I knew he wasn’t going to have a problem understanding the value of the service. It is the same thing he has been doing for over eight years: connecting with people, helping others connect with people and providing useful information to people who opt in to his message.

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