Ask an HR Executive: Doug Dean of Children’s of Alabama

In our latest Ask an HR Executive interview, we had the pleasure of speaking with Doug Dean, CHRO of Children’s of Alabama. Here is what he had to say:

Tell us a bit about yourself and your journey in the HR field.

My leadership career has been wildly diverse, and the unusual path I took early on makes complete sense now looking back. I was a Liberal Arts major and later earned a Master’s in Public and Private Management. I started in employee benefits Trust work in banking, which led me through the back door, if you will, to HR, in comp and benefits. After a stint in HR at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama, I moved to the healthcare industry, spending six years at Baptist Health System in Birmingham. We grew to 11,000 employees and 12 hospitals. My big break came in ’99, and I’ve been the CHRO at Children’s of Alabama for 26 years. It’s a joy to work in a kid-friendly environment, bringing in talent and being inspired by the mission, even though like all HR leaders, we’re dealing with talent management challenges and a shortage of great talent these days.

Could you share a bit about your current organization and how your role supports its business objectives and mission?

Children’s of Alabama was founded in 1911 by a group of religious women, the Holy Innocents. We have grown to 3.5 million square feet, making us one of the top five children’s hospitals in the country, with nearly 6,000 employees. We handle over 684,000 outpatient visits and more than 15,000 inpatient admissions annually. As the only dedicated provider of pediatric healthcare in Alabama, our recruitment process is simpler because we’re the obvious choice for new graduate nurses who identify with pediatrics as their career choice.

How does your role align with the company’s business objectives and mission?

Our main goal is to respond to actual business problems instead of pushing our own HR agenda per se. I start with candid conversations with my executive colleagues to understand their needs and craft solutions accordingly. I ask them where they are having performance issues, employee absence issues, or other people issues. Are we bringing in the right kind of talent for them? Our main goal is to demonstrate that we’re responding to the actual business problem instead of trying to talk them into letting us do the cool and fun things, which, as HR pros, is a tendency we must guard against. It’s the old saw that “if a person only knows how to use a hammer, they will see every problem as a nail.”

What trends are you seeing in HR right now that have your attention?

HR is slow to adopt AI, but it can speed up processes and is a powerful tool. The emerging job title of data scientist is also an interesting skill for HR. We need to be careful not to use “carpet bomb solutions” house-wide and instead focus on the specific departments or work teams that are most in need of transformation. You can solve big aggregate problems such as high turnover much faster if you address the right hot spots. Data and tools can help us zero in on those hot spots, allowing HR to be more effective and efficient.

Have you seen a shift in your position, in the request or requirements from your CEO, from a data perspective, over the last few years?

Our board of trustees is impressively curious about staffing, morale, and voluntary turnover. They are asking more questions about these issues, and my CEO has adopted the language of HR leaders, which is admirable for any CEO in this challenging labor market. It’s powerful when your top-ranking executive can speak to these issues.

Is there anything specific that you’re doing in your role to get the HR team to adopt AI a bit more in their roles or in the healthcare space in general?

Like many organizations, I would say, we are playing catch-up on AI adoption. I think the statistics show that only about 25% of HR people in larger organizations have meaningful AI implementations underway. In our case, I’ve been telling my team to go out and play with it. I encourage my team to use AI tools to speed up processes and then audit the results. For healthcare in general, there’s a continuum of adoption of AI. Risk management is concerned about the liability of not adopting AI quickly enough. It’s being proven that proper use of AI improves outcomes.

What roles are in demand on your HR team or will be soon?

We need more recruiters and technology to help increase productivity. There is also a growing demand for leadership development, which is exciting to see on the rise. If the executives want high-touch and smaller class experiences, we would need to look at bringing in contract or permanent OD practitioners who are great at building out those leadership skills.

What’s the biggest challenge facing your team today? And how are you addressing it?

I’m really proud of the progress HR has made in becoming business partners with a seat at the table. The greatest challenge is balancing transactional work with strategic HR initiatives. We need to take a Skunkworks approach (see U.S. military “Skunkworks” creation of first fighter jet), physically separating strategic activity from transactional work to ensure we focus on impactful change management and real HR innovation.

What does that process look like when you want to add talent to your team, specifically to the HR team?

Adding FTE resources involves budget control processes for the majority of CHROs. I like to have more planful, low-pressure conversations with my COO to build consensus on the need for HR resources and find ways to fund them, sometimes budget-neutrally, which is always smart when possible.

What’s something you want to accomplish in the next few years?

I want to set up HR processes so that my eventual successor has a smooth transition. We are adopting five Leadership Pillars: trust, empathy, innovation, accountability, and all four wrapped around communication. We’re training our leaders to ensure consistency of leadership practices across the organization. This creates a magnetic culture that goes a long way in attracting and retaining talent, and if we’re honest, it’s far superior to reacting with compensation time and again. We’re looking forward to getting more traction on these pillars in the coming months.

What would your dream job be if you weren’t doing this one?

I would love to write fiction and plan to do so when my time is much more “my own.” I have a couple of novels in progress and plan to publish them digitally for friends and family to read first. My mindset is not even to pen some bestseller novel! It’s simply to work at something I love – writing.