Suzanne Lucas on Driving HR Impact in Lean Teams

By Ashley Litzenberger
January 27, 2025
3 minute read

On this episode of People Fundamentals, I’m joined by Suzanne Lucas, a long-time HR consultant and co-founder at HRLearns. A long-time HR blogger under the title of “Evil HR Lady,” Suzanne takes a refreshingly candid approach to HR. She blends decades of corporate experience with her passion for teaching practical, no-nonsense strategies. Her mission? To empower HR professionals, particularly in small-to-midsized businesses, to thrive in the face of competing priorities and limited resources.

In this conversation, recorded live at UNLEASH World 2024 in Paris, Suzanne shares techniques for staying creative under pressure, setting boundaries to protect your time and energy, and communicating in ways that resonate across the organization. 

Listen in as Suzanne shares advice to help you juggle your many hats with confidence and clarity.

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Take a creative approach to problem solving

For Suzanne, creativity is an essential skill for HR professionals, especially in smaller teams juggling multiple responsibilities. She draws on her experiences in improv comedy to teach techniques that spark innovative solutions, even in high-pressure situations. Whether adapting to sudden policy changes or brainstorming new initiatives, embracing a creative mindset can transform challenges into opportunities.

The “Yes, and…” principle, for example, states that an improv performer must accept a premise from the audience or another performer, and expand on it. “You just accept that reality, and move on,” Suzanne says. “And that is so much of what HR is. Governments throw regulations at us. We can complain about it all day long, but until you accept this is the rule and I’ve got to deal with it, you can’t move forward.”

She also recommends the “Five Things” exercise, a rapid-fire brainstorming game where each team member contributes five ideas — no matter how unconventional. “The important rule is it doesn’t matter how dumb it is,” she says. “You’re going to say whatever things come out, and as you say each thing, the rest of your team is going to cheer you on.” This exercise promotes idea creation and reinforces it with immediate encouragement from the rest of the group.

By using these tools, you can foster collaboration and create space for fresh perspectives, even when resources are tight.

Protect your peace with boundaries

HR professionals in small-to-midsized businesses often find themselves stretched thin, wearing multiple hats and handling endless requests. Suzanne emphasizes that setting boundaries is essential for maintaining balance and avoiding burnout. She draws a distinction between boundaries and rules, pointing out that boundaries give you more control. “Boundary setting is something that a lot of people don’t understand,” she says. “A lot of people make rules. Rules are when I tell you what to do. A boundary is what I’m going to do.” 

Boundaries, when combined with the “Yes, and…” principle, produce a powerful tactic for protecting your valuable time, resources, and mental health. When leaders come to you with increasing demands, Suzanne recommends responding with, “Yes, I can do that, and someone else is going to have to do this and this. What do you want?” This approach creates space for negotiation while setting clear limits for yourself.

Clear boundaries also set the tone for the rest of the organization. When you model effective prioritization, you encourage others to do the same. Protecting your peace is not just self-care; it’s a strategic way to promote sustainable success.

Speak in a language your audience understands

HR professionals in smaller companies are more likely to have to advocate for their function and make the case for further investments in HR — and that means you need to be a good communicator. Effective communication is all about tailoring your message to your audience. 

Suzanne highlights the importance of adapting to the priorities and “language” of different stakeholders within the organization. “HR speaks a different language than finance, who speaks a different language than marketing, who speaks a different language than production,” she says. “You’ve got to learn those languages.”

For example, when presenting to finance, focus on the bottom line. Increased engagement isn’t an outcome that the audience cares about. “What do they want? How is this going to affect my bottom line?” Suzanne says. “If I can’t speak numbers, I’m not speaking their language.” This skill is critical for gaining buy-in from leadership and aligning HR initiatives with organizational goals.

Suzanne also recommends active listening as a way to build stronger relationships. One of her favorite techniques is starting your response with the last letter of the previous speaker’s final word — a subtle trick to ensure you’re fully present in the conversation. “It forces you to wait until they’re done, and it makes it so you’re not jumping to conclusions,” she says.

Suzanne offers practical strategies for tackling the most pressing challenges with creativity, confidence, and clarity. Whether it’s embracing an improv-inspired mindset, setting boundaries to protect your time, or speaking the right language to drive alignment, her insights offer a masterclass in modern HR leadership.

People in This Episode

Suzanne Lucas: LinkedIn

Transcript

Suzanne Lucas:

The biggest principle of improv is what we call “Yes, And…” If you’re on the stage and you’re performing and the audience gives you a suggestion, you can’t say, “No, I’m not going to do that.” And that is so much of what HR is. Governments throw regulations at us. We can complain about it all day long, but until you accept this is the rule and I’ve got to deal with it, you can’t move forward. And that’s that basic “Yes, And…” from improv comedy that I’m going to accept what it is, and then I’m going to work with whatever that is to make it successful.

Ashley Litzenberger:

Hi, and welcome to Betterworks’ People Fundamentals podcast. I’m your host, Ashley Litzenberger, senior director of Product Marketing.

Betterworks’ core belief in people fundamentals revolves around helping HR lead through constant change by focusing on core values like fairness, support, balance, and enabling growth opportunities for employees. These tenets empower everyone in the workforce to strive for excellence, to foster creativity, and to acknowledge each other’s contributions.

Betterworks believes that strategic HR leaders can translate these principles into action, shaping their workforce for the better, and helping to drive meaningful business outcomes. And in this show, we’re diving even deeper into these principles by listening to experts share how you can make them come alive at your organization.

In this episode, recorded live at UNLEASH World 2024, I’m excited to be joined by Suzanne Lucas, co-founder of HRLearns. HRLearns is an organization focused on training HR and talent acquisition professionals. Suzanne is here to share her unique perspective on how HR teams, especially at small and midsize businesses, can juggle competing priorities while staying creative, adaptable, and effective. We’re talking about everything, from using improv techniques to boost problem solving and active listening, to setting boundaries and tackling those endless to-do lists.

Suzanne’s approach is full of practical tips and fresh ideas that can help HR professionals manage their workloads and create real impact in their organizations. It’s a conversation packed with actionable insights and inspiration to help you bring more creativity and balance into your HR practices. Let’s get started.

Suzanne, thank you so much for joining us today here at UNLEASH World. It is fantastic to be here and see all of the different vendors and things happening. I’m curious, what brought you here this year?

Suzanne Lucas:

Well, I have been to UNLEASH many times, but the last time I came was in 2019. I was planning to go to the London UNLEASH in 2020, but a couple things happened in the world, and it got canceled. I don’t know if you heard about it.

Ashley Litzenberger:

Minor virus outbreak.

Suzanne Lucas:

Minor.

Ashley Litzenberger:

Changed the world of work fundamentally. No big deal.

Suzanne Lucas:

And then since then I’ve been like, “Oh, I want to go back, I want to go back, I want to go back.” But life gets in the way, and then this time it worked out. So I love to come to UNLEASH, I love to meet all of the different people, different vendors, and I like talking to them about what’s new. And yeah, so I’m here to find out what’s new and what’s exciting, and that’s why I’m here.

Ashley Litzenberger:

Well, one of the things that caught my ear as we were preparing for this conversation was that you really like to focus on how to make work better for HR managers. And you mentioned that improv and being able to go with things on the fly is really important for making life better. So tell me a little more about what it means to make life better for HR managers and how improv has anything to do with that.

Suzanne Lucas:

Well, improv makes everything better regardless, but what it means to make things better for HR managers is so much of what HR does… And my target audience tends to be the small to midsized businesses. I am not targeting Google or Amazon. They’re great, and if they wanted to pay me to do stuff for them, absolutely I would, but I’m not targeting them. And a lot of our smaller companies, you have one or two people doing jobs that Amazon has 400 people doing and different people doing. So you’re doing recruiting and employee relations and compliance and succession planning, all of it, you’re doing all of it.

Ashley Litzenberger:

Yeah. It’s a small team where everyone on the HR team is wearing at least three to five different baseball caps and they have to switch around through them every day of the week and within each day.

Suzanne Lucas:

Exactly. And they make less money than the person doing one task at the big company, right? So it’s a really complicated thing. And so what I like to do is give training that will help them make a difference tomorrow. I’m not looking at 10 years down the road difference, but if you make a good difference tomorrow, then it’ll lead you towards something 10 years down the road.

And one of the big things I do is using improvisational comedy, which is my side gig. I am part of a performance improv team, and the biggest principle of improv is what we call “Yes, And…” So if you’re on the stage and you’re performing, and the audience gives you a suggestion, you can’t say, “No, I’m not going to do that. I won’t.” I mean, you can set your boundaries like, “No, I’m not going to do things that would get me in trouble as an HR professional, right? I’m not going to do that.”

But if they… Say you are in a cafe in Budapest, then that’s where the scene is. And if one of your team members says, “Oh, what a beautiful pink and purple polka-dotted ball gown you’re wearing.” Then suddenly you are wearing a pink and purple polka-dotted ball gown, and you don’t say, “No, I’m not. I’m wearing jeans and a T-shirt. What are you talking about?” You just accept that reality, and move on. And that is so much of what HR is.

Governments throw regulations at us. We can complain about it all day long, but until you accept this is the rule and I’ve got to deal with it, you can’t move forward. The CEO says this is the policy, and you can say, “This is a dumb policy. Here’s the best practice, blah, blah, blah.” And he decides ultimately, “Nope, this is what we’re going to do.” Your options are either to accept that and figure out the best way to implement it, or to leave. Because if you just spend all of your time complaining about it, “Oh, it’s a dumb policy,” it’s going to destroy the company. You either need to get on board or get out. And that’s that basic “Yes, And…” from improv comedy that I’m going to accept what it is, and then I’m going to work with whatever that is to make it successful.

Ashley Litzenberger:

Yeah. And I’m curious, how does someone in HR, especially when you’re looking at a small or midsize company or anywhere where you’re wearing multiple hats and probably a little burnt out, maybe a little bit overwhelmed, you might have a lot going on your plate as an HR manager, how do you balance the “Yes, And…” with the neurons in your brain firing and feeling overwhelmed when the new policy comes through, when the new regulations come out, when the new ask jumps on your plate? How do you balance “Yes, And…” with making sure that you are managing your workload and setting expectations appropriately? What does that look like?

Suzanne Lucas:

That’s a really difficult thing, especially for these HR people with the multiple hats. And the “Yes, And…” doesn’t mean I’m going to be a doormat. So CEO comes and says, “I want every employee to have an assigned parking space.” And for some reason that’s HR’s responsibility, because I don’t know, they think we do that, right? “I need you to plan the company picnic.” “Okay, Bob.” And so you can say, “Yes, I can do that, and someone else is going to have to do this and this. What do you want?” And throw it back. You do have to set your boundaries.

And boundary setting is something that a lot of people don’t understand. A lot of people make rules, and so rules are when I tell you what to do. A boundary is what I’m going to do.

Ashley Litzenberger:

Interesting.

Suzanne Lucas:

And so HR people, we’re naturally inclined to make rules. That’s part of our job. We’re going to make the rules, we’re going to make the policies, and then we’re going to try to get you to follow-up with them, but the only real power we have is over ourselves. And so when we’re making those rules, we have to make the boundaries too. The rule is you have to be to work by 8:30. What’s my boundary with that? What do I do if you break that rule? If I do nothing, then there is no rule. If I ignore it, then there is no rule. It’s on paper. There is no rule.

And I can also go completely nuclear and be like, “It is 8:31, and that’s when you clocked in, and I’m going to fire you, because you’re one minute late.” That’s probably not a good boundary. You need to decide what those are and how you’re going to react, how the company is going to react to that type of thing. And so when the CEO comes to you with a billion requests that you can’t do, then you need to say, “Here are my boundaries. These are things I’m not going to do. I’m not going to work 60 hours a week. I’m not. The end.”

So within this, how can I “Yes, And…” you? What can I do to make this a success? Maybe the way to make it a success is to give it to somebody else. Maybe the way to make it a success is to drop something. You need to be able to look at all of those possibilities in order to do that.

Ashley Litzenberger:

And I know we’re getting into the details here, but I think this is something that everyone listening to this podcast struggles with when their manager hands them a new idea or a new responsibility, and they’re working through this reprioritization or they know that they’re going over well beyond what they can fit on their plate. So what does that conversation with the CEO or with your boss look like as you receive the new information, you’ve processed it, you’ve realized that this is going a little bit beyond the scope of everything that you can handle? What does going back to that person look like with the “Yes, And…” creating these opportunities to brainstorm creatively and find a good solution?

Suzanne Lucas:

Well, there’s a bunch of different tools you can use to brainstorm creatively. My favorite is an improv game called Five Things. And what that is, you do it as a team, and each person will give five things to whatever the problem is. And it’s important that there are five things. You’re not going to give one answer, you’re not going to do three answers, you’re not going to do 25 answers. When we brainstorm, we’re like, “Come on, come on, more ideas, more ideas, more ideas.” And sometimes our brains just shut down.

So with Five Things, you’ve got these boundaries around it. I’m going to do five, I can come up with five. And the important rule is it doesn’t matter how dumb it is. You’re going to say whatever things come out, and as you say each thing, the rest of your team is going to cheer you on, which sounds dumb, right?

So I say, “Whatever the rule is, the parking lot, everyone needs that. So we can make everybody alphabetical,” and you’re going to go, “One,” and then I’m going to say, “We’re going to do it according to hierarchy.” And everyone says “Two.”

Ashley Litzenberger:

“Two.”

Suzanne Lucas:

And it gives this immediate positive feedback to your brain, like people are cheering me on, and it allows you to move forward, because you’re getting this positive feedback, even though it’s only just one, two. I know it sounds dumb. It really, really works to come up with great ideas. So that’s one way to brainstorm.

Ashley Litzenberger:

And does it work in a hybrid environment or if we’re on Zoom as well or?

Suzanne Lucas:

It’s a little bit harder on Zoom just because you can’t hear everybody say it at the same time, but I’ve done it on Zoom where everyone does jazz hands, because then you can see. Zoom is difficult for that, but it’s that cheering on or everybody puts the thumbs up button or whatever. So you get some sort of visible, if not audible feedback. And that’s one thing.

The other thing is you need to speak the language of the people that you are dealing with. And when improv was originally developed, it was developed by a woman named Viola Spolin. She’s lovely. She’s dead. But anyway, she was lovely when she was doing it. And she had all of these kids in Chicago that didn’t speak English and they didn’t speak the language of the other kids. And so she developed it to help them communicate when they couldn’t speak the same language.

HR speaks a different language than finance, who speaks a different language than marketing, who speaks a different language than production. You’ve got to learn those languages. If I’m going to try to convince the CEO in finance of something, I can’t give them soft, squishy, this will make everybody feel more engaged. They don’t care. What do they want? How is this going to affect my bottom line? If I can’t speak numbers, I’m not speaking their language.

Ashley Litzenberger:

Yeah. So finding out what that language is, and then adjusting your message to go back to that.

Suzanne Lucas:

Right. It’s like the love languages, except not nearly as fun.

Ashley Litzenberger:

And so what is it? Is it the stories that are going to be compelling for this audience member? Is it the data and the bottom line numbers that you can present? Is it the best practices and the research that someone that’s going to sway your stakeholder?

Suzanne Lucas:

Right.

Ashley Litzenberger:

It’s really interesting. In some ways, it’s very similar to sales where if you have a strong salesperson that you’re talking to, they’re going to listen to you, and they’re going to be able to understand what are your biggest pain points, what are your biggest priorities, and what is meaningful to you? And they’re going to start shifting the way they talk to you to align to that. So if your pain point is employee engagement or your pain point is employee retention, that should be the lens through which they are talking to you about what it is that they’re trying to sell can benefit you.

Suzanne Lucas:

Exactly. And then for an HR person, I can talk to an HR person about employee engagement all day long. That may be the pain point for the business, but I need to translate that to numbers for finance. If I have engaged employees, but they’re not productive, they’re not bringing in money, that doesn’t solve finance’s problem.

Ashley Litzenberger:

Yeah. So understanding who your stakeholder is, what their challenges are, and what motivates them, and then align it to those things.

Suzanne Lucas:

Absolutely.

Ashley Litzenberger:

So if employee retention is your HR problem, but you’re trying to talk to finance, you need to talk about the cost of recruiting someone new and training them in versus that lost productivity if you had retained someone and kept them in seat, which is why whatever investment you’re trying to make to drive up employee retention is worthwhile.

Suzanne Lucas:

Exactly. And that is an area which HR and talent acquisition struggle with a lot is putting what we do into numbers, because it hits different budget lines. And so your finance people, your CEO, your operations manager, they don’t actually see the cost of bringing someone new in. And you have a lot of stupid things where someone asks for a $5,000 raise, and they’re like, absolutely not, and that person quits, then you have to spend the money to recruit and replace. And if that $5,000 increase in salary was the market rate, that’s what you’re going to pay for the new person.

Ashley Litzenberger:

Or probably a lot more, because it takes more to incentivize and get someone to switch over. You often see that internal raises or mini promotions to keep someone in seat and engaged are still below market value if that employee has been in seat for several years.

Suzanne Lucas:

Absolutely. And right now, especially within HR, it’s an employer’s market, and they can do that. But as we know, because all these things are cyclical, just because you can do it today doesn’t mean you can do it tomorrow. And if you’re treating your employees poorly today, as soon as they have the opportunity to leave, they will.

Ashley Litzenberger:

And then you’ll have a huge dearth of internal knowledge, and you’ll start to have skeleton teams that are unable to pick up and move the work forward.

Suzanne Lucas:

Absolutely. Because that internal knowledge is so, so, so critical in so many positions, and not just our white collar. I had a meeting once with the head of manufacturing for a pharmaceutical company, and he said, “Oh, I don’t want to see my hourly employee turnover. I just want my professional staff, my exempt employees.” And we said, “But your hourly turnover is high.” And he’s like, “Oh, that’s no problem, it’s no problem to replace those people. They’re easy to hire.” And we’re like, “No, they’re not easy to hire, they’re not easy to train.” But he had it in his head that they were unskilled labor, and so they didn’t matter to him. And we had to show him, okay, this is hitting your bottom line. And when he could see that, oh, this is costing me money, then oh, maybe I should pay attention to how we’re treating our manufacturing staff. But how do you get to be a senior guy in a Fortune 100 company and not understand that? But he didn’t, he didn’t understand it.

Ashley Litzenberger:

Well, and it sounds like common sense to you and to me who kind of sit in HR and think about it quite a bit, but if you are a senior executive coming over from the R&D side where you’re talking to PhDs and engineers and highly skilled people, when you hear the word unskilled, you think that doesn’t take any skills. But actually being on the floor of a manufacturing warehouse requires incredible skills. You do not see Toyota, you don’t see Apple looking at their manufacturing skilled tradesmen and thinking that they can be replaced easily. They actually require a ton of bespoke knowledge for what’s being created.

Suzanne Lucas:

Exactly. And a lot of that knowledge is transferable to another employer, but a lot of it is internal. And so all of that stuff is so incredibly critical, but it lies on HR and talent acquisition to communicate that to in a language…

Ashley Litzenberger:

That makes sense.

Suzanne Lucas:

… that they can understand.

Ashley Litzenberger:

And to your point about creating the numbers for it or finding the numbers or defining the numbers, whatever you want to call it, that is incredibly hard, because if you just see a 3% increase in engagement or productivity from your entire workforce, that output is a literally unimaginable number. It is so high, it is not believable to an executive team that you could save $20 million, $30 million, $40 million in revenue or make up that lost revenue, because of a 3% increase in productivity. But when you’re looking at incredibly large companies, that output is very real. And if you’re talking about a sales team, depending on what it is that you’re selling, that number could actually be very real as well.

Suzanne Lucas:

It could be very real. And you see some things, there’s an old joke about the old guy that’s worked for the company for 40 years, and he’s making more money than everybody else. And so the new CEO comes in, and he’s like, “Well, fire Bob, because he’s not doing anything different than anybody else.” And of course they fire Bob, and things start to fall apart.

And so they sheepishly go, “Hey, Bob, can you come in?” And Bob is like, “Yeah, but I’m going to charge you $10,000 to fix this problem.” And so they’re like, “Anything.” And Bob walks in, he looks around, pulls out his hammer, hammers one time on one machine, and then everything whirs up, and then he hands over the invoice for $10,000. And they say, “Wait, wait, we needed this itemized.” And so Bob says, “Hitting a machine with hammer, $5, knowing where to hit the machine with the hammer, $9,995.”

Ashley Litzenberger:

And that’s true.

Suzanne Lucas:

It’s absolutely true. And somebody that’s been there a long time knows where to hit that hammer.

Ashley Litzenberger:

It’s something that if you’ve ever been a solo contractor or running your own business, you’re not charging for the cost of building the report or writing the survey or creating the document itself. You’re charging someone for the decades of work and training and experience that led you to creating whatever that thing was in a matter of hours and doing it right the first time or with very minimal edits.

And we don’t really think about it that way with our internal employees. We often think about it when we’re bringing in a contractor or a consultant or someone else to come in and support us with work. We recognize the value of those skills and the reason that their rate is so much higher, but we don’t necessarily do that same internal reflection and acknowledge the value of someone’s in-seat knowledge and see that reflected in their salaries or see it in reflected in our decision to retain them. Even though they are a more expensive employee, there’s probably more that they’re bringing to the table.

Suzanne Lucas:

And there is. And you also see one of my very first encounter with a high-dollar McKinsey consultant, I was running the headcount, I was responsible for headcount in a 30,000 person company, and I was having trouble getting finance to work with me. And so I had given all of these things, this is what we need to do. Forget it. I was young, I was in my late-20s. I was completely ignored, right?

So they bring in McKinsey at how many… I have no idea how much they were paying. The McKinsey consultant shows up. He has a PhD in biology, so he’s smart. He knows nothing about finance, he knows nothing about HR, he knows nothing about headcount. He’s just a McKinsey employee. And so he interviewed me, he interviewed my staff, he interviewed the finance people. He puts together this PowerPoint presentation where point-by-point, he went over what me and my staff had told him to do. And because it was coming from him, finance was like, “Okay, we’re going to do that.” And I was just like, “I told you that six months ago for free.” But it was that I didn’t have the McKinsey stamp of approval, I was young.

You always want to listen to different people with different ideas. There isn’t something inherently magical about age. It is about experience and knowledge, but it’s experience and knowledge of different things.

I have a 16-year-old and a 21-year-old, and sometimes at dinner they’ll be talking, and I’m like, “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. I don’t understand you. I know the definition of each one of those words, but what you’re talking about, I don’t get.” And I’m sure they have the same experience listening to me blathering around about HR, because it’s just not in their wheelhouse. They’re not inherently more creative than I am. And a lot of companies assume young is creative, old is staid and boring. You can be boring and young, and you can be super creative and old. The important thing is for leadership to listen to people in their area of expertise.

So if you are in marketing and you want to market to a younger crowd, you should probably listen to those younger people. But also just because I am old doesn’t mean I don’t speak that language, that I don’t know, maybe I’ve done all the research. It’s having that open mind to look at everything that’s going on around you and to take those ideas.

We get back to that Five Things thing. It is rare when I do this that the first idea is the best idea, and sometimes it’s the fifth idea, but we’re going to listen to all five of them, and we’re going to listen to everybody’s five of them, and then we’re going to work together. And that’s another important thing when you’re talking about bringing new people in and listening to the older people is that if our goal is the same or if our goal is to be successful in this field, then as we are working together, then we’re unified. If our goal is, well, I want to get the gold star and the promotion, and you want to get the gold star and the promotion, and there’s only one promotion, then we’re going to be battling against each other. But if our goal is to make the company better, then we’re working together.

Ashley Litzenberger:

Yep. And I’m curious, I want to close us out with one last question, and it does connect back to improv and HR. You just talked about being open-minded and being willing to listen to different opinions and being able to be open to new ideas or different ways of doing things. What are some exercises that leaders can do before going into a meeting or before having a difficult conversation that can help them move into a more open-minded mindset?

Suzanne Lucas:

One of the things that we do as humans is we’re very predictable. I’m very confident in coming into this podcast interview that you weren’t going to suddenly ask me facts about roller coasters. I don’t know any facts about roller coasters, so that would be boring, but I wasn’t worried about that, because we’re going to talk about HR stuff. That’s my wheelhouse, that’s your wheelhouse. And because of that, in most of our conversations throughout our day, whether it’s at work or the people at the grocery store or your spouse or your kids, you’re 75, 80, 90% sure what the next word is that’s going to come out of someone’s mouth. And because of that, we spend most of our time when someone is talking, thinking about what we’re going to say next instead of listening.

So one of the tools and were games that I use when I’m doing leadership training using improv comedy is we will have a conversation, but you have to start your sentence with the last word of my sentence.

Ashley Litzenberger:

Oh, interesting.

Suzanne Lucas:

And so that forces you to wait until I’m done before you can formulate an answer. Now that is not something you want to do in a meeting, because it’s creepy and weird. If someone just started doing that to you, you would be like, “Why are you doing that?” It’s a fun game to play, but you can do it in a meeting in that what I’ll tell you to do in a meeting is that you need to begin your sentence with the last letter of the last word that they said. Then it’s not super obvious, but it forces you to wait until they’re done, and it makes it so you’re not jumping to conclusions. We often talk over each other.

I just started a new improv class, I teach improv, and I just started a new class on Monday, and in their scenes, they kept talking over each other, and I’m like, “Stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it. You have to wait until they’re done.” And if you start to do that in a meeting, wait until someone’s done.

Ashley Litzenberger:

Yeah. And that’s even more important for leadership that because if you start talking over someone who reports up into you or is more junior than you in another organization, if you cut someone else off, they are not going to want to speak as much in the future, they’re not going to speak up. And so as leaders, you need to model active listening. And the idea of listening to someone’s sentence, listening to the last letter of the last word, and then starting your next question or starting your next statement with that is a great trick for moving you into that active listening role.

Suzanne Lucas:

It’s a great trick. And so many times when people talk about active listening, they do that whole, “So what you’re saying is…” And that is so condescending. Nobody likes that. But if instead I just start with the last letter, it’s going to become very clear, very rapidly that I am listening to you, because I’m not cutting you off, I’m letting you finish your statements, I’m clearly understanding what you’re talking about. There you go. It’s a secret, this little tool that you can use.

Ashley Litzenberger:

Well, thank you so much. This has been a fantastic conversation, and I loved learning about the connection between the improv and HR in terms of being creative, problem solving, and also finding new avenues into active listening.

Suzanne Lucas:

Thanks so much for having me. It’s been super fun.

Ashley Litzenberger:

Thank you.

As we wrap up today’s conversation with Suzanne, let’s look at how we can apply some of her practical advice to our own organizations. First, embrace creative problem solving. Suzanne introduced us to improv techniques like the “Yes, And…” mindset, and the Five Things exercise. These can help HR professionals brainstorm solutions and manage challenges. It can also foster collaboration in even the most high pressure environments.

Second, focus on setting boundaries. Suzanne highlighted the importance of being clear about what’s realistic and sustainable, especially in HR roles where professionals often wear multiple hats. Establishing boundaries not only protects your time and energy, but it also sets a standard for effective prioritization across the organization.

Finally, learn to adapt your communication style to your audience. Suzanne emphasized that whether you’re talking to the CEO, finance, or frontline employees, speaking their language will build alignment and drive results. These strategies are all about bringing creativity, balance, and strategic focus to HR practices, helping professionals thrive in their roles.

Be sure to stay tuned for our next episode of the People Fundamentals podcast. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube Music. And if you like what you hear, share us with your friends and colleagues. We’ll see you again soon.