Laura Lawson learned HR leadership in some oblique ways. Through her mother’s death from cancer. With Ellen DeGeneres. And without any professional background in human-capital management.
Twenty years ago, the woman who now is executive vice president and chief people officer of United Wholesale Mortgage, in Pontiac, Michigan, was instead well ensconced in the world of Hollywood entertainment. She was associate producer of the Ellen DeGeneres Show—the first full-time employee of the groundbreaking daytime talker, the person who hired the rest of the staff, and the pre-interviewer of celebrities to make them as interesting as possible when DeGeneres chatted with them on-air.
“It was a dream,” Lawson recalls now for StrategicCHRO360. “Every year we were the No. 1 daytime talk show. But then my mom was diagnosed with cancer, and we were very close. I couldn’t go home [to Michigan]. When she was sick and hurting, I couldn’t go home. And once I finally could go home on [the show’s] hiatus, she passed away 12 days later, when I was alone with her.
“I learned a lot from it. I was 30 years old.”
Lawson made the difficult professional decision to arc back to Michigan, where she had two older sisters and other family members. “After that significant loss of my mother, I began to see my life differently,” she says. “Instead of sadness, I rose to a leadership role in the family. I never had that voice when I was the youngest.
“So I moved back to Michigan. I had a great resume, but what was I going to do with it?”
Mat Ishbia had the answer. After a stint in charge of marketing and communications for the American Lung Association in Michigan, in 2011 Lawson joined the man who owned and runs United Wholesale Mortgage, the industry giant that originated $108 billion in home loans in 2023 and employs about 6,000 people. The gist of the company is a B2B home-lending platform for mortgage brokers, which requires a lot of tech and online-support workers.
Like Lawson, Ishbia is a devoted graduate of Michigan State University and even rode the bench for coach Tom Izzo’s national title-winning Spartan men’s basketball team in 2000. Now, billionaire Ishbia also owns the Phoenix Suns of the National Basketball Association.
“Our first meeting was comfortable right away,” Lawson says. “I learned from Hollywood, and through the loss of my mom, that I wanted to succeed by being myself and being authentic. I said, ‘I know nothing about your business.’ He said, ‘I don’t want you to. You know productivity and marketing and you can help us. I bet on you, and you bet on me.’ Thirteen years later, here we are.”
Lawson joined UWM in 2011 as senior vice president of marketing; having graduated from MSU with a degree in advertising, it was her most proximate and identifiable skill. But that was just an opening to her soon becoming the company’s HR chief without a speck of professional training in human resources.
“Every time I saw a void, I said, ‘Why not me?’” Lawson says. “I’m always curious and a helper. I started picking up opportunities, in travel administration, and then, why not help with hiring? I didn’t stay in my lane. I became a company caretaker. I got people’s stories and learned how to support them. I moved into training and leadership development. Mat kept betting on me, even through maternity leave.”
Ten years ago, Lawson was promoted to EVP and chief people officer. One of the remarkable things about how she has evidently flourished in that role at UWM is the stark difference in the type of employer, and the setting, between her Hollywood days and today.
Her roles in the entertainment industry—with early reality-TV concepts as well as game shows such as Celebrity Challenge—mostly consisted of tightly controlled production sets and included lots of handholding with big egos. By contrast, UWM is more of a wild west kind of workplace, with a single facility that is an old automotive plant and a vast office panorama that opens below, consisting of thousands of ambitious, mostly young, employees trying to make their mark in the world.
Here are some approaches she’s taken and leadership lessons she’s learned in the last decade:
Leverage ambiguity. It fosters creativity, Lawson believes. “It takes not having an education in some of the lanes I lead to not have pre-set or existing rules,” she says. “What do we know, and how do we heighten it? One of the things we did, for example, is change the name of our function to ‘team member services.’ Where I’d worked before, I didn’t know the HR team, or where they worked, or if they sat somewhere different. They were regulators.
“But we are team members and a support system. So we changed our [HR] structure in order to change the mindset, or we can’t thoroughly help people. It also helps open us up to provide unconventional things like wellness and career coaches and engagement teams and community ambassadors.”
Shift gears. UWM’s business has sloughed off in the last couple of years with high mortgage rates, but Ishbia has stuck with his promise not to lay off anyone. Among other things, that has required Lawson to help come up with productive pursuits as more employees shift into what she calls “education mode.”
“We’re able to be more aggressive on an educational uptick,” she says. “We do more leadership development and training. We’re overstaffed by design. If people are under-indexed in production, we are able to have them shadow into other roles. If they’re not production-busy, they’re education-busy. And if there’s a cycle in the mortgage business, we shift our population to more of an emphasis on developing and learning technology.”
Make DEI organic. “It’s always been a focus” for UWM, Lawson says. “But it’s about being our authentic selves. We have ‘Be You Here’ days. We have [employee resource groups], and I’m a member of every single one.
“Also, a lot of it is to have not just thought leaders being educated on DEI but opening it up to all team members. They all deserve a DEI education. We have no walls or barriers, both physically and figuratively. We see each other and celebrate each other, and that’s the definition of diversity.”
Go and learn. “I love talking to other companies” about their human-capital management approaches, Lawson says. “That drives and motivates me, too. Any time I’m not sitting in Pontiac, I’m visiting other companies, where I get so many ideas. I’ve been to Zappos in Las Vegas and to the Googleplex in California. I like to see how others structure things, even if sometimes they don’t provide a great service experience.”
Know your people. UWM has great facilities for its employees, including a vast sports complex. Lawson also helps lead events such as a UWM Fair in the summer that, this year, lured 20,000 employees and their families.
“So I go and talk to the family members. ‘Do you know what your mom and dad do for a living?’ I ask employees, ‘How can we support you.’ Every touchpoint like that gives you something. And when I cross the [work] floor, I take a different angle and path every time, and I learn something different every time. I’m constantly taking pictures on my phone out there of what things can be better. I don’t miss an opportunity. It just takes energy.
“My mind never turns off. I have a cloud of scratch pads. There is so much for me to do here.”
