Tonya Jackson has served all over Lexmark in her 33 years with the printing-equipment company, rising through and across the ranks with experiences that included directing experience design, honchoing technology services and overseeing sustainability. For more than 10 years she led global supply-chain and other operations, culminating in a promotion to senior vice president and chief product delivery officer in 2020.
So she carried with her a unique perspective—or, rather, a unique basket of perspectives—in 2023 when Jackson jumped over to her current role as senior vice president and people officer for the $3.7 billion former IBM spinoff headquartered in Lexington, Kentucky.
Why did she plunge into an arena in which she had no formal training, having earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in chemistry as well as an MBA, and having spent her early career at IBM in engineering-staff positions?
“The reason I’m [now heading HR] is to connect HR more to the business, because while it is around the business and providing service in the business and our people are amazingly talented, there is a natural disconnect,” Jackson says. “I’m trying to make sure we’re making the best decisions to add value to the business.”
In the pursuit, she says, “you have to bring your own set of skills with you, but you have to spend time listening within the organization and recognizing there’s a lot to learn, and how to operate in the space with the people you now have working with you, and figuring out how to mobilize them.”
For the goal of making human capital management more integral to the overall enterprise, Jackson believes her long and thorough familiarity with so many aspects of Lexmark’s business are a major advantage for her and the CHRO function as she begins to push more levers in her relatively new role.
“When I was in the business, it was easy to stay connected with the business,” she says. “In HR, it’s easy for me as a person to continue that, because I was in it. But I’m trying to build a culture with my peers about, what do they need from HR? Sure, what they’ve received all the time—but what else do they need?”
One thing Jackson knew from her decades in leadership at Lexmark before she took over the HR function is that not only does the company have a culture, but “every business unit has a subculture,” she says. “Everyone is different and has different needs. We’re all trying to achieve greatness in helping customers and each other, but people need different things.”
In just about a year at the helm of HR, Jackson is exerting her leadership in several ways in a number of areas. They include:
Sub-culturation. When Jackson says different parts of Lexmark have different subcultures, she means, for example, that they operate at different paces—and that affects communication styles, among other things.
“I spent a lot of time in the supply-chain area, and it’s very fast-paced and the fastest-moving part of the business,” she says. “Communications have to be crisp. They’re always respectful, but people working there are just trying to get fast information so they can make decisions. They understand the business, and you don’t have to explain the how’s and why’s.
“But other parts of the business may be more removed from the day to day, such as R&D. They’re looking at long-term projects and what might impact the future. They’re interested in road maps. So you have to develop the right kind of communications for that.”
Talent appreciation. Every company based on technology is looking for more good help, but Jackson is trying to help the company make better use of the talent it already has.
“We’ll always have to get talent, but we’re trying to work with the business more to identify other skills in people and things they may be interested in beyond what they’re doing, to stretch the internal talent we have and give them opportunities.
“People stay for a lot of different reasons, especially compensation. But a lot of people also want a chance and an opportunity to use their skills. If you believe in them and give them an opportunity, and time to get up to speed, people feel you’ve answered the what’s-in-it-for-me question. They feel the company is investing in them.”
Creating “EX.” Lexmark is focusing on improving the “employee experience,” Jackson says. “EX,” she says, “looks different across the globe,” with more than 8,000 employees in facilities around the world. “We try to figure out what is the work-life fit that people need wherever they are.”
And also figure out how different global cultures affect EX expectations. One important area for that, Jackson says, is in employee recognition. “Different regions want different kinds of recognition,” she says. Workers in some Western countries, for instance, may be happy with just an e-mail acknowledging some sort of milestone or achievement.
But “what’s important in recognition to one set of people won’t be to another,” Jackson says. Sometimes, it’s a matter of picking “low-hanging fruit” in ways that easily satisfy the egos of employees who, for instance, have achieved an anniversary with the company.
In the Philippines, for instance, employees “have voiced that they would like more types of recognition, and a big one is anything that is branded with the company. We have a large site there, and employees like to wear Lexmark t-shirts and other things. They like to show it off in an area where there are lots of other companies.”
Liberating skills. Before Covid and the rise of remote work, Jackson says, Lexmark was like many other companies in that, in hiring for particular skills, “we used to have to hire the people we had around a site. Now, if we need a particular skill set, it can be remote. And we can target some of the best places to get those skills.”
In fact, Lexmark’s recruiting team now works with a group of mobile specialists who know, “if we need a certain talent and need it to be cost effective, these are the best states and countries to find them.”
Leveraging data. One surprise to Jackson as she moved into human-capital management was “how much data there is. There’s data everywhere. Now we need to get it to managers so they can make decisions with it. We’re working on dashboards and other things. If managers have to keep coming back to HR to get data, that’s not helpful to the business.
“But the data needs to be focused. When you do that, you can see what skills are available. People are doing their jobs, but that doesn’t mean they are using all of their own skills. So we have people put their skills into our database, and even when looking at an internal position, you can look at the data and ping people to apply for certain roles if they aren’t paying attention to the posting.”
Creating “One HR.” As a team, Jackson says, Lexmark HR is “really working on ‘One HR.’ Sometimes you can become a specialist and identify as a specialist. But the business wants help from the HR team, not necessarily from a specialist. They want a solution and the best way to accomplish it—not to have to go to five specialists to put it together.”
Further, she says, while HR “has always been in the business of helping people, we also are trying to bring our own value proposition. Why are we here? What are we doing differently? When we do that, if we help drive business results, we’re helping people—but it’s not just about helping people. It’s about adding business value.”
