Yahoo Finance My first boss: HR leader Tracy Layney, from Gap to Levi Strauss
San Francisco-based Tracy Layney, 49, has over 20 years of experience in human resources and organisation strategy.
Having held senior roles at Gap and Shutterfly, the travel passionate, change-agent leader is now senior vice president and global chief human resources officer at Levi Strauss & Co working under CEO and president Chip Bergh. She joined as the pandemic took hold in March 2020.
I started my career in organisation development consulting, which I loved and has forged a large part of where I am today. I focused on large scale transformation at different companies and was a consultant at PriceWaterhouseCoopers before I first went to Levi’s, early on in my career in 2003.
At the time Levi’s wasn’t doing well financially, they cancelled my organisational design project and I got laid off by the company. I still say today that if I hadn’t been laid off, I would not be where I am now.
Gap was down the road from Levi’s, they were building their HR team and I somehow got on the radar of its relatively new chief HR officer, Eva Sage-Gavin. Even though I was a senior manager, Eva saw my skill set in organisation development as a pivotal one for HR of the future and I enjoyed a 10-year career there up until 2014, working for an iconic company in San Francisco.
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I learnt the nuts and bolts of more traditional HR, through some great leaders and the value it played for the organisation. Eva taught me to approach HR with art and science, or head and heart. HR as a profession needs to be very business driven, in line with the company strategy, data-based and analytical; and anything that any other heart of the company would bring to the table.
And, because it’s about dealing with the employees and the person who wakes up thinking about the company talent, it has to have heart, as well as art. Excellent HR leaders are able to balance both, bringing the analytical view and leading with empathy.
Under Eva’s mentorship, I learnt about making tough decisions with an employee mindset - how you treat people is everything and what people will remember you by.
I started at Levi Strauss in March 2020 and I’ve carried over plenty of experiences which came into play from my Gap tenure. We were in such crisis management mode at Levi’s as the pandemic took shape and it was about how to keep people safe and the business afloat.
My HR principles became front and centre in how to make the best decisions with the ever-changing crisis data we had and not to be afraid to make those decisions if they don’t work anymore. It was data-driven, combined with the straight empathy approach. It’s how you show up in the hard times, too. In the summer of 2020 we had a reduction of workforce and we had to lead with as much empathy as possible.
Levi’s has 16,600 employees globally, with the majority in our stores. We set a mantra in 2020 that we wanted to emerge stronger through the pandemic and we reached over £4.4 billion (US $5.8 billion) in revenue in 2021, a 29% improvement from 2020.
During the pandemic, focus turned to mental health. Towards the end of my tenure at Gap I had suffered a pretty big experience of burnout, had to take a sabbatical and turned to reading Thrive by Arianna Huffington. A few months into the pandemic, we looked hard at mental health with our frontline and corporate employees and partnered with Thrive Global to help our employees take a tailored approach to managing stress. I got to know Arianna personally, which was a dream as a mental health mentor.
We now have paid family leave which isn’t unusual for a lot of corporate companies, but for retail it is. All of these things lined up for us to ‘emerge stronger’.
Eva was certainly a strong, commanding presence. She had a clear perspective and wasn’t afraid to say what she thought. She was able to show up, be fearless in leadership and wasn’t afraid to speak her mind. It is an attribute I have used to become an effective HR leader.
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With human resources, be business driven, collect the data that makes sense and be able to contribute to the critical conversation around talent that’s going on in the company.
Remember, you are the voice of the table that is thinking the most about talent and the key is to balance that advocacy for employees with an understanding of what the business requires. Just don’t be afraid to speak up.
Levi Strauss & Co employee population is 58% made up of women — along with more than 60% of its executive team
Watch: Why do we still have a gender pay gap?
