Results Don't Happen. They're Designed. w/ Dr. Tim Williams

Results Don't Happen. They're Designed.

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Most HR leaders have had this moment. A program gets launched. A culture initiative goes live. Engagement scores are discussed in a leadership meeting. And six months later, nothing measurable has shifted. The work feels busy. The results feel invisible. And the question that quietly follows every HR leader home is some version of: was any of this actually strategic?

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Dr. Tim Williams has spent decades answering that question. Tim trained as an engineer before he trained as an organizational psychologist. He spent years inside Procter & Gamble during the period the company was implementing the Hanna OP model across its plants. Today he is a partner at the Organization Transformation Group and a three-year partner with SHRM Georgia, where he helps HR professionals make the shift from administrative execution to strategic leadership. His premise is simple and unusually direct: the results your organization gets right now are the designed output of the systems and behaviors already in place. If you want different results, you do not wish for them. You redesign the system.

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Why engineers make different HR leaders

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Tim's framing starts with how engineers approach problems. "There's a science to everything," he said. "Engineers do things to get to a solution, to have an answer, to have a result." That mindset is rarely how HR functions operate. Most HR work is organized around task execution, not around the root causes of the outcomes a business actually needs. Tim argues that this is the single biggest reason HR gets treated as support rather than strategy.

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At his firm, the team is built almost entirely of operators. People who ran businesses before they moved into HR. "We're a group of HR folk who at some point were either engineers or worked in operations or did the real work," he said. "We understand people from our client's point of view, not just from a book point of view."

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From managing to leading

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One of the most direct moments in the conversation came when Tim laid out why most HR professionals never make the jump to strategic work. "Most people who are in HR have not made a decision to lead," he said. Managers handle resources. Leaders envision outcomes. They think about what the organization could be, not what it currently can do. Tim illustrated this with a simple car analogy: if your organization can do 80 miles per hour and the market demands 120, most people accept the 80. Leaders decide on the 120 and work backwards to build toward it. "Forget about what you can do. Decide what you need to do. That's your vision."

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The shift starts with a decision. Not a title, not a new process. "Once you make that decision, you can lead. But if you never do that, most HR folks, they don't see themselves doing that."

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Organizational design is the lever

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The core of the conversation centered on organizational design, which Tim defines in a way that cuts through most of the jargon around it. "Organization design produces culture. Culture are behaviors of your people that produce results." Org charts, span of control, and reporting lines are not design. They are artifacts. The real design question is whether the systems, incentives, and processes in your organization are producing the behaviors that produce the results you need.

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To make the idea concrete, Tim walked through a story from his time as an HR manager at the P&G plant in Brockville, Ontario. The plant was considered one of the highest-performing in the company. But safety results were cratering. The statistics suggested they were due for a fatality. When the team dug in, they found the cause was buried in their own policy. The plant had a set of "red light" behaviors, safety violations that triggered automatic termination. In a close-knit Canadian plant culture, this produced an unintended result: nobody reported anything. Workers were not going to get each other fired.

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The HR team walked the issue back to the system. They removed the automatic termination rule. They built channels for people to report without consequence. And in a move Tim described as their commitment to the new design, they reoffered jobs to the workers they had previously terminated under the old rule. Within roughly twelve to eighteen months, Brockville was back at the top of P&G's safety performance. "We were uniquely designed to get those poor safety results," Tim said. "We came back and changed the design. The design changed people's behavior. Culture changed. And then our results became something different."

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The finance myth

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One of the more counterintuitive parts of the conversation was Tim's take on how HR leaders fund their programs. The default advice most HR professionals hear is: build a relationship with finance. Tim pushed back on that directly. "Finance is like a regulator. They hold us accountable to the numbers. But who decides what we're going to do? Decision makers make that decision." Money should not drive vision. Vision drives where money goes. And the people approving the money are not in the finance function, they are in operations, on the executive team, and in the rooms where the strategy is set.

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The practical implication is that HR leaders should build relationships with the operators they serve, not with the gatekeepers of the budget. "Begin to build a relationship with the people that are counting on you. Help them see that you're not just a person that's going to accomplish a task. You're a person that can help them solve their problems from a people standpoint." When HR work connects to a problem an operator is trying to solve, the money stops being an expense and starts being an investment. Companies always find money for investments.

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HR metrics are not soft

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Tim also dismantled the idea that HR is stuck behind soft metrics. "The bottom line results were my results. Productivity was my results. Attrition. I owned that, even if people were leaving because of these not-so-good managers. I still owned it." He pointed to a short list of categories HR leaders can tie their work to directly: productivity, the cost of attrition, organization performance, and employee survey data that can be converted into dollars and behavioral patterns. The feeling is not the metric. The behavior is the metric. Feelings drive behavior, but you measure behavior.

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BE, BECOME, and ACT

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Tim closed with a framework he uses with his coaching clients. Start by determining who you are. Your be. Then work on why you are not yet that person. Your become. Only then do you take action. "At the point where you nail all of that, then you can take action to actually be that person."

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He paired that with advice that feels underrated in a career stage where most leaders are trying to expand: get clear on what you do not want to do. "A hammer can't screw screws. You ought to be okay with that."

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The thread running through the conversation is control. The outcomes you have were designed. The outcomes you want can be designed too. That is not inspirational. It is operational. It is the work.