Sarah Ehrnschwender – Principal Dr. Sydney Savion, Ed.D., serves as Vice Chancellor for People, Culture and Belonging at Vanderbilt University. We had a chance to chat with her about the transformation she is leading to help the university scale while meeting this moment of human transition in a world of AI. From learning a surprising source of inspiration (agriculture!) to her advice for helping people see their future selves in the change, Savion shares insights for leaders to create conditions for growth. Let’s dive in.
Let me frame it like this: I grew up in a rural farming community, and that experience still shapes how I think about transformation. You can buy a better tractor, but if the soil is depleted, the irrigation is broken, or the ecosystem is out of balance, better machinery is not going to produce the harvest you want.
That’s how I see the work that we’re leading at Vanderbilt. We’re building the people infrastructure for a university growing in scale, geography, and ambition. Skills-based job architecture with critical skills, manager capability, talent mobility, performance development, workforce intelligence, and responsible AI all have to work as a connected system.
Through our skills-based job architecture, we’ve mapped more than 800 roles and identified seven critical skills. We’ve launched a Talent Marketplace that has reached about 90% utilization, and now we’re evolving the work into something more intuitive for Vanderbilt: a Talent Marketplace to create clear pathways for people to move, grow, and contribute across the institution. We’ve also launched a new approach to performance (development and management) by connecting our philosophy, policy, and manager practices in a technology platform that centralizes goals, feedback, and development and documentation.
People often chalk these up as HR programs. For me, they’re part of an ecosystem designed to help people understand what’s expected, where they fit in, where they can grow and connect, and how what they do supports Vanderbilt’s mission. We’ve launched many things. Now we’re operationalizing and normalizing those things. It’s been one grand transformational experiment.
For any organization I’ve been a part of, the question is ‘how do you make a transformation real for people?’ Oftentimes people feel like it’s happening to them versus being part of co-designing that transformation.
Shared understanding happens when the strategy makes that trip from the PowerPoint or e-mail to a small gathering or what happens on Tuesday morning in the team meeting, and ultimately in the work itself. People should be able to answer three questions: Where are we going? What does this mean for me? What do I do differently today?
We are creating that line of sight in different ways. Our Manager Voyage establishes a shared Vanderbilt standard for good management. The Vanderbilt Talent Marketplace makes mobility visible and actionable. We have a Curious Bar where people can come and ask questions about anything related to People Operations, and our Curious Bar pop-ups support people where they are. We’re launching Manager Connection, where my Chief of Staff and I will sit with small groups of managers to connect the patterns across people, processes, and systems.
The goal is not more communication. It is clarity and connection and helping people see how Vanderbilt’s vision and mission show up in the choices they make every day. What might work in terms of trying to foster shared understanding with one group may be different than the executives or the middle managers and so on. That is why I believe in experimentation and segmentation: try things, see what resonates, and figure out what works for different groups in the organizational ecosystem.
Sometimes people just want to be heard. You’re not always going to have the answer. Sometimes you might have information that you can’t share. But people just want someone to be present.
They want to be heard and being present makes them feel seen. That sounds a little amorphous, but it’s very concrete when you can sit across from someone and be present with them.
Human transition, which I’m very passionate about, is what happens in that space between technological change and human adaptation. I wrote about this after falling down a rabbit hole watching The Gilded Age. Beneath the gowns and drawing rooms was something very familiar: new technologies, fortunes, institutions, and rules for who belonged, and people trying to figure out who they were as the world around them changed.
AI is creating a similar moment. Technology changes first, markets reorganize, institutions adapt, and people transition last. People are rarely afraid of the future in the abstract. They’re afraid of losing their place in it. If something you spent 20 years mastering can suddenly be done in seconds, the question is not only ‘what can AI do?’; it is, ‘where do I fit in now and where does my value move next?’ That is why I see AI transformation not simply as a technology rollout, but as a human transition event.
I start from the premise that when work changes, identity can change with it. A lot of people attach their identity to their work. Expertise gives people more than competence. It gives them status, confidence, and often a sense of place. Our job is not simply to teach people this new tool. We have to help them move through the transition, going back to the human transition.
I think about the journey as displacement, disorientation, experimentation, integration, and stewardship. Leaders can either accelerate people through those stages thoughtfully or leave them stuck in one of them. That means making the change legible: What’s changing? What’s not? Where does human judgment become even more important?
It means protecting room to experiment and be a beginner, giving people agency in redesigning their work, and creating visible pathways to what comes next. In my experience, people need more than reassurance that they have a future. They need to be able to see themselves in it. Going back to shared understanding, how do you help people see themselves in that future when the world around them is changing so quickly?
Redesign the work before you make decisions about roles. Ask what should be automated, augmented, stopped, simplified, or made more human first.
Second, learn in public. When leaders show what they tried, where AI missed, and how their judgment improved the outcome, they make experimentation safer for everyone. Demonstrate with your people.
Third, build capability through work, not just courses. Practice on real problems with guardrails. Notional problems can help, but real ones are more useful when so much change is happening around us.
Fourth, reinvest the productivity dividend. As automation and augmentation return time, ask what we will do with it. This is our opportunity to reemerge in a different way. We should reinvest that time in judgment, relationships, creativity, and better service.
I love data. I’ve got a team that oversees insights and optimization, so I like to watch the dashboard and listen for the signal underneath it. We look at quantitative and qualitative data, including adoption, utilization, cycle time, quality, service levels, mobility, retention, customer satisfaction, net promoter score, service-level agreements, and sentiment.
Transformation usually starts stalling before the KPIs turn red. You hear it in workarounds, shadow processes, manager hesitation, or language like, ‘I do not understand what this means for me.’ We might chalk that up to resistance to change, but it is a signal.
I also look for signs of healthy momentum: people experimenting without being told, managers connecting strategy to local decisions, talent moving across boundaries, and teams retiring old work rather than layering new work on top of it. Performance during transformation is both operational and human. We need evidence that the system is getting better and that people are gaining confidence and agency.
My leadership team and I review the data weekly. The numbers say something, but we also look at the emotions behind the numbers and ask where the signal is coming from: which group, what division, what business unit. Then we go talk to people. I’m big on getting up out of the seat and talking to people. That is where the connection comes in. Asking ‘Are you free? Where are you? What building are you in? I’m coming over to see you.’ We don’t do enough of it; connecting with people is so important.
Our core values are belonging, self-direction, collaboration, and growth. Radical collaboration is important. It’s not just something we say. I believe we truly espouse it. I often say ecosystems like that don’t respect org charts, neither does a transformation. Some of our best work happens when we sit and radically collaborate with finance and legal, technology and our data, communications, and our academic and operational leaders. We do that day in and day out. There’s always a tech component if you’re trying to drive any kind of automation or augmentation, even before AI was all the rage. The notion of radical collaboration is paramount.
Going back to my farming analogy, you can’t command a field to grow, but you can create the conditions. We can’t command people to change and grow, but we can create the conditions for them to grow. To me, that is the most important mindset.
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