Meg Bear: Building a More Engaged Workforce with Innovative HR Technologies

With over 7,000 customers and 164,000,000 users globally, SAP has been leading the Human Capital Management (HCM) market for more than two decades. Consistently a leader in industry-wide analyst reports such as the Gartner Cloud HCM Suites Magic Quadrant and IDC Talent Acquisition Marketscape, SAP SuccessFactors solutions cover all aspects of HR technology. This includes core HR, time management, compensation, and payroll as well as strategic HR solutions like employee experience management, recruiting, onboarding, performance management, and learning.

Building on the longstanding success with HCM, SAP is now developing a new market category: Human Experience Management, or HXM. HXM is the backbone of the future of work – technology that puts people at the center of business. Recognizing people will be a true competitive advantage for businesses.

An Inspiring Leader Fuelling Enterprise Growth 

Meg Bear is the SVP of Engineering and Operations at SAP SuccessFactors. Her team is responsible for delivering market-leading products for its customers.

Meg has been in the enterprise applications market for the past 20+ years, with over a decade focused on HR technology. Prior to SAP SuccessFactors, she held strategic executive roles as SVP of Product, Data, and Engineering at Juvo, SVP of Cloud Services at Imperva, GVP of Social Cloud, and HCM Development at Oracle, and HCM leadership positions at both PeopleSoft and Saba. Meg's experience and passion revolves around building and scaling technology platforms, applying technology to solve business problems, and defining market-winning product strategies that help customers succeed. She is a firm believer that business thrives when people thrive. In addition to her day job, Meg is also a mother of two, as well as a startup advisor, mentor, keynote speaker, and TEDx host.

Driving Breakthrough Innovation with People

Commenting on product and service innovation, Meg asserts that SAP listens to and actively involves its customers for the best result. While the leadership team at SAP SuccessFactors has a strong vision for the future (a vision of HXM) that guides them, the company has innovative customers that work with it to build the best solutions. SAP co-innovates with its customers, listening to their feedback every step of the way in building, launching, and enhancing its products.

SAP has a variety of co-innovation opportunities for its customers from simple idea submission to formal product advisory programs and Beta programs. In 2020 alone, and despite the pandemic and entirely virtual work, over 800 customers participated in these programs.

Technology will Disrupt People's Lives and Work

Throughout her career, Meg has always been excited about how technology has expanded the benefit of applications in the enterprise. She believes that everyone will agree that the world has hit yet another exciting inflection point. The last decade of cloud adoption has significantly built the foundation for interesting leaps forward, specifically in the realm of data. Businesses are moving past the ideas of how technology can reduce cost and increase output, to how technology can make work better. Meg is curious to find out how technology can bring the best of itself forward to not only simplify work, but reimagine work.

"We are in an era where we can think beyond personalization and think about individualization. Looking at our whole self and understanding how each of us can become a part of an organization that will not only help us achieve, but thrive in the competitive business landscape," she said.

She continued: "In the mid-2000s, people were thinking about the nexus of forces – bringing mobile, social, and local together powered by the iPhone. Today, they are contemplating how everyone can not only manage their careers but instead leverage their gifts. Critical pieces of this are already showing up, but this is only the beginning. Everyone is thinking about key concepts like well-being, inclusion, feedback, self-sovereign identity, and much more. Technology is no longer abstract. It is embedded. And most importantly, it is not about technology, it is about improving people's lives."

Exceptional Traits of Next-Generation Leadership

Meg emphasizes that transformational leadership is about driving change. Sustainable change is achieved when a leader equips people with clarity of vision and then paves the path for them to achieve greatness. To quote Lao Tzu, "A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves."

To make sure people are clear on the vision, leaders have to do the work to clarify the 'why' and communicate that 'why' to every group in a way that is deeply personalized to the role they play in the organization. Paving the path requires all the mechanics on how leaders get to the end state – skills, roles, tools. Every piece of it needs to fall into place to help people achieve what they are capable of.

Lastly, it is a lot about performing. Often, with transformational leadership, people get excited by the vision and want to talk about it. But performing it can feel harder. Meg assumes that leaning on a growth mindset and leveraging agile technology tools helps break things down and get started with small wins, building toward the ultimate end state. She avows that critical skills, including curiosity, empathy, and execution, will help drive transformational leadership.

Leading the Change to Stand Out in the Crowd  

Meg is the first-generation in her family to go to college, so everything about a professional career was new to her. She didn't have a real role model to chart her path. She graduated high school at the age of 16 and college at 20, so she was also very young. Meg started her career in a context that already made her feel different. She joined a tech company selling ERP solutions to manufacturing companies in the Midwest of the United States. Often, Meg was the only woman in the room. As she progressed in her career, she began to recognize her obligations to support other women so that the next-generation didn't have to be the "only". "I am fortunate to have had these opportunities in my career, and I've come to realize that it really is gratitude to so many of our industry pioneers that I even had the opportunities I did. We stand on the shoulders of giants," Meg mentioned.

Thriving in the Era of Technology

After graduating in Economics, Meg was hired into a tech startup right out of college and she fell in love with the industry right away. Her first role was in tech support, then consulting and product management, and finally engineering. It was in engineering where Meg found her combination of interests in market dynamics, technology, design, and a deep sense of customer empathy was a great foundation for engineering leadership. She says "The opportunity to learn on the job every day is why I am so passionate about technology as a career. Where else do you get paid to reinvent your skills so frequently? It is never boring."

Envisioning the Future of Work

Every business is undergoing some kind of transformation. To compete in the global market of today, companies need to be agile and adaptable. Every business transformation is ultimately a people transformation, and people transformations are best enabled by empowering the workforce. Every month since SAP announced HXM in 2019, there have been more and more companies beginning their experience journeys.

SAP expects this momentum to continue as organizations seek to maintain the culture and a sense of belonging for remote employees, while also promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion and well-being. As the HXM market maker, the company is committed to providing the technology platform to bring the future of work to every employee.

Inspiring Future Leaders

Advising emerging leaders, Meg says that the more they deeply understand their best self and bring that to work every day, the better leader they can be. Embracing and honouring their own authentic learning journey is the first step. Expanding empathy for others by seeking to understand their best selves and embracing a growth mindset, getting out of their comfort zone, and being willing to take risks in the service of learning is crucial for future leaders.

Meg further expresses that she would love to tell her younger self to spend less time trying to pretend she was not different, and instead invest more time in learning why her differences were her power. "It is so hard when you are not like others to question your place – and often there is no one else who has an interest in helping you feel like you belong." The two biggest things she learnt that have made the biggest impact on Meg's career (after the hard work, of course) are:

1. She should use her gifts to help othersvs. try to help herself.

2. She could never stand out if she kept trying to fit in