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If you want to understand what makes Kristen Harper a great people leader at the Houston Rockets, you can start with the fact that she just had to deal with the first turnover on her team in a decade. Whatever the senior director of human resources has been doing since coming to the NBA team in 2012, her team has willingly followed through a global pandemic and the period of hyper-change and growth that has followed.
Harper has incurred a tremendous amount of evolution and growth over the last three years. That includes a drive toward digitization that she half-jokes hopes leads to most file cabinets in her department heading to the scrap yard. Harper has led the shift to digital performance reviews, onboarding, offboarding, and recruiting with vendor HRIS partner Paycor to centralize payroll, benefits, learning, and employee records. It took months of coordination across the organization.
“Everything is Docusigned and approved digitally,” Harper explains. “Ideally, you won’t be handing anything on paper to our team anymore.”
Calling the digitalization effort a small part of a much larger HR facelift underplays just how impactful going paperless will be for the organization going forward. But you need to consider just how much transformation Harper is driving.
“I feel like there is nothing in HR that hasn’t gotten touched,” the senior director says. “We have overhauled employee communication, employee events, our internship program, our recruiting platform, and today, we’re in the middle of improving our employee website.”
Harper has also had the opportunity to bring on new talent in HR. She recently hired two new reports who the senior director says are highly motivated, are ideal culture fits, and have already brought outstanding ideas to continue to drive HR efforts across the team.
“I’m a firm believer that when you have good people under you, they make you look good,” Harper says. “They have really great ideas, and some of the time, it’s just about getting out of their way and letting them be successful.”
The senior director says communicating HR’s needs and plans for change to the Rockets’ broader leadership team has been crucial to getting where they need to go. Harper says she believes she’s cultivated trust over her thirteen years to drive the kind of change she sees as necessary from getting HR modernized and ready for the next thirteen years.
Looking ahead, Harper says she’ll continue to look for ways to enhance the employee experience and optimize benefits. She’s also got her eyes on leadership development programs for future leaders of the team.
“This year, we’ve spent a lot of time working with people in middle management,” Harper explains. “Those are the people that you want to invest in and help grow their careers within the organization.”
What’s most evident about Harper is that she does what she says and says what she does. There’s not a whole lot of gray area. Perhaps that’s because she doesn’t have time to dabble. Some weeks, there are three home games and two concerts.
Much like the game on the court, Harper’s game is fast-paced and heavy on executional excellence.
Rick Noriega and USI are proud to be the official Employee Benefits broker of the Houston Rockets for the past 18+ years. USI combines industry leading national capabilities delivered through longstanding, passionate and committed local service teams. At USI we work to Understand the specific needs of our clients, to provide an unparalleled local Service experience, and to Innovate with cutting edge solutions so our clients can continue to invest and grow.
