TPO Spotlight: Dana Papke

April 1st, 2015
Written by: TPO

Meet Dana

After featuring so many of TPO’s consultants and staff, it is time to profile the person who leads and inspires them every day: TPO President and CEO Dana Papke. Many know that she’s served in numerous business and HR roles throughout her career, including Executive Vice President, Chief Administrative Officer and Chief Operating Officer to name a few. But not everyone knows that Dana is a TPO “boomerang” who returned to the firm for a second term. Dana worked as a TPO Consultant between 2002 and 2004, and later moved on to serve a variety of executive roles at the non-profit Grafton School. When she started a job search in 2011, she called TPO founder Karen Usher to request that she be an employment reference. Instead, Karen began recruiting Dana back to TPO, and the rest is history. “That reference request turned out to be one of the best phone calls I ever made,” says Dana. Today, she draws from her extensive operations experience to lead the firm and help drive TPO’s success. 

A Fresh Perspective

Dana is an expert in bringing people and operations into strategic alignment to fuel business results. Because she’s split her career between both operational roles and HR roles, she brings a unique perspective to her work, and to TPO. “I often say that I look at HR through the lens of an operator and at operations through the lens of HR, and that’s a good set of lenses,” she says. It’s a viewpoint that led Dana to help architect TPO’s unique approach and its exclusive data-driven tools. “I’ve tried to sharpen our focus on the quantifiable value of HR,” says Dana. “That’s what clients are demanding.”

Moving Clients “On Board”

One of the best examples of those tools is the firm’s Onboarding Productivity Measurement Toolkit, a research-based resource that diagnoses and measures the business impact of onboarding employees into new positions. Dana is particularly proud of the tool and gratified that so many clients have been capitalizing on its value. “Every business leader out there knows the importance of attracting and retaining the right talent, and our onboarding program maps directly to those goals,” says Dana. Clients have credited TPO’s process not only with speeding the time it takes for new employees to become productive, but also with improving workplace culture. “They’re telling us that having a structured onboarding process sends a positive, morale-building message to other employees and managers,” Dana says.      

Walking the Walk

An important fact about TPO is that the firm practices what it preaches. “We follow all of our programs and processes ourselves, which is rare in the consulting world,” says Dana. “For example, that same onboarding process we recommend to clients is what we use to bring new TPO consultants on board,” says Dana. “After all, we face the same business challenges that our clients do, so it only makes sense that we leverage our own best practices. It’s our way of focusing on the business of the business.”  

A Virtual Success

For 20 years, TPO has been a primarily virtual company. With consultants frequently working on-site with clients, the full TPO team is seldom in one physical place. But Dana prides herself on making a virtual business model work, and good communication is at the heart of it. Once a month, she gathers everyone for an all-hands staff meeting and sits down with each employee individually to discuss their goals and priorities. TPO also operates All Call—an online collaboration process that facilitates knowledge sharing between consultants. “One of the great things about our business model is that we can effectively advise clients who are thinking about implementing telecommuting programs,” says Dana. “We’ve been there, and we made it work long before remote workplaces were mainstream, so we’re able to share our experiences and effective practices.”

Why She Loves TPO

Dana delights in her role at TPO and appreciates the many hats she gets to wear. “We’re a small business, so I get to do it all,” she says. “I get to think strategically and lead at a high level, and I can drill down to the operational level, too, so it’s the best of all worlds.” Of course, Dana can’t resist doing client work and keeps her toe in that water, as well. “Interfacing with our clients and learning about their businesses and stakeholders are some of the most interesting aspects of the job,” Dana says.  

Pursuits

Dana is an avid cyclist, reader and tennis player. She also loves traveling and often finds ways to incorporate biking and hiking into her vacations, which recently included excursions to Bryce and Zion Canyons (below), Glacier National Park and Guatemala. However, her new passion is running, and she recently set a goal to run one organized race every month. Her first? A Disney Princess 10K in Orlando, Florida that she ran earlier this year. “My daughter and goddaughter strong-armed me into it,” laughs Dana, who is still recovering from the royal spectacle. She assures us that her upcoming races will be tiara- and glass slipper-free.  

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