EVP of HR Lori Schick on building agile, people-first HR in a budding, regulated industry
The most important HR lessons for Lori Schick were forged in crisis and in unfamiliar territory — from the 2008 financial downturn to the tightly regulated cannabis sector today.
Those experiences have shaped how Schick — now the Executive Vice President of HR at Toronto-based Aurora Cannabis — thinks about talent, culture, and global HR in a business that can’t afford to stand still.
One of the defining moments in Schick’s philosophy came as an HR relationship leader at American Express during the 2008 financial crisis. “We went from doing what we were doing as HR practitioners to suddenly restructuring and re-engineering, and working with the business very much side by side,” she says. “And that was one of those moments where you realize the importance and the power of the role in really partnering with the business and helping shape the business.”
Keeping people at the centre
The difficult circumstances of that downtown drove home the importance of keeping people at the centre of her role, says Shick.
“It became time to work through the impacts of the restructuring, and the names that were on the org chart and then off the org chart, they were suddenly sitting in front of me and I was having the toughest conversations,” she says. “It became very real for me, as these were people that I cared about and had worked with — you can do what you need to do when it comes to the business side and the restructuring, but at the end of the day you have to take care of your people.”
For Schick, that means more than legal compliance. It’s about how thoughtfully packages are designed, how decisions are explained, and how respectfully employees are treated from hiring to exit.
Those moments set the tone for culture more powerfully than any set of values listed in a document or posted on a wall, according to Schick. She believes that how leaders handle “the worst day” for employees establishes expectations for how people will be treated when things go wrong — a lesson that has stayed with her into every subsequent role.
Building HR for a nascent, regulated industry
When Schick joined Aurora five years ago, the company — and the legal cannabis industry — was in a period of intense volatility. Rather than importing a familiar transformation template, she and the organization’s leadership team quickly realized that traditional HR approaches wouldn’t keep pace.
“When I was approached about Aurora, I didn't know the world of cannabis, but I knew there was an opportunity here to help transform an organization in a nascent industry,” says Schick. “So when I came in, it was this time of resetting and turnaround, and there were multiple phases over the last five years — it's been turnaround, rebuild, stabilize, and then grow.”
However, Schick says “there’s no playbook that does that,” so “we threw out the playbook — we don’t have the luxury of time and we also have to move very quickly with deep agility.” She believes that getting stuck in the idea of a particular HR playbook can lead to tunnel vision.
In practice, that meant defining a clear vision of what Aurora needed to look like in the short- and mid-term, and then rebuilding core HR and organizational foundations to match, says Schick. It also meant being willing to question anything that wasn’t mandated by regulation or law. “We’re too young of an organization and an industry to hold anything sacred, aside from regulatory and legal,” she says.
Leaders developing strategy together
The work has been anchored by a tightly aligned executive team, according to Schick. She says that leaders at Aurora are expected to understand one another’s businesses, debate strategy together, and focus on what will move the whole enterprise forward.
“Something that's really made us special is we hold deep to our values — we're a values-based organization around making sure that we're doing the right thing, leading with
courage, leading with accountability, and bringing in the right leaders who are change-agile and also hold the right values,” says Schick. “We went all through that together, and I think it's what makes us a very unique leadership team and stronger for it.”
Those dynamics make workforce planning in cannabis fundamentally different from more mature industries. Many of Aurora’s most critical roles, particularly in cultivation and operations, are both highly specialized and scarce, says Schick.
“You can’t just put out an ad and find hundreds of people who can do this,” Schick says of lead cultivators and other specialist roles. When the external market is that thin, HR leaders must think in terms of adjacent sectors — agriculture or pharma, for example — and invest heavily in internal pipelines, succession, and capability-building, she says.
Redefining workforce planning and culture
Schick believes that talent strategy has a strong cultural dimension, and she’s candid with candidates, especially for senior roles, about the realities of an emerging industry. “If you’re here and you’re wanting to sit down and opine on strategy and talk at a high level, we’re not for you,” she says. “You’re going to roll up your sleeves and get things done — we’re going to work hard, but we’re going to do it together and the right way.”
Compliance is another non-negotiable pillar in the cannabis industry. Aurora positions itself as a top medical cannabis producer with a “culture of compliance” and a deep respect for patients. For Schick, HR’s role is to hire and develop people who share that commitment so that quality and regulatory discipline are embedded in daily decisions, not treated as box-ticking.
Despite the pace of change, Schick says she was determined to put meaningful leadership development in place once the business could sustain it. About two years ago, Aurora launched SPARK, a multi-module leadership development program that takes a candid view of what leadership really looks like.
Schick describes the program as allowing cohorts meet in open, safe forums to discuss the real challenges of leaders, support one another, and build peer networks that last beyond the formal program. For Schick, the real sign of success is hearing “language from Spark seep into the culture” as leaders apply shared frameworks in daily conversations.
Employee wellbeing is the other side of that people investment. Aurora’s total rewards team built GLOW — short for “get lit on wellness” — a grassroots program that targets financial, psychological, and physical wellness. “We’ve seen some wonderful results come back from the employees and wonderful results as well,” says Schick.
The shifting landscape of global HR
Schick says her responsibility now includes about 1,100 employees across Canada, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Poland, and the UK. That global scope brings certain pressures for HR leaders in multinational organizations, she says.
“I think we're in such an interesting time to be in HR — the landscape of HR and the work environment is shifting constantly in our roles, so our job is to really help steer the organization through all of these interlocking challenges in this global environment,” she says.
Schick notes the added challenge in the cannabis industry, as different markets will have not only different conditions, but different regulatory standards. “You can’t just assume that everybody’s at the same place,” she says.
Artificial intelligence is another force that Schick sees as reshaping expectations. “I think sometimes there's this perception that AI is the responsibility of IT, and I wholly disagree with that — [HR leaders] have a really critical role to play in that, in how we’re becoming stewards of AI for the organization so that we can help our employees be better in their role, how we use it to train our teams to bring in new capabilities, but also to do it in a responsible way that protects our people, holds to fairness and also brings value to the organization.”
