‘Culture is the most ‘fundamental enabler of strategy,’ says VP of People Culture and Organizational Effectiveness
When Lola Obomighie began her career, HR wasn’t part of the plan and she says she “didn’t even know that HR existed as a profession.” With a degree in economics and statistics, and membership in a family of academics, the expected path was grad school and a life in academia. Instead, she says a suggestion from her husband that she would do well in HR nudged her into a field she hadn’t considered.
“I'm a numbers girl, I like economics, statistics, not necessarily people,” says Obomighie. “My first stint in HR was a role that I did just to gain a little bit of work experience, and it was a rude shock to me — but I liked it and I went back to school and did a Master’s in HR.”
That led to other roles in HR and payroll, first in the private sector and then the public sector in England. After more roles in the financial services sector, Obomighie moved to Canada, where she continued her career in HR.
Today, as Vice President People, Culture and Organizational Effectiveness at Northumberland Hills Hospital (NHH) in Cobourg, Ont., Obomighie draws on that analytical background and cross-sector experience to steer a complex public health workforce.
Leading by ‘walkabout’ and evidence
Two early lessons still define how Obomighie leads at NHH. The first came from one particular boss early in her career: “She drummed into me, management by walkabout,” she says. “You can’t support a business line, or a business unit, or a department if you don’t know what they do and you don’t have the credibility of presence.”
For Obomighie, that means visibility and “having those touch points with the people who are the recipients of the decisions that we make.”
The second anchor for Obomighie is data. “Maybe because of economics and statistics, I’m very driven by metrics and evidence-based decision-making,” she says, which she believes brings legitimacy to HR. “I feel that there’s a lot of merit there, and I feel like it also brings credibility to the profession, in that it’s not just a personnel function, but it’s adding value — let's make decisions based on data, be it qualitative or quantitative data, and what does good look like? There's evidence, there's research.”
While Obomighie is a big supporter of data and technology in performing her role, she says a key challenge to overcome is not losing sight of the people impact. “I see technology as a huge enabler, but I don't see it as a tool that replaces the human element — so if we're taking it as an enabler, the question then is, what is it enabling?” she says. “Where I often see that there are bumps is where technology is seen as the be-all-end-all and it's going to fix all the problems — no, it's an enabler, and it can either underscore a clunky process or it can it can help you be efficient with an optimized process. That's the big thing, where people lose sight of the human factor.”
Culture as the ultimate enabler
At NHH, Obomighie oversees people, culture, and organizational effectiveness — functions she sees as tightly linked. “There are a lot of synergies because they're support functions, and often the areas that I lead are the crew behind the cast,” she says. “We're the ones that we might not be patient-facing, client-facing, or customer-facing, but we make sure that everything runs behind the scenes so that overall, the users of the service get a good experience and a good outcome.”
As for having responsibility for the organization’s people and its overall effectiveness, “it's like having different levers, and determining which one you need to adjust, and to what degree, to achieve what you need,” says Obomighie, which she believes is “the bedrock of an organization or institution that’s able to deal with transformation, or to deal with even the changes that are happening around the world.”
Obomighie believes that culture lies at the centre of an organization’s success. “Culture is the most fundamental enabler of strategy,” she says. “It's the way we do things around here, our norms, our behaviors, what we reward, and the behaviors that align with the priorities of the organization,” she says. “So being able to shape culture through the policies and the practices, all of that is deep work — it's not always obvious work, but it pays dividends in the future.”
She also believes that when the culture work is done well, “you see an organization that’s nimble and able to respond to the needs of the business or to the needs of the consumers of the service.”
Caring for the carers and hard-wiring inclusion
Obomighie identifies two initiatives that stand out to her as culture shapers at NHH. The first is a broad well-being strategy branded “caring for the carers”: “If they feel cared for, they will naturally go ahead and provide care to the recipients of our service, simply because these are people who want to be in healthcare,” she says. “There's no question about their ability, but what do they need to feel that they’re set up for success? We did that over a couple of years and that helped a lot, and we still have that now.”
She says this initiative also includes investments in leadership development and “activities that provide joy at work.”
The second is her and the hospital’s efforts at equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI), which Obomighie says they approach “as a strategic initiative, not as a tick-box exercise — it’s deep work, meaningful work.” With limited resources, she says the focus has been on embedding EDI into the fabric of policies and processes, and hardwiring it into the organization. This included moving from baseline data on what the workforce looks like and the populations it serves, to mandatory training on EDI, according to Obomighie.
“I went from an organization that was in its infancy in EDI maturity to an organization that has mandatory training on EDI,” she says. “So when you look at that journey, it's something that I think is commendable to the entire organization for being open-minded and committed.”
Treating people as humans, not numbers
Across the employee lifecycle, Obomighie believes loyalty grows when every interaction reinforces dignity. From hiring and onboarding to development and exits, she says the goal is a seamless experience where staff feel genuinely seen. And it goes back to that lesson on management by walkabout, she says.
As she puts it, trust is built through “every single opportunity for a touch point where we’ve treated them like a human, not a number.”
