Director of HR and Vice President of Operations on what people leadership brings to the operations table – and why more C-suites should take note
At Vistek, the Toronto-based specialty imaging retailer, the person responsible for people strategy also runs day-to-day operations. Holding both roles has fundamentally reshaped how she thinks about talent, technology, and culture, says Lee-Ann Reid, Director of Human Resources and Vice President of Operations in Toronto – and she believes the model holds lessons well beyond specialty retail.
Vistek employs approximately 160 people across five stores and a substantial e-commerce presence. The company serves what it calls “prosumers” – professional consumers who span working photographers, videographers, drone pilots, and content creators of every kind. It’s a category that has weathered five decades of technological disruption, and like much of Canada’s retail sector, it continues to face pressure from shifting workforce demographics and emerging technology. That volatility has made Reid a sharper people leader, she says.
A changing customer base reshaped people strategy
The imaging industry looks almost nothing like it did when Vistek opened, says Reid. Where the company once served a defined community of professional photographers and filmmakers, its customer base has expanded dramatically – and so has the range of skills the people who serve them must possess.
“We’ve really gone from that photographer, videographer [customer] all the way now to what we call content creators,” Reid says. “Because content creators come in many forms now – they’re photographers, they’re videographers, they’re vloggers, they’re bloggers, they’re drone pilots, so it really has become diverse.”
Mass participation in content creation hasn’t replaced specialist expertise – it has created a new class of customer who needs expert guidance, according to Reid. “We’re not about selling you a widget, or the widget we have on hand – we’re about understanding your need and mapping options for you to that complete solution that’ll meet that need or deliver on that result you’re looking for,” she says.
Vistek’s frontline staff largely hold degrees, diplomas, or certifications in film or photography, and many run side businesses as wedding photographers or freelance videographers – businesses the company actively encourages, so staff can advise customers from lived experience rather than from a specification sheet, says Reid.
A three-step approach to technical hiring
Recruiting for both technical depth and customer empathy is a challenge Reid has built a systematic answer to. She says Vistek’s hiring process runs in three stages: a screening interview, a manager-and-recruiter conversation, and a dedicated technical assessment. Before that third stage, candidates complete a self-scoring matrix across the company’s product categories – photography, video, drones, grip, and lighting.
However, Reid points out that the self-assessment is diagnostic, not eliminatory. “There are things to learn about an individual in how they rate themselves and how accurate that is to our technical score for them,” she says, adding that the company also includes manager interviews that focus on people-centric soft skills and customer service skills that are needed in the retail sector.
The framework is also designed to create psychological safety in the hiring room, according to Reid. “This isn’t about tricking people,” she says. “Never is it about trick questions. It’s really about having someone feel comfortable enough to be themselves, be authentic.”
The approach reflects the need for soft skills training for socially anxious Gen Z, plus a combination of measurable technical credentials and the interpersonal capability that determines whether expertise actually reaches the customer. Reid is conscious about this, as she says she’s passionate about internships throughout her career – “that’s our future workforce,” she says.
AI as a productivity lever, not a headcount strategy
Vistek’s approach to AI is shaped by scale and practical discipline, and its implications on skills and productivity, says Reid. With roughly 160 employees, the company isn’t building an AI transformation roadmap for its own sake. Reid has instead framed adoption around a single question: where is the organization spending human attention on work that yields no human value?
“We’re a small and mighty team and it’s really about being the right size, having people focusing on the right things, and leveraging AI to do some of that ditch-digging work, alerting us about things,” says Reid.
She lists practical applications of AI such as automated workflows, business intelligence tools that eliminate data-aggregation tasks for managers, and Microsoft Copilot for Office 365 users as ways the organization is integrating AI. More analytically complex roles draw on more capable tools, but the boundary Reid draws isn’t between AI-ready and AI-resistant roles.
“We’re really looking not to replace people with AI, but to make the work we have here the meaningful work and not the transactional work, and get beyond that,” she says. As Canadian organizations track how transformation is reshaping people strategy, Reid’s position offers a grounding counterpoint to more aggressive AI adoption narratives.
Where people strategy meets operational leadership
Reid believes that an HR background contributes to her role in operations leadership through authority, but with restraint. “Credibility comes with humility,” she says. “I don’t know everything, but I think what an HR professional can bring to the role of an operations manager – who’s someone who gets things done – is that ability to facilitate great conversations around a challenge in front of us.”
What Reid says she brings from HR is a capacity to separate problems from personalities – to hold a challenge in front of a team without triggering territorial instincts. “The challenge is before us on the table together, and we’re going to solve it together. It’s not a turf war,” she says.
The other contribution is intimate knowledge of people. Because Reid understands the capabilities and growth aspirations of Vistek’s staff, she can match individuals to projects with intention – building cross-functional teams that develop careers alongside organizational outcomes. In a flat structure, those assignments matter, she says.
Vistek also runs a formal job-trial program, where employees meeting tenure and performance criteria can apply to spend time in a different role, according to Reid. Both employee and manager assess fit at the end – a mechanism for development that does not depend on a hierarchy to climb, she says.
Reid’s broader insight connects to the work of helping people make sense of an increasingly complex working world – a challenge HR professionals across Canada encounter every day. “You don’t have to be the biggest company, but you have to be that to each individual the company that they believe is going to help grow and enrich and give them a great experience at work,” she says.
There’s a good marriage between HR and operations, according to Reid. “In business, you often will have a great operations manager, and you will have someone who understands people – and the desires not only for the company and achieving the company goals, but that everybody chooses to come to work every day,” she says. “So it’s understanding the goals of the business, the ways to enrich people's jobs, or help develop them to be the best they can be.”
