Jane Savage

Background

About Jane Savage

I am a proven leader of HR functions with prior experience as an organizational consultant and a Master’s in business (MPPM from Yale School of Management, an MBA equivalent). I have worked in higher education, hospitals, and manufacturing. My HR knowledge and skills encompass strategic alignment, HR transformation, organizational development, talent management and succession planning, leadership development, executive coaching, learning, employee relations, labor relations, benefits, internal communications, navigating public relations crises, and project management. Throughout my career, I have been a starter and founder of programs and initiatives and an innovative and pragmatic change agent. My two greatest skills are creating order and aligning diverse, even opposing, groups to attain a challenging goal – with real and tangible outcomes - especially when there is a sense of urgency. I currently lead Yale HR’s effort to transform our impact through a refresh of our service delivery model and process efficiencies. I also co-lead an effort to make learning and development a distinctive part of the support to Operations and of Yale’s employment value proposition. Finally, I lead HR’s Organizational Effectiveness & Staff Development team including learning, leadership development, talent and performance management tools, organizational development, and coaching. I formerly led employee relations policy and labor relations for represented staff and was the staff leader of the University’s efforts to change its historically fractious union relationships. Over multiple contracts, we achieved great results without strikes, including significant modernization of culture, compensation, and benefits. In recent bargaining, I was chief spokesperson. I came to Yale from a consulting career, seeking the opportunity to lead a significant organizational change rather than advise. As a consultant, I facilitated strategic planning among leadership teams, taught management and organizational change skills, facilitated quality improvement projects in healthcare and manufacturing facilities of Fortune 500 companies, and managed practice standards and professional development for a team of organizational consultants. In my master’s program, I concentrated in organizational behavior. I had developed, as an engineer, an intellectual curiosity about work, in particular the incongruities between work as I’d experienced it growing up on a farm and my early work experience in large complex organizations.