Who has the greatest impact on Innovation? The VP of HR of course!

Most will agree that the people in the organization are the most important component to sustained business results.  Weighing the accuracy of this statement, it follows that HR is your organizations most critical sector, affecting the people in, and thus the success of, your organization at all points from hiring to policies and programs, performance management, and succession planning.  I realized that HR can also form the basis for innovation.  It is well recognized that business value is generated and regenerated through innovation and your people strategy department (HR) can be the key channel to increasing innovation through people in the workplace.

But to be a key driver of innovation, HR must be innovative!

Imagine an organization with a head of HR that focuses on measuring their department against best practices, plays it safe, and ensures every initiative has a quantifiable ROI. Sound familiar? HR is supposed to drive and support an innovative workforce but all too frequently caution and risk aversion is their main priority.  These organizations that hold fast to traditional approaches to HR and discourage experimentation, risk operating machine-like enterprises, following, but incapable of rising above, industry norms. 

The mindset and culture of your HR team has an exponential impact on the entire organization: everyone is influenced by HR.  Therefore, changing your organization and becoming more successful and innovative begins by teasing apart your beliefs on this role.  

Who is in a better position to campaign for and express the culture and needs of your organization at all touch points (hiring, policies and programs, new employee on-boarding, succession planning, performance management, etc.) than HR?  Who promotes and embodies everything your organization stands for?  

HR leaders translate your organization’s business strategies into cohesive and efficient people strategies.  They are the link between the leaders and the business enablers – your people.  Strategic HR management plays a critical role in the organization but if your organization’s prevailing mindset is conservative, your HR will fall prey to this strategy.

So, how do you push your HR team into a more innovative mindset?  

It starts when you stop following herd. Innovation at Google does not come from their HR team and employees measuring themselves against best practices. Similarly, Zappos did not become a billion dollar industry in less than 10 years selling shoes online by following industry norms in HR – they innovated. Imagine an HR policy that offers all new employees a $2,000 incentive to quit.  This is what Zappos does, and though it goes against the grain, it is perhaps one of the most cost effective means of ensuring everyone in the organization is happy and satisfied with their jobs. 

Ask yourself this question: How many experiments in HR policies have you allowed in the past twelve months?  How about making everyone’s salary public knowledge.  Watch this video below to understand how Ricardo Semler changed his company, SEMCO in Brazil:

Companies, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple, offer many examples of innovations in HR policies leading to large success.

Innovation is never a sure thing.  In fact, it is almost always a gamble.  Any venture capitalist will tell you that while they are always looking for greater than 10 times return on their investments, they also expect a pile of failures along the way.  This contradicts an HR mainstay: ROI.  Organizations with HR departments that avoid risk-taking for fear of not justifying every new policy through a black and white ROI stifle business growth and potential.

Perhaps it all starts in the beginning: do you even expect HR to be innovative?  If not, ask yourself who cares about the bottom line.  To increase innovation in the organization, leaders must work together with HR towards the edification of innovative business and people strategies. 

This article was co-authored with my friend Diane Boulet, Senior Director of Corporate Development, Brother Canada.

Engineers should run the Human Resources Department

I’m an avid follower of Josh Bersin, who runs Bersin by Deloitte. They do research in Enterprise Learning, Talent Management, Talent Acquisition, and strategic HR Solutions.

Every year Josh publishes predictions for upcoming year; a view forward, perspectives and important trends to consider in the enterprise learning, talent management and HR space.  This report is completely free, and I look forward to it every year.

After reading through predictions for 2014 I've come to the conclusion that in the future, engineers will make the best Chief Human Resources officers.  Not the social inept, introverted engineers that make great computer programmers but those with natural people skills, strong analytic skills and vision. The engineers that can ‘feel’ complex systems and love hacking away at complex problems will make the best chief human resources officers to drive a business forward.

Josh talks about 5 key roles of the chief human resources officer. First and foremost they need to run HR well. All the hiring, onboarding, training, payroll, labor relations, and benefits must just work. Many of the best run organizations in the world are managed by engineers, because engineers pay attention to the details required to make the nitty-gritty of administrative operations work smoothly.

Next, the Chief Human resources officer is responsible for the corporate talent system. They need to build the performance, learning, succession, onboarding, career management, and compensation systems that drive productivity, engagement, and performance. This is a systems engineering job. I’d want somebody with years of math, systems design, and logic education under the belt, along with the vision to see and feel large complex systems in one breath.

The Chief Human resources officer is the keeper of the culture. It is, and always will be, the senior executives and CEO that create and drive the culture. But the CHRO should monitor its health and provide feedback. Engineers implicitly understand feedback, setting up feedback systems, and monitoring the state of complex systems.

The Chief Human resources officer must transform and upskill the HR team. The team must not only serve as strategic consultants, they need to understand analytics, implement complex new software tools, and understand the role of changing technology. Are you thinking engineering yet?

Finally, the Chief human resource officer must have a vision and plan for the future.This year, Josh predicts that innovation comes to HR. He calls this the new bold chief human resources officers. It’s the innovation that engineers brought to almost every industry on the planet that needs to be brought to bear in HR. An engineer’s implicit grasp of innovation, their desire to tinker, to create new ways of getting things done, to change the world, and to work through complex problems by taking measured risks that makes them ready for the future role of HR.

Now I'm not really saying engineers should run the human resources department! Most of the guys that went
through the McGill engineering degree with me would make an absolute mess of things. But a chief human resource officer with a strong engineering flair, along with everything else one needs to be a chief human resource officer, will almost certainly make for better business results in the future given the changes happening in HR today.

There is a trend to bring non-HR business leaders into these roles. Liberty Mutual, Time Warner Cable, Yahoo and many others companies are promoting business leaders in the Chief Human Resource Officer role, attempting to drive bold and innovative thinking into the people part of the business. This trend will accelerate given that it's HR that makes the biggest single difference in most large organizations.

So keep an eye out for those engineers with strong people skills, or those HR types with a flair for partial differential equations... you might just be looking at your future CHRO.

An article on a similar trend was recently published in HBR on how Google sold it’s engineers on management. It's very much worth the read to understand one aspect of the very sophisticated job of human resources in this new day and age.

And please don’t ever put someone from finance to run your HR… that is the kiss of death. That’s like putting an accountant to run your company. Can you image what would happen if someone from finance started making decision in HR, or an accountant was put in charge of Apple of Google? Look at what happened to Nortel when the accountants took over.

Much of this blog is paraphrased from Josh’s predictions for 2014. If you want the full report please click here to get Bersin by Deloittes free prediction for 2014 report. And for those that follow us at CoachingOurselves, you'll notice an ongoing theme that developmental coaching is one of several key growing trends in 2014.

All the best in 2014!

Phil LeNir

President of CoachingOurselves

http://www.CoachingOurselves.com/

How HR kills innovation in HR

"Whatever you do, please don't mention this to anyone in HR, they will kill it".

That quote may sound odd but it is real. The ‘it’ being kept secret from HR is an innovative learning program. I am sure the same thing happens with all sorts of HR innovations, not just learning. When HR hears about a manager who is doing things a little bit differently their first reaction is to want to kill it outright or wrap it in a deadly python of bureaucracy.

One client spent two or three hours on cross-continent video conference calls trying to decide if they would try one experimental 90 minute learning session. Another leader reported he was going to have to write a business case to justify spending $1,500 to continue a small leadership development pilot program.

The literature on innovation recognizes the value of small experiments; but even though HR tends to be aware of this kind fact, they tend to treat experiments with extreme distaste.  There are good reasons for this, as well as bad ones, and these need to be disentangled before we can get to the meat of how to improve innovation in HR.

The obvious bad reason is simply that HR wants to protect its turf; if it’s an HR related effort they want to control it and any associated budget. This is however linked to a good reason which is that organizations don’t want managers running off doing things that are risky or ill-considered.

We often see the same thing in IT. Managers may have experienced the wrath of IT when they try to bring in a Mac into an organization that has standardized on PCs. There are both good and bad reasons for IT’s inflexibility. They need to prevent any actions that would undermine the security of their system and also they need to protect themselves from the user demands that can arise when someone has an incompatible hardware setup. They may also just be difficult for the sake of being difficult. But the right steps are relatively clear.  A good IT department will look at the issue, assess the risks, see if there are reasonable steps to mitigate the risk, and if it makes sense then allow the user to go ahead with the non-standard system.

Yet HR does not seem to have this risk assessment / risk mitigation mindset. There are several reasons for this.  One is that many HR professionals grow up in a quasi-legal world where their job is all about ensuring the organization does not fall foul of labor laws. This, along with their frequent role as the policy police, have led them to get used to saying “No you can’t do that!” instead of working as a partner to determine the best thing to do. Another reason is that historically HR has championed enterprise-wide programs; if there is on-boarding then it will be for everyone, not just for a critical subset of jobs. If there is a dress code, it applies to all, even if it’s only needed in customer facing roles. When HR sees an innovation they immediately think in terms of an enterprise-wide roll out, which is expensive, risky and time consuming—all in all better put to death than permitted.

So we need a radically new mindset in HR. They need to encourage managers to experiment and simply provide a limited overview to ensure that there are no undue risks. When the cost of the experiment is less than the cost of the business case they should cheer on the manager to go ahead and try it out. When experiments don’t work HR can draw useful lessons. Where experiments do work HR can consider applying the approach to other areas of the organization. But you don’t get to learn from failed experiments or build on successful experiments if you kill experiments before they can begin.

HR often suffers from a bad reputation. They are seen to get in the way of the business rather than help it along. HR can go a long way in building rapport with managers if it encourages them to experiment with things they think might work, providing only enough support to ensure there are no uncontained risks. This will lead to rapid learning, happier managers and a better loved HR function.

If you'd like to try a 90 minute experiment with a completely new, group based approach to leadership training, visit us at http://www.CoachingOurselves.com/ 
This article was co-authored with my friend David Creelman, of Creelman research.

Mintzberg and LeNir's approach to developing leaders is 70:20:10 all in one

Years ago, when I was a young engineering director, I made the acquaintance of Professor Henry Mintzberg:

He is one of the classic management thinkers, like Drucker and Handy. He has plenty to say about numerous aspects of management but the area of particular interest to me is on how managers get better at their practice of management and how we can help them do this.

Henry Mintzberg is most known for his studies of working managers:

“…I studied managers and what did I say in my first book (The Nature of Managerial Work, 1973) that got the most attention; that managers are interrupted a lot, that it’s a very action oriented thing. That was patently obvious to anybody who ever managed, or spent a day observing a manager. So what makes me so special? Nothing, I just wrote it down, that’s all. … I said: ‘Gee, it’s not what everybody says. This is not planning, organizing, coordinating and controlling, to take the most popular words to describe management. This is about getting interrupted, and trying to keep your head above water.’ And everyone said, ‘Wow… geez… so fantastic…’. 

Some 25 years after he first begun studying managers, Professor Mintzberg came to a powerful conclusion on how managers get better at their job based on his real world understanding of what managers actually do. He articulated this in his book Managers not MBAs (2003),:

“Thoughtful reflection on natural experience, in the light of conceptual ideas is the most powerful tool we have for management learning.”

A growing number MBA and EMBA programs are adopting Professor Mintzberg’s methodology, displacing the dominant lecture or case study method. Even Nitin Nohria, the new Dean of Harvard Business School (the bastion of the case study method) is moving through with radical change in the way young MBAs are developed. The new focus is on helping young managers learn through reflection on their experience.

I began experimenting with the application of Mintzberg’s ideas while I was that young engineering director looking for a way to develop myself and my team in the midst of the dot.com meltdown of the early 2000s . I began bringing my management team together on a regular basis for learning meetings. I modified the course material and lecture PowerPoints supplied by Professor Mintzberg and his colleagues to guide 90 minutes of reflection and discussion. These “topics” gave us the pedagogy, Professor Mintzberg gave us the experiential reflective approach, and doing this together as a team made the learning happen.

Many years later I stumbled across the 70:20:10 framework (through Jay Cross and Charles Jennings). I quickly realized that Mintzberg’s approach fit squarely within the 70:20:10 framework. It integrated

reflection, the power of social learning, and allowed participants to contextualize their experiences through structured knowledge. Mintzberg’s approach to leadership development encompassed all of 70:20:10 in one. This is in contrast to many current methodologies that seem to put learning activities into 70, 20 or 10 “buckets”.

In 2007, Henry Mintzberg and I co-founded the company, CoachingOurselves (http://www.CoachingOurselves.com/). We brought Mintzberg’s approach to the enterprise learning space by working with leading management thinkers to provide topics, the themed discussion workbooks. 

Management teams use these during 90-minute discussion and reflection “meetings”.  L&OD piece these together to deliver interventions and programs that solve the classic needs (“I need to develop a culture of innovation”, “I need a high potential leadership program”, “I need to deal with our engagement challenges”), but in a balanced 70:20:10 approach. In 2012, we had over 10,000 managers in 130 organizations using our topics.

The results have been beyond my initial expectations, but not without difficulties and surprises. The hardest challenge is changing the dominant L&OD mindset with the organization. Even when the HR team believes in 70:20:10 or the CEO is a big Mintzberg fan, it sometimes takes months, even years, before this very different approach can be embedded into a new initiative, piloted, and launched.

So, if you are having trouble changing your L&OD programs into 70:20:10 based initiatives, there is only ones olution: start now,contact us to start with a CoachingOurselves pilot, and learn from that experience!

The end result will be worth it.

HCI Conference: The Future for L&D

CoachingOurselves attended the HCI Learning and Leadership Development Conference in Boston this month: this was an eye-opening experience.  We had just participated in the CSTD conference the week before and were anticipating our first “American” conference experience. While we met dozens of interesting people at both conferences, we felt more at home with our peers at HCI; there were more full service vendors and vendors similar to us, specializing in innovative learning methods.

The overall tone at HCI was that the risk of not trying innovative approaches to learning and development far outweighed the risk of trying them.  It is no longer acceptable to keep sending people into the classroom and straightforward e-learning is now considered ineffective.  The number of times we heard that Harvard ManageMentor was purchased but then barely ever used by large organizations was incredible.  Were you one of these organizations?  One of the opening keynotes for HCI was by Sandra Edwards, Senior Vice President of the American Management Association.  This organization's bread and butter is selling classroom training to the mid-market.  She began by telling people that things were changing – and changing fast.  People say they like classroom training and want more of it, but we all know it has very little impact.  She likened it to the telephone and telegraph. In the era of the telegraph, no one asked to use a telephone; they all liked the telegraph and thought it worked very well.  They could not fathom a telephone. As vendors begin providing solutions that help people extract learning from work rather than adding learning to work, the current classroom and e-learning solutions will look as effective as the telegraph.  Sandra proclaimed that extracting learning from work would be the key to the leadership learning interventions of the future. “Extract learning from the workplace instead of imposing.  We know learning happens from doing…” -       Sandra Edwards, VP, AMA Enterprise Several presenters repeated this mantra: in the new world, we will be facilitating learning without instructional design.  Learning professionals will need to think differently and learn new skills. Google held a keynote titled “Think Big and Experimenting with Leadership and Learning at Google”.  Their mantra is everyone is responsible for their own development and the development of others.  They reiterated that the biggest risk you can take as an L&D professional is not trying and experimenting with new approaches. Mike Welsh at Facebook, Inc. spoke on the importance of in-team mentoring, teaching each other, and Coaching Circles. As an organization, they’re working to deepen on the job learning and build a culture of coaching. Marla Hetzel, Director of Innovation, at AARPquoted CoachingOurselves co-founder Henry Mintzberg in her presentation: "The way to start rebuilding community is to stop the practices that undermine it... the organization has to shed much of its individualistic behavior and many of its short term measures in favor of practices that promote trust, engagement, and spontaneous collaboration aimed at sustainability."  Peggy Schroeder, Director of HR Leadership and Professional Development, at The Hartford Financial Services group discussed transforming leadership learning from an event to a continuous journey, emphasizing innovative learning methods based on 70:20:10. Unfortunately, few vendors actually offered any products and services inline with this new direction.  CoachingOurselves received an amazing response; it was different from every other vendor’s product and exactly what people needed. We explained that we work with world-renowned business leaders, taking the content they use in their MBA and EMBA workshops and seminars to craft 90-minute discussion guides for small groups of managers. These guides capture the professors pedagogy, along with questions and exercises to guide discussion and reflection on participants’ own experiences, driving action and change. The 90-minute sessions can be pieced together to create personalized interventions and programs based on each organization’s individual needs and goals. This is a better learning and leadership intervention on so many levels.  It is flexible and cost effective – and most importantly, what managers want and what works.  Like our peers said above and throughout the HCI conference: people learn through experience and through facilitating conversation on these experiences. This is how to improve work performance. Give us a call to try CoachingOurselves! 1-866-699-0838 or 1-514-419-1849 or send an e-mail to warren@coachingourselves.com