Leadership in HR management practices – the people edge competencies
‘If you do things well, do them better. Be daring, be first, be different, be just.’ – Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop
Throughout this book, we have made reference to organisations that are considered to be ‘Employers of Choice’. This is a designation that only employees can give to an organisation. When current employees and individuals who want to become employees of an organisation make this claim, they are saying that this is an organisation where:
employees are treated with respect,
trust is very high throughout the organisation,
employees are encouraged to expand and develop their skills and talents,
employees are appropriately recognised for both their efforts and their accomplishments,
individuals are held accountable for their decisions and their behaviour,
individuals are challenged to make significant contributions – every day – not just occasionally, and
there is a sense of fun and excitement evident throughout the organisation.
To be able to achieve this designation, an organisation has to demonstrate that its leadership and management practices are outstanding. The same applies to their Human Resource Management practices. When these conditions prevail in an organisation, the message spreads like wildfire and individuals clamber to join it.
One firm we are familiar with that meets these characteristics is WestJet, a low-cost airline company based in western Canada. WestJet, which was launched in 1996, has such a positive corporate culture that their employee attraction and retention rates are outstanding. We have never seen an advertisement in any of the national or local newspapers for openings in the firm. Yet, it is widely reported in HR circles in Canada that the company receives as many as 1500 unsolicited job applications a month. That’s an enviable position to be in, especially in an environment where most employers are begging for good applicants to fill vacancies. Proof of the firm’s attractiveness to interested candidates is provided in this excerpt from Paul Gescoe’s book Flight Path: How WestJet is Flying High in Canada’s Most Turbulent Industry. Gescoe writes about Alanna Deis, Director of the People Department, and some of the challenges the company faced during its early days:
‘In one recent six-month period, when WestJet was opening five bases, the People Department had about a dozen recruiters reacting to 25,000 applicants and hired about 500 of them. A deluge like this calls for an efficient handling system. "We have to make sure that the system is in place so we are treating the other 24,500 with dignity, fairness, and equity – not only because it’s right but because they fly our planes and they have brothers and uncles who fly them", she [Deis] says. Although there’s no longer time to send handwritten postcards to those rejected, each one does get a communication from the airline.’1
The deluge of applications in this example is amazing. The People Department’s practice of providing written response to the 24,500 unsuccessful applicants is equally amazing. Not many firms would take the time and effort to say ‘thank you’ in this way. Also, the mere fact that the name of the department is ‘The People Department’ and not the HR Department or worse yet, the Personnel Department, says something about their positive, upbeat, refreshing attitude. Employees quickly notice and value this type of atmosphere. The firm’s reputation as an ‘employer of choice’ is well deserved – and they continue to work at doing all of the things, both small and large, which help them to retain this reputation.
The importance of leadership
For any organisation to demonstrate the practices of enlightened people management, there must be some enlightened leadership in place. This leadership will reside in the corporate offices, as well as in the HR Department or the People Department. In organisations where the senior executive team legitimately recognises and values the strategic role that the HR Department and its team of professionals play for the organisation, the reputation of HR changes drastically. They are no longer seen as the ‘policy police’. Their role is no longer seen to be a transactional one only. They are acknowledged as key players in attracting and retaining the skilled workforce needed for the organisation not only to survive but also to thrive in the very competitive world of work that every organisation faces today.
When this type of senior leadership is demonstrated, it cannot help but have an impact on the leadership role of the HR team. When the HR team sees itself as playing a critical, strategic role in the future success of the organisation, they change the way they interact with their customers – the managers and the staff of the organisation. This creates a change in thinking from one of ‘filling staff vacancies’, for example, to one of ‘securing the talent pool needed for the future’. This shift is not just a play on words. It is a fundamental shift in perception – in the way people think. Before we can act differently, first we must be able to think differently.
The debate about the strategic role of HR versus the operational role of HR has been going on for many years. One of the best proponents of this shift in thinking is Dave Ulrich, a professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Business. His book Human Resource Champions created a lot of controversy within the HR community when it was first published in 1997. Having attended several conferences where Ulrich spoke about his concepts, I can attest to the level of consternation it created for many HR professionals, who could only see their role in the traditional way – as ‘order takers’ and ‘order fillers’.
Ulrich opens his book with a chapter entitled: ‘The Next Agenda for Competitiveness: Human Resources’. He states:
‘This book is about creating organizations that add value to investors, customers and employees. In particular, it tells how line managers and HR professionals together can champion the competitive organization of the future. If organization capability has become a source of competitiveness, and if line managers and HR professionals are to be the champions of organization capability, then a new agenda for both HR practices and HR professionals must emerge. This book will help operating managers and HR professionals work together to achieve these goals.’2
Ulrich has continued to play the role of a leading protagonist to try and help HR professionals take up the challenge of truly becoming strategic partners with the senior executives of their organisations to fully capitalise on the potential value of their people resource. His efforts have met with limited success. This is due in great part I believe to the fact that many HR professionals are their own worst enemy in this regard.
For years, I have heard and read about the continuous laments of HR professionals that they are not considered to be strategic partners, and that they are not invited to be active members at the management table, where strategy is discussed and formulated. Having provided consulting support to many organisations over the past 15 years, as they develop their corporate strategic plans and their corporate human resource management plans, I have found that some of the individuals who are most averse to strategic changes are HR professionals themselves. Not that this is true in all cases. However, it has been evident in a very large number of cases, in my experience. When this is pointed out, HR professionals tend to become very defensive. But, when they are presented with some dramatic, strategic shifts in the way that their function can be conducted within the organisation, there is a definite tendency to pull back into their traditional and familiar role of being order takers, order fillers and providing transactional services. I believe that this innate reluctance to step up and seize the opportunity to play a strategic partner role is the greatest impediment for many HR professionals.
To illustrate this point better, let’s look at an editorial column in HR Magazine, the monthly publication of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the world’s largest and most respected HR professional body. In the November 2007 issue, Susan Meisinger, who was CEO of SHRM at that time, refers to a 2007 study conducted by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, the international consulting firm and The Economist Intelligence Unit, part of The Economist Magazine. The study was entitled: ‘Aligned at the top: how business and HR executives view today’s most significant people challenges – and what they’re doing about it’.
The study surveyed 531 HR and non-HR executives, and included 50 interviews. It included respondents from 468 companies of every shape and size, representing every major industry and global region. Of the respondents, 104 were HR leaders and 155 were senior business executives. The assessment of the degree of alignment focused on the various responses from these two key groups of respondents.3 Here are a few key points from the Executive Summary:
‘More than 85 percent of all survey participants said that people are vital to all aspects of their company’s performance, particularly their top strategic challenges, such as responding to increased competition, developing new products and services, and capitalizing on advances in technology. However, the survey shows a clear gap between business needs and HR’s perceived focus and capabilities. In fact, the responses and follow-up interviews suggest that two entirely distinct conversations are taking place. When senior business executives talk about HR, they focus on administrative activities, such as rewards and benefits, performance evaluations, and HR operating efficiency. When those same executives talk about people issues, they focus on talent management, workforce productivity, and leadership development, and in many cases the HR function isn’t even mentioned.
The survey results suggest that there is still a gap between the senior business executive’s view and the perceived capabilities and programmes being promoted by HR. At the moment, most HR functions appear to have the administrative side pretty well covered. But the survey shows the strategic people agenda is not being addressed by HR – presenting a common challenge to HR leaders and senior executives alike.
Many HR functions already recognize this challenge and are shifting their administrative transactions and other non-strategic HR activities to a shared services centre or outsourcing vendor. In theory, this enables the retained HR function to focus more attention on strategic people issues. The big challenge for HR is to develop the advanced skills and capabilities required for this new role – skills and capabilities that many HR functions currently lack.’4
Of the Key Findings of the survey, these have particular relevance to our discussion:
More than 85 per cent of all surveyed executives consider people ‘vital’ to every aspect of their company’s performance.
Eight-eight per cent believe people issues will become more important over the next three to five years.
Sixty per cent of senior business executives already consider people issues ‘very significant’ or ‘highly significant’ to strategic decision- making, and that number rises to 90 per cent when looking three to five years ahead.
The top people concerns for senior business executives are: creating a high-performance culture (79 per cent), leadership development (76 per cent), talent management (76 per cent) and training (63 per cent). HR leaders have similar priorities: leadership development (83 per cent), creating a high-performance culture (72 per cent) and talent management (71 per cent); however, they consider HR operating efficiency to be somewhat more critical than do their non-HR components.
Fifty-two per cent of all respondents don’t have a Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) or other C-level executive who is dedicated to people issues; however, more than two-thirds expect to have a CHRO in place in the next three to five years. Within the next three to five years, the vast majority of them (82 per cent) expect HR to be perceived as a strategic, value-added function – not just a cost centre. Yet only 23 per cent believe HR currently plays a crucial role in strategy formulation and operational results.
Sixty-three per cent of senior business executives rarely or never consult their senior HR team on mergers and acquisitions, whilst 41 per cent of HR leaders rarely or never consult their senior management team on outsourcing.
Only four per cent of senior business executives describe their company as world-class in people management and HR, whilst nearly half (46 per cent) said their capabilities are adequate but need to improve. Another 31 per cent said that significant improvement is needed in HR.
On average, 29 per cent of the surveyed companies already outsource recruitment, training and payroll, whilst an additional 18 per cent expect to outsource these and other HR activities in the next three to five years.5
In her editorial, in which she commented on the results of this survey, Meisinger stated:
‘What are HR professionals to make of these findings? We could react defensively, dismiss these results and assume – perhaps correctly – that a different designed study would reveal HR in a more positive light. After all, we know that HR is performing at the highest strategic level in many organizations. And while the study reveals that 52 percent of respondents don’t have a C-level executive dedicated to people issues, that means that almost half do – a significant increase over recent years.
I believe that we should take a clear-eyed, objective look at this study and some of its conclusions – not all of which are negative …
HR professionals should be encouraged by the growing appreciation of the vital role that people play in business performance and that this view is steadily making its way into the strategy formulation of many successful organisations.’6
What is fascinating about this response from Meisinger to the Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu and Economist Intelligence Unit study is that it is a defensive response. It appears that she is saying, yes, there is some room for improvement, but, overall we aren’t doing too badly and things have improved a lot lately. What I find intriguing is that SHRM has been a very strong proponent of the work and views of Dave Ulrich for many years. This organisation sponsored the conferences that I attended when I first encountered Ulrich. And here we are, more than ten years later, still trying not to get too excited about the results of this study.
As the study points out clearly, a large number of senior executives are expecting a major shift in the strategic role of their HR professionals in the next three to five years! HR professionals have been politely talking about this issue for more than a decade. Some have reacted positively and have stepped up and taken on the strategic roles and responsibilities referenced in the study. And these are the pioneers in the field of HR. They need to be credited for their astuteness, courage and leadership. However, what is most disturbing is that a significant number of HR leaders and HR professionals are still waiting to be ‘invited to a place at the executive table’. If HR does indeed have the importance that it claims to have as the ‘keeper of people issues’ in every organisation, then the time to act is now! We will not be in a position to respond as needed within the next three to five years if we don’t start shifting our attitudes, our mindsets and our behaviours soon.
Ironically, when we first began to develop ‘Creating the People Edge’ – our Strategic HR Management Process – back in the late 1990s, we expressed many of these same concerns. And they are still fairly common today. In the next section of this chapter, we will outline two key competency assessments that are very important to complete when developing a People Plan. These were referred to briefly in Chapter 6. Now we want to take a closer look at them in order to develop a better understanding of some of the ways that HR professionals and the HR function can become much more strategic and provide a more valuable service to their organisations.
Conducting an assessment of human resource practices
Having worked for many years as an HR professional in the fields of organisation development, leadership development and staff development it was very clear to me that for many years, the majority of HR departments were established and structured to be able to provide the fundamental functional services of HR – staffing, classification, compensation and benefits, training and development, and labour relations and negotiations. Each of these groupings provides specific transactional services to the employees, managers and executives of the organisation. With this structural approach to how HR was organised, it is easy to understand why senior executives tended to view HR as just a series of transactional relationships.
When we initially developed our People Edge Planning Process, we made a conscious effort to recast the components of an HR Department in a different way. Rather than looking at what HR could provide, we asked ourselves ‘What do the customers of an HR Department need?’ As we were trying to establish a ‘systems approach’ to looking at the HR function, we chose to apply one of the primary concepts of Systems Thinking. This was Concept 1 – the Seven Levels of a Living System, which was described in some detail in Chapter 5.
The rationale for taking this approach was based upon an attempt to follow the needs of an employee through their life cycle within an organization. What was needed to attract an individual to your organisation? What was needed to provide for their individual needs? How could their needs for working with others be accommodated? What support do teams and work groups need? What cross-departmental functions should HR be able to provide? What can HR provide to the total organisation? Is HR expected to play a role within the larger society, outside of your organisation? The answers to these questions started to become quite obvious to us, which led to the development of our People Edge Best Practices and Core Competencies. These are outlined in the following model.
This model outlines what we consider to be the Six People Edge Best Practices, based upon our extensive research work and consultative practice with clients over a ten-year period. The model includes four distinct rings. At the centre or core of this model is the Strategic People Edge Plan, which identifies the existing gap between an organisation’s current practices and their desire to install a set of ‘best practices’. The second ring provides the role distinction, to confirm ‘who does what’ when it comes to People Management. This second ring also clarifies that there is a need to assess the six natural levels of leadership competencies for all members of the organisation, from the executive suite to the front office staff. The third ring embraces the set of six People Edge Best Practices, as well as the five areas that need to be covered under each of the Best Practices. This yields a set of 30 HR practices that every organisation needs to ensure are provided for all of their staff. The fourth and final ring produces the overall outcomes that you want to achieve – the alignment with the organisational strategic plan and the attunement of the hearts and minds of staff with the overall corporate direction and corporate culture.
The Six Natural Levels of Leadership Competency will be discussed in the next section of this chapter. First, we turn our attention to the Six People Edge Best Practices and the core competencies included in each level.7
Based on our research, we believe that these are the best practices and the core human resource competencies needed to establish an HR function that is clearly focused on capitalising on the people resources of an organisation, in order to achieve the organisation’s desired future state.
Level 1: acquiring the desired workforce (focuses on individuals)
1. Identifying core organisational competencies and individual capability requirements.
2. Developing diverse, flexible, safe and alternative workforce arrangements.
3. Conducting workforce succession and retention planning.
4. Installing career development and employee assistance practices that assist employees in managing their own careers and lives.
5. Implementing recruitment, selection and promotion methods to hire, orientate and assimilate the desired employees.
Level 2: engaging the workforce (focuses on interpersonal relations)
6. Installing Performance Management Systems that attune individual and team behaviour with the strategic direction and core values (i.e. goal setting, coaching, appraisal, development).
7. Linking remuneration and compensation systems to capability performance.
8. Creating recognition systems that reinforce strategic direction and core values.
9. Providing flexible benefit programmes to meet employer and employee needs.
10. Dealing effectively with poor or inadequate performance/discipline problems and grievances.
Level 3: organising high-performance teams (focuses on teams)
11. Understanding, designing and developing teams, task forces and team skills.
12. Developing small unit team leaders and supervisors.
13. Developing empowered, self-directed and accountable employees and work teams.
14. Establishing participative management skills for management to lead teams in conducting business.
15. Developing programmes that reward and reinforce teamwork.
Level 4: creating a learning organisation (focuses on cross-functional issues)
16. Developing and spreading learning and intellectual capital quickly across the organisation by all employees (life-long learning).
17. Institutionalising Systems Thinking as a new approach to better thinking, understanding and acting.
18. Developing human resource measurements and information to help the sharing of learning, including cataloguing corporate knowledge.
19. Promoting the value of debriefing and learning from our experiences (mistakes and successes).
20. Creating ways to encourage creative thinking and innovation.
Level 5: facilitating cultural change (focuses on the totalorganisation)
21. Engaging in a continuous process of communications dialogue, discovery and assessment to deepen everyone’s shared understanding of the organisation’s vision and desired organisation culture vs. its current status.
22. Shaping and developing the collective management skills in support of the desired culture.
23. Aligning and streamlining all human resource processes, programmes and systems with the core values and strategic direction.
24. Designing and organising structures and people management roles needed to facilitate change to the desired culture.
25. Developing strategic change experts, agents and capabilities of all employees to support and implement the desired organisation change.
Level 6: collaborating with stakeholders (focuses on community)
26. Developing the environmental knowledge, awareness and skills in employees to operate in a global environment.
27. Understanding, developing and maintaining strategic alliances and networks, including outsourcing.
28. Maintaining the positive people environment and competitive advantage in the marketplace.
29. Creating an intense customer focus commitment by all employees.
30. Collaborating and balancing value contribution to employees, customers, shareholders, community, cultures and countries.
These six People Edge Best Practices and the accompanying 30 Core HR Competencies are designed to provide a comprehensive set of practices that will meet the needs of employees and the corporation. By design, these best practices and competencies do not directly duplicate the more traditional HR service functions. That is not to say that these service functions are not needed. They are. However, by taking a more strategic perspective that cuts across all of the various service functions found in most HR departments, the introduction of these core HR competencies can avoid the ‘silo mindset’ that plagues so many organisations and creates gaps in service delivery.
When an organisation applies this approach to examining the current level of effectiveness of their ‘people services’, it forces all those who have a part to play in the management of people within the organisation to become engaged in the assessment process. In doing so, it tends to avoid the gap in thinking, the gap in perception and the gap in service delivery that was so clearly highlighted in the ‘Aligned at the Top’ survey conducted by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu and the Economic Intelligence Unit.
The completion of a detailed assessment exercise, based upon these 30 Core HR Competencies, is conducted during the Current State Assessment – Step 5 in the People Edge Planning Process. This assessment will help to identify those areas where an organisation has strength as well as those areas where improvements are required.
The second major assessment that is conducted during this stage is that of examining the leadership competencies of the organisation. This methodology is outlined in the following section.
Conducting an assessment of leadership competencies
The Centring Your Leadership Model outlined in Figure 7.2 is also based upon the Seven Levels of Living Systems Model and the Six Rings of Readiness described in Chapter 5.. The fact that both the Creating the People Edge Competency Assessment and this Centring Your Leadership Competency Assessment are built upon the same systems thinking concept is not coincidental. We developed the leadership model first and then used this approach to identify the core HR competencies model.
This model was developed based on a review of the work of 27 different authors and the popular models of leadership that they developed. We searched for common elements as well as unique and distinctive elements among these approaches. We wanted to develop a comprehensive approach that could be applied to all levels of any operating organisational system.8
Centring Your Leadership Model
Each Level includes – an Energising Force, five specific skills and an overall Outcome.
The Six Core Competency Levels and their specific Leadership Skills are:
Level 1: Enhancing Self-Mastery
Level 3: Facilitating Empowered Teams
The Energising Force for this competency is ‘Interdependence’.
The overall Outcome for this competency is ‘Goal Achievement’.
The Leadership Skills of Levels 1 and 2 are necessary for every employee – from the Mail Room Clerk to the CEO/President.
The Leadership Skills of Level 3 are needed by every supervisor and every manager in the organisation.
Level 4: Collaborating Across Functions
Level 5: Integrating Organisational Outcomes
Level 6: Creating Strategic Alliances
The Energising Force for this competency is ‘Synergy’
26. Scanning the Global Environment
27. Reinventing Strategic Planning
28. Networking and Managing Alliances
The overall Outcome for this competency is ‘Globally Competitive’.
The Leadership Skills of Levels 4 and 5 are necessary for all middle and senior managers of the organisation.
The Leadership Skills of Level 6 are necessary for all senior executives and officers of the organisation.
These skills are cumulative in nature – each level builds on the preceding level. So the higher that your role is in the organisation, the more complex and more complete are the leadership skill requirements and expectations for your position.
Having worked with this model for over ten years, we have found that one of its greatest features, for those organisations that have chosen to work with it, is that it offers a progressive approach to developing leadership talent at all levels of the organisation. This becomes an extremely important feature when organisations are looking for ways to ensure that they have a solid leadership succession planning system in place to handle the major demographic shifts that loom ahead as senior leaders and managers begin to retire in significant numbers.
A second key feature of this systems leadership framework is that an organisation can determine which specific programmes, conceptual theories or models to introduce under each of the six levels of competency and the 30 specific skills. For example, under Competency Level 2 – Building Interpersonal Relationships, you will find Skill 7, which is ‘Communicating Effectively’. An organisation could include any number of communication skills programmes or courses within this specific skill module, as long as each one helped to improve the communication effectiveness of individual staff members as well as the communication skills between staff members. At the same time, this comprehensive set of skills provides a template for an organisation to identify module gaps where they do not have any specific skill development programmes in place.
The value of competency assessments
Conducting an assessment of one’s competencies can be difficult. It may well point out that many of the things that you are currently doing are highly recommended. On the other hand, you may become aware of some of the areas where deficiencies occur, where extra care, time and attention is needed to strengthen these weaknesses. Either way, the results of any assessment are simply data. The big question is ‘What do you plan to do with the data received?’
Awareness is the first and most important step along the path of change. Until one is aware of what needs improvement, no effort to improve is forthcoming. Knowing that something needs improvement also does not guarantee change. Until one makes a conscious effort to make the necessary changes, to bring about the desired outcomes, things stay the same.
When you conduct an assessment, at least you can’t use the excuse: ‘Well, we didn’t know’. Knowing and doing are not automatic, but they are linked in a very direct way. The value of these assessments is that it enables the organisation to determine whether things need to change regarding their HR management practices or their leadership practices. With this awareness, the opportunity to develop specific strategies and action initiatives and embed them into your Strategic People Plan is in place. When you make specific commitments to bring about conscious changes in these two key areas of People Management, you have indeed set out on the path towards becoming an ‘employer of choice’.
A word of caution is in order here however. We have found that with some clients, it is very hard to accept that there may indeed be a need to change. This seems to be more often the case when it comes to the competencies of HR management than it does for leadership development. It can be very hard for HR professionals to acknowledge that their current practices may be out of synch with the needs of the organisation. Remember the ‘Alignment at the Top’ survey results cited at the beginning of this chapter? Remember the rebuttal provided by one of the world’s leading HR spokespersons?
Despite more than ten years of drumbeating by some of the leading authors in the field of human resource management about the need to make significant changes, many professionals are content to take the position that ‘things are better than they used to be’. It took less than ten years from the time that President John F. Kennedy challenged NASA to successfully place a man on the moon and return him safely to earth. The HR profession needs to become much more responsive than it has been on these issues. The global challenges for workforce talent are so intense that those who set a leisurely pace for change are doomed to be swept aside by those who are pursuing change with a passion.
There is an old Chinese proverb that states:
‘If you want prosperity for one year – grow rice.If you want prosperity for ten years – grow bamboo.If you want prosperity for one hundred years – grow people.’
We need to be working in the ‘people growing business’ much more aggressively than we have in the past. This Chinese proverb could have a specific message for libraries and library staff, too:
It takes many years for the fruits of your efforts at initiatives such as leadership development and effective succession planning from within your organisation to be realised. Delays at putting these types of important people management systems in place will produce major problems in the years ahead. There is no more time to debate the merits of this approach. Further delays will only sabotage future success.
Summary
In this chapter we outlined some of the characteristics of organisations that can truly be called ‘an employer of choice’.
We explored the results of a large survey conducted by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu and The Economist Intelligence Unit that provided a grim profile of the gap in perceptions that exists between corporate executives and their HR staff about the way in which HR plays a strategic support role within the organisation.
We outlined two key assessment tools for use during the development of a People Plan, to evaluate your current level of HR and leadership competencies:
We presented a challenge to all HR professionals – the time for stepping up and clearly demonstrating your value as strategic partners in the current and future success of your organisation is now. Stake your claim. Don’t wait to ‘be invited to the table’. Demonstrate that the table is weaker without your valuable input!
The ART of People Management
A – Attention
The attitudes of HR staff about how important their role is can be their greatest asset – or their greatest liability. Providing strategic support services rather than just transactional support services is the new future for HR.
In order for staff to develop a strong attitude about your organisation as ‘an employer of choice’, HR professionals have to lead the initiatives that create the workplace culture that is the envy of your industry. What do you need to do to make your library the one that staff from other libraries or new graduates in the library field are clambering to join?
R – Results
To shift from being a transaction-focused HR Department, you will need to do two key things:
- secure the services of dedicated staff or possibly the services of a competent outside provider to handle many of the primary transactional functions required by your staff; these cannot be overlooked or down played – they just need to be provided in the most efficient and effective way possible, to free you and your team up to shift your focus
- re-focus your energies and your talents on the longer-term future competency and skill requirements of your workforce, to demonstrate to your senior executives that you are preparing for the workforce and the workplace of tomorrow.
Focus on your own specific career development needs, to learn more about strategic thinking, strategic planning, and strategic human resource management and planning practices. You are one of the key internal change agents, and your progression towards playing a more strategic role will be an invaluable asset to your library.
T – Techniques
Conduct an assessment of your own HR team to determine your strengths and weaknesses in the People Edge Best Practices and Core Competencies. Then initiate skill development initiatives to focus on those areas where your greatest gains can be made.
Take the lead to conduct an assessment of the Leadership Competencies and Skills of your organisation. Then begin to intentionally find or develop appropriate programmes to fill the gaps that are most important to the future growth of your organisation.
1.Grescoe, Paul (2004) Flight Path: How WestJet is Flying High in Canada’s Most Turbulent Industry. Toronto: John Wiley and Sons Canada Ltd, p. 192.
2.Ulrich, Dave (1997) Human Resource Champions: The Next Agenda for Adding Value and Delivering Results. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, p. 1.
3.Aijala, Ainar, Walsh, Brett and Schwartz, Jeff (2007) Aligned at the top: how business and HR executives view today’s most significant people challenges – and what they’re doing about it. A global survey conducted by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu and the Economist Intelligence Unit, source www.shrm.org/hrmagazine/07November (restricted to SHRM members) and www.deloitte.com, p. 2.
4.Ibid, p. 2.
5.Ibid, p. 3.
6.Meisinger, Susan (2007) New study challenges HR, illustrates opportunity. HR Magazine, November, p. 8.
7.Bandt, Allan and McKinlay, James (2003) The Systems Thinking Approach to Strategic People Edge Planning – Participant Workbook. Perth: Bandt Gatter & Associates and Centre for Strategic Management, pp. 5.2-5.4.
8.Haines, Stephen (Ed.) (2002) 50 One-Minute Tips for Leaders: Using the Systems Thinking Approach. San Diego: Systems Thinking Press, p. 52.