Questions from the Brandon Hall webinar with Claude Werder on 5 Strategies to Transform HR

On November 21 we joined a webinar with Claude Werder, Principal HCM Analyst at Brandon Hall Group, on 5 Strategies to Transform HR. The five strategies Claude identified were …

1. Understand the Capabilities Required to Meet Your Customers Needs

2. Foster a Team Mindset

3. Foster a Growth Mindset

4. Develop the Agility and Capabilities to Meet Future Customer Needs (which we do a deep dive on talent mobility in an ebook)

5. Leverage Technology and Analytics to Develop High-Potential Employees

The webinar stimulated a series of questions, and we did not have time to answer them all in the time allotted, so we are following up here.

Can you talk on the level of trust employees may or may not have in participating in developing the corporate competency model for corporate gain? I understand individuals can enter their data through the open model but how open are they for their employer to use the data for corporate objectives. Do they buy into the benefits of their own learning and marketability in the process?

Earning trust is critical to the success of such programs. How to achieve this? In our experience, there are three keys.

1. People have to own and have control over their own data. This means that when they leave your company their skill record should travel with them. Degreed and Ibbaka-TeamFit share this approach and we think it will soon be the standard. People also need to have some control over what other people get to see. We need to move beyond data privacy to giving people control over the data being collected about them.

2. Leaders have to lead. It is critical that leaders participate and share their own profiles. This can take courage as everyone’s profile will show some gaps. Leaders also need to engage with other people, suggest skills for them and rating skills. Be open to the conversations this can spark.

3. Respect people’s aspirations. We let people identify their own core and target skills. The target skills are the ones they want to develop. Make sure that this is acknowledged and acted on. At one of our customers, the target skills are sent to Degreed and used to populate the learning path so that Degreed can serve them the content relevant to their core and target skills. (here’s more on developing people potential)

Trust has to be earned and built up over time. Ways to build trust need to be designed into the system, but how people are introduced to the system and how it is actually used are even more important.

What are your thoughts on speed to capability?

Given the pace of change, this is a critical question for many of us. One of our customers has asked us to create a metric for how people’s skill levels are changing and then to create a set of velocity measures. Of course, measuring speed is not the same thing as gathering speed.

I think this is going to be capability specific. In every case, one will need leadership to demonstrate a real commitment to building a new capability. One of our customers actually uses capability models to signal important new capabilities. This does lead to a proliferation of models though. A good model helps to focus effort in three ways. (i) It helps everyone understand what behaviors and skills underlie a new capability. (ii) The model is a lens that can show where there are skill gaps. (iii) Learning resources and experiences that will help to build the capability can be attached to the model.

I don’t think that formal learning is ever enough to build a new capability. The 70:20:10 approach applies here (70% of learning is experiential, 20% is social and only 10% is from formal training). Given that this seems directionally correct, giving people experience is necessary. So one way to accelerate speed to capability is to make sure that you have projects underway that give people the opportunity to build new skills and put them to work. Yes, communities of practice (social) and formal learning (from books to online courses to certificates) are all important, but the key is to build learning into projects.

What are your thoughts on retaining institutional knowledge and/or IP before it walks out the door (without returning)?

Can we do this? I think it is very hard to do with tacit knowledge (the knowledge encoded into practices that are difficult to formalize and express and that often includes social networks and/or muscle memory). The solution then is to get a better understanding of these social knowledge networks and to cultivate them and preserve them beyond the boundaries of your organization. As more and more people age out of full-time work we will need to find ways to keep them engaged as mentors, advisors, teachers and coaches. Understanding the skill networks in your organization is a good place to start. Who has what skills? How do they use them when working with other people? What skill are shared across the organization? What are the unique skills?

When using the bottom up approach wow do you maintain consistency of vocabulary and writing style of each competency definition?

This is a common challenge with all social knowledge systems. There are three ways this problem can be addressed (it can never be fully solved). (i) Use natural language processing (NLP) and ‘steming’ (looking for the stem in words to find words that are near similes) to find terms that are similar and make sure that search finds these similar terms and that your AI understands that they are related terms. (ii) Map similar terms to a common term. A simple example is that Excel, MS Spreadsheet, Microsoft Excel all refer to the same thing. (iii) Human curation. We believe that no matter how good your NLP and mapping tools you will still need to involve humans in skill curation. This is part of what we do.

Customer success has emerged as a critical capability for many companies. What role does HR play in customer success? Is this strategic?

The shift to the subscription economy, where more and more things are provided through subscriptions rather than outright purchase, is leading many companies to transform their customer support operations into customer success. Customer success is responsible for making sure that users get the value promised and even to help users discover new ways of getting value. One common Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for customer success is renewals. Customer success requires new skill sets that are very different from the typical customer support worker. People in customer support need to understand their employer’s solution. People in customer success are more concerned with their customer’s business. There can be a big skill gap. Human resources leaders need to understand the new skills needed and then build a culture where these skills are cultivated and applied. In some cases, new hires may be needed.

We are building an open competency model for customer success to help HR lead this transition.

Many of the changes we need involve culture change. Can companies build a capability in culture change?

Perhaps we should say companies need to build a capability in culture change. Culture is and should be, more enduring than a solution of business model. But cultures do need to change and this change requires leadership. So how does one build this capability? This needs more research, but here are some initial thoughts.

• Be aware that your company has a culture and find ways to measure it. (Measure culture! How does one do that? Good question, I don’t know yet, but the question has got me thinking.)

• Have early detection systems to see where new cultures are emerging in your organization. Cultures start among small groups, so you need to be aware of what groups are forming and dispersing in your organization. These will often be informal groups.

• Encourage diversity and find ways to allow different cultures to co-exist. I know this sounds like it goes against best practices in culture building, but without diversity, there is no change.

Really understanding the link between skills and performance requires data from many different applications and sources. How does one execute on this?

One needs to begin with a skill graph. This is a data structure that connects skills to other skills, to people, to projects, to teams, to roles … to all of the things included in your competency model. This needs to be thought of as a graph (in the mathematical sense) where all of the data is connected. The skill graph has to be open and able to change as new data is integrated.

Once you have a skill graph, you need to invest in integrations. Ideally, these are API integrations, but they don’t have to be. We have a couple of integrations where we use the old fashioned ETL (Extract Transform Load) approach. Another option we offer is to enter a URL into our skill extraction engine, we can then extract information about skills, projects and other parts of the skill graph. Of course, this is only to get data into our platform. In many cases, the information needs to flow both ways. In this case, an API or ETL integration is optimal.

We currently support integrations with talent management platforms like SAP SuccessFactors, learning experience platforms like Degreed, talent applicant systems like Smartrecruiters, project management systems like Asana and Basecamp and learning management systems like Docebo.

One reason skill and competency models get a bad name is that they are often built top-down by experts who are not close to the actual work. I have been one of those ‘experts’ and like the VP People quoted last week, was suffering from Competency Model PTSD. But these systems are changing to become open and adaptive. Our approach is to have skills bubble up from use and to organize these into more formal models that organizations can shape. We are also building a collection of open competency models that can be mixed and matched and adopted without charge. The first four models will be available in 2020.

• Customer Success

• Design Thinking

• Pricing Expertise

• Adaptation to Climate Change (with the Resilience by Design Lab at Royal Roads University)