HR can play a key role in driving sustainable growth

I am looking forward to sharing screen time with Claude Werder at our webinar on Thursday, November 21st (you can sign up here). Claude is the Vice President and Principal HCM Analyst at Brandon Hall Group and an expert in the strategic dimensions of HR and the evolving role of the CHRO (Chief Human Resources Officer). In this webinar, Claude and I will be discussing the emerging role of HR in driving sustainable growth.

Claude has identified five key themes from his research and conversations with CHROs around the world.

1. Understand the capabilities your company needs to meet customer needs, today and in the future

2. Cultivate a team mind set and build teams that cross organization silos

3. Develop a growth mindset

4. Build agility

5. Leverage technology and analytics to achieve these four imperatives

The first of these themes is close to my own interests. Building an understanding of the current capabilities of an organization is not easy. It is not even easy for an individual. Every so often I get an e-mail from a person I have worked with or a close collaborator asking me what their key skills are. It is interesting to be asked this and it has several implications.

• Other people often have more insight into our own skills than we do ourselves

• Skills are critical to self reflection

• Our skills are the product of social interactions

Of course, we provide a skill and competency management platform whose main purpose is to understand the skills in an organization as the individual, team, business function and organization levels. We have an ambition to expand this out to professions, industries and geographies. But it all begins with helping people to understand their own skills and the skills of the people they work with.

One of our core insights is that skills are not primarily individual but that they come to life through interactions with other people. In our own research, we have found that people have connecting skills. These are skills that people use to work with each other. They are unique to each combination. The skills that I use to work with our CTO Lee Iverson are quite different from the skills that I use to work with our COO Karen Chiang. Lee and Karen also work together, and they rely on different skills to do this than they do when working with me. (Of course, these connecting skills are only a small subset of a person’s full skill profile, and the connecting skills are not predefined but depend on who is on the team and what they are working on.)

Mapping and developing these connecting skills is one of the keys to developing teams that can cut across silos. Another key is to understand complementary skills. Complementary skills are skills that are frequently used together by two different people. Think of a pitcher and catcher in baseball. Very different skill sets. A good pitcher will seldom be even an average catcher. But one needs both skill sets and they need to work together in order to build an effective team.

A good skill and competency management will help you identify both connecting and complementary skills.

Skills are not static. They are not something one can capture in an annual performance review or skill survey. In today’s world, skills are dynamic, change quickly, and come together in new patterns. A growth mindset requires a rapid cadence and an openness to change. Think of Roger Martin’s cascading choices framework.

When using this framework, many people focus on the downward cascade. But notice that there are also connections up, from systems to capabilities, capabilities to how to win choices and so on. The CHRO basically owns the spiral between capabilities and how to win. This is something dynamic. If capabilities fail to change and grow then the ability to win is seriously compromised.

Which leads to Claude’s point about an ‘agility.’ An agile organization is one where people have the opportunity to change. There has to be internal mobility, potential skills have to be discovered and cultivated, and new mappings between people, teams and skills encouraged. One metric to track is the diversity of project teams. If you are always using people with the same skill sets on teams you are going to stifle creativity and agility. On the other hand, if you are building teams that lack connecting and complementary skills, you are setting up the teams for failure. Agile organizations have to be able to change, but they also need to be able to shape these changes as they emerge. The CHRO is the leader of this.

A very small team can execute on a sustainable growth strategy without systems support. But once one gets beyond a two pizza team (say 6 to 12 people) one needs systems support (here is a great article by Janet Choi on the science behind this). The systems one need should be able to do the following:

• Help people understand their own skills and the skills of the people they work with

• Help organizations understand skill distributions, skill gaps and how skills are being applied to real work

• Connect learning back to skills (one learns to acquire new skills)

• Predict the potential skills or individuals and groups of people

• Map future skills to the current workforce

Join Claude on November 21 for what will be a stimulating conversation with lots of ideas you will be able to put into immediate action.