HR professionals must become ‘innovators’ if they are to survive the sea of change said the CIPD’s keynote speaker and strategy guru Gary Hamel.
Delegates were told that the problem centres on the pace of this change. The challenge is for businesses to build the capacity to move forward before the case for change becomes desperately obvious.
The yawning realisation, he said, is that many businesses don’t wake upto what is happening around them until it is too late, profits dip and customers are lost before action is taken.
“Success has never been more fragile and as change accelerates we are becoming more ignorant,” Hamel commented.
HR must champion ‘innovation’ if their organisations are to be successful.
The three-pronged solution he suggests is revolution, renewal and resilience. Companies must continually reinvent themselves he argued and develop a capacity for continuous reconstruction.
This quest for resilience should be the focus of every HR professional. Strategy dies he said if they are replicated, supplanted, exhausted or eviscerated.
With ‘change’ buzz words filling the auditorium HR delegates were told that there: “Is no better time to be in HR.”
One Response
It’s about leadership, silly!
I don’t think there’s anything essentially new in what Hamel is saying (I wasn’t present at his speech). Arguably the pace of change is quicker, but being resilient, and having a capacity to change have always been very useful characteristics to have in organisations!
I think that taking Hamel’s notion further it’s really about leadership. Kouzes & Posner’s research-based model for looking at leadership (http://www.kouzesposner.com/) may be a good place to start:
* Model the way – effectively giving permission for people to innovate and act
* Inspire a shared vision – and some direction
* Challenge the process – the innovation bit!
* Enable others to act – 2 heads are better than one apparently
* Encourage the heart – more about giving people permission and confidence to innovate, act and so change things.
I think now is an excellent time to be in HR, so long as we make a useful contribution, otherwise we may find ourselves at parties claiming to be in any number of professions, just not HR!