Put the Cart Before the Horse

It is a crying shame that most organisations put responsibility for change squarely on the individual. “It is up to you,” they seem to say, “to change yourself, to be positive about change, to work in new ways. To help you, here is some training.” As if the reason why people don’t change is lack of skills...

And, because the business abdicates responsibility for change to the individual, the organisation doesn’t have to do anything different. It carries on managing their people in the same old ways and then acts surprised when things stay the same, blaming their people’s “resistance to change...”

This kind of thinking is commonplace because it is easy. It is also lazy and ill-informed, for it is placing the cart squarely before the horse.

If a business wants to introduce change, it must have a good reason to do so: either what it is currently doing isn’t working well enough, or it wants to do something differently. Either way, the business is seeking a new outcome. If it wants a new outcome, it needs to manage the business differently: set new goals, adjust processes, tweak measurement and reporting, discuss new topics at meetings, establish new feedback processes and revise its reward processes. It is this new context that demands new skills and hence determines the training that is needed.

So next time your business is embarking on change, before specifying training, ask yourself: what have we done to ensure that we are managing the business to achieve our new goals? To make working in new ways easier and the old ways harder? To change things so that we pay attention to new ways of working?

If we can ask and answer these questions well, then our people will want the training we offer, they will know how they will use their new skills - and success, rather than being a struggle, will be inevitable.

- Mike

Photocredit: Javier Gonzalez / www.sxc.hu

Overcoming the HR Barrier

Most of the time* when I have implemented change in an organisation, success has been either despite HR or through ignoring HR. Where HR has been involved, the result has usually been a signal failure: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing**.

Several reasons suggest themselves for thinking that having HR in a lead role in major change is detrimental.

1. Out of sight, out of mind Having HR involved makes it easy for the rest of the business to abdicate responsibility for the 'people' side of change to HR and not worry about it themselves. Yet as we all know, the people side of change is most of the battle and all of the war. Change either happens in the operational side of the business or it doesn't happen in any meaningful way at all. It is neither within HR's responsibility or capability to take charge of implementing behavioural change at the front lines.
   
   
2. Uncommon language The land of HR is commonly one where a foreign language is spoken: a place that speaks of 'human resources' rather than people; that speaks of 'organograms' rather than stating who is in charge of what; that speaks of 'learning outcomes' rather than doing things differently. Such language gets in the way, and after a while, compliance with language becomes an end in itself. If the business needs a translator to understand what HR is talking about, then HR's ability to influence the business meaningfully will be minimal.
   
   
3. Own the problem, own the solution No customer ever bought a company's product because they have a great HR department. If a business truly desires fundamental change, then this thinking must be led by those parts of the business that engage and service the customer.
   
   The role of HR (and Finance, Legal or Procurement for that matter) is to follow this lead, not to lead it themselves; to do everything in their power to enable the customer experience, as required by the customer. In the final analysis, HR does not have the power to make front-line change happen - nor should it.

So what then is the role of HR in change implementation? For what it's worth, I would make leading the classic HR tasks (training requirements, communication, job specification changes) the responsibility of what might be termed customer 'front-line' departments, with HR providing delivery resources and advice on implementation.

Each of the reasons I offer above is structural: each is endemic to the role of HR as it commonly functions in many organisations. This is not to cast aspersions on many of the people who do great work within HR; indeed, some of the most effective change agents - no, some of the best people - I know, work in HR. The problem is that their ability to succeed is constrained, and in many cases doomed, by the structural and systematic problems inherent in the current HR models adopted by many companies that I have observed in both Europe and the US.

Are HR tasks necessary for change to succeed? Absolutely. Should HR specify those tasks, or determine the goals of these tasks, or be responsible for the outcomes that result? Absolutely not - because they can't.

Mike

*Most of the time, but not always - some initiatives succeeded because some terrific HR people did their damnedest to deliver despite, rather than because of, the operation of the HR function.

** I couldn't resist the Macbeth quote - not only is it apposite, but it's worth remembering that tragedy of Macbeth was caused by the wrong people taking actions that carried within them the seeds of their own destruction...

(A version of this blog entry was originally posted on the LinkedIn BPM group discussion area).

Photo credit: Scott Liddell / www.sxc.hu

There's No Need to Drown

My chum Steve Towers drew the attention of the Business Process Management Group on LinkedIn (of which I am a member) to version of the wonderful 'Shift Happens' presentation. If you didn't already know, the World is changing faster than we can imagine...

There is no longer (if ever there was) any way for us to control the flow of information that engulfs us every day.

If we accept this, however, as a good thing, then we will see that we don't have to drown. In the flow we can also find more valuable, worthwhile and downright inspiring information as well - all we need are the strategies to find and use it...

Mike