FUTURE TALENT November - January 2019/2020 | Page 29

ON TOPIC
O
managers to interpret those values and to find the
sweet spot between direction and giving people
freedom to operate, to experiment and sometimes
fail,” he says. “They need the courage to accept that
they can’t – and shouldn’t try to – control everything.”
Cowley’s work has reinforced his view that there’s
no substitute for keeping the human element at the
heart of business. Take performance management:
“Too often, performance management is focused
on the lowest common denominator of tackling
under-performance; it’s all about the process,” he
says. I’d argue that, instead, it needs to focus on the
spirit of what organisations are trying to achieve:
having conversations with people that focus on
purpose and contribution. Investing in the time it takes
for trust-building conversations is an investment
worth making. It’ll save time down the line.”
Courage is an interesting word here. It’s not easy
to throw out rulebooks and trust instead to all-too
fallible humans. But, to quote Sue Bingham again,
“policies are a company’s message to its employees
regarding how it values people”. If we want to build
cultures that value initiative, build judgement and
encourage problem solving, to offer Ruskin’s ‘meaning’
at work and to develop our own and others’
‘ambidexterity’, we may have no other option.
S
dress code: “dress appropriately”. This is a touchstone
for her, a small but meaningful example of empowering
managers to step up and take responsibility. For Barra,
the danger of overly prescriptive policies and procedures
is that people will live down to them. Better, perhaps,
to set the right expectations and guidelines and expect
people to live up to them.
In a 2017 Harvard Business Review article, Sue
Bingham argues that strict policies are often excuses
to not think, leading to clashes between common sense
and bureaucracy. This rule-enforcement approach
does nothing to support the kind of enabling
organisational cultures to which we all aspire: “When
you spend time thinking up rules to stop every
conceivable bad behaviour, it’s easy to forget to rely on
the people around you. Take your faith out of policies,
and place it in the people you hired to grow your
company into a thriving business,” says Bingham.
Nick Cowley, director of The Oxford Group and
author of the book, 5 Conversations, agrees. For him,
the key building block for performance management
and engagement is trust. He gives the example of an
organisation that has, Mary Barra style, boiled down its
core leadership competencies to a few simple
principles. “After that, it’s up to individual leaders and
o, what of that other great efficiency driver
in HR today: technology. Ar tificial
intelligence (AI)-based recruitment
solutions are only the tip of a very large HR
tech iceberg; chatbot-based coaching, anyone?
The common factor in much of this new dawn is
the ability to collect, use and analyse data to support
everything from tracking retention rates and basic
performance management to (supposedly) taking
the bias out of recruitment and better employee
wellbeing. If tech can help HR teams with the
grunt-work that threatens to tie them down and
improve process and people outcomes, bring it on.
For Nadia Hutchinson, global HR operations
director at Kantar, the genie is well and truly out of
the bottle – and that’s no bad thing. Her organisation
has its own digital HR team, custodians of data-based
solutions that are driving not just efficiencies but
service improvements, especially, for her, around
global and regional compliance and risk management.
“We all need to be alert to the tremendous changes
in the world of work, whether in the personal tech
we use – who uses a BlackBerry these days? – or
structural changes around job automation and
robotics,” she argues. “We need to evolve and accept
that the pace of tech change at work is no different
to the changing tech in our personal lives.”
She is also bullish about the levels of service she
and her colleagues still provide: “While our roles are
changing, HR will always be there to advise senior
leaders, for talent management and a whole host of
personal interactions, even if some staff requests are
now routed through a case management tool rather
than in person,” she says.
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