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. November – January 2019 // 29