Sunday 19 October 2014

#unfurlingHR...Baking These Things In


Just a quick one from me on my thoughts bubbling since we met together for the NZLEAD Unconference #unfurlingHR.

I've said it before, but I want to say it again – thank you Amanda and everyone who made the day happen.

NZLEAD is leading us in an amazing way.

Lisa Gill has pointed me to Gary Hamel’s talk on the Future of Management in the last few days. If you haven’t already seen it, you can view it here. It’s well worth a watch.

A quick fire summary of the themes that stuck with me. 

Gary asks "how do you build a company that can change as fast as change itself, where innovation is the work of everybody, all the time, everyday, and where people are willing to bring the gifts of creativity and passion?"

He challenges us to build companies that are: Adaptable – Innovative – Engaged.

Gary draws parallels to the web, and says the web gives us a “global operating system for innovation”. He boils down the values of the web to the following four principles:

(1) Openness
(2) Meritocracy
(3) Flexibility
(4) Collaboration

Gary goes on to make the challenge, “how do we take these deep principles...and bake them into our organisations....because the web is already adaptable, innovative and engaging."

If we stop and reflect on NZLEAD and what Amanda is building, at its heart, it is baking these things in.

We are being led as a community with these principles at the heart - openness, meritocracy, flexibility, collaboration - and it’s inspired.

When I take a step back, when I think about the effect of leading in this way, I see it bringing out creativity, courage, new thinking, confidence, accountability, urgency and a real sense of community.

It’s immense.

We can learn so much by stepping back and reflecting, not just on the event of the NZLEAD Unconference #unfurlingHR, but on the way we are being led.  

This is amazing, this is really something….





  

Thursday 2 October 2014

A very sorry state

Who are our customers?

I ask this simple question, because for some strange reason for the first ten years of my HR career it wasn’t so simple.

It seems a very sorry state.

I got confused; it was of course about doing the best for the business, but from a people perspective, was it the CEO, the managers, the employees?

Because, for some reason it felt like each of these groups had different needs.

I “grew up” in HR working in traditional, hierarchical organisations (finance and insurance anyone?)….

So why was it hard to work out who my customers were?

So I’ve been doing a lot of pondering, and I’ll put it out there – I think it’s because management not leadership was king.

So let me quickly define management (courtesy of Kevin Kruse), and don’t for a second get me wrong, good management is needed. Managers need to plan, measure, monitor, coordinate, solve and so many other things.

Typically, managers manage things

Leaders lead people.

It occurs to me when you have a “management culture” not “leadership culture” it turns into them verses us mentality very quickly, and the HR team sit somewhere in between. Or in many cases on one side of the fence. 

Even the name "Human Resources" implies a big lean towards the management side; calling people "resources" implies they are things that need managing. 

And that doesn’t help anyone really.

The business and growth suffers. The employees suffer, the customers suffer.

It’s all about the people that make your business. The customers, the owners, your team, your future and past team members, and the people that you’re yet to meet that will grow your business to new heights.

Treating people as people. Richard Branson’s unlimited holidays fit perfectly.

Saturday 13 September 2014

Inside-out

I’ve been thinking a lot about Unfurling HR ahead of our NZLead #UnfurlingHR Unconference. If you haven’t already registered to join us on 15 October – do so now!

I’m looking forward to asking loads of questions, seeing the problems as one big massive opportunity. Walking away so we can implement some cool new stuff; try it out, and give it a go. Step in to the wild.

So how can we be unfurling (as in the verb….constantly unfolding)?

I love this article on being anticipatory. Daniel Burrus talks about not only being agile, but being anticipatory – you can check out his wise words here.

“When you’re anticipatory, you’re creating changes and driving disruption from the inside-out rather than being disrupted from the outside-in”.

So, how can we be anticipatory?

Daniel gives three practical tips to go about it:
- Make the future more visible; look at the cyclical and linear change
- Identify the hard trends; the disruptions on the horizon
- Look outside our industry for the solutions we need

So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how this applies to what we do.  

Firstly, how can we make the future more visible? What about cyclical change?

There are of course, many cyclical changes that have a direct impact on what we do.

So how can we better understand the business context we are working in, see outside the organisation, look at the cyclical cycles that are impacting us, to help see what the future holds?

What about the economic cycle or business growth cycle? What point in the growth cycle is our business? A start-up, high growth, established? What about the product or service we offer? Are we in a growing market? An established market? A diminishing market? What, in turn does that mean for our people in (or outside) the business?

Next, what about the Linear Changes?

So it’s easy to think about linear changes when we think about products. Like, for example, the music industry; from cassettes to live streaming to U2 releasing their new album on iTunes last week. 

But what about the way we do HR? What about our linear trends?

It occurs to me that in some areas, we are holding on to very old, tired, out dated processes that do not match the way we work now. How can our processes be fit for the future of work? Easily adaptable and always changing….unfurling…..?

For example, what about incentives and Dan Pink’s ideas that we are motivated by automony, mastery and purpose.  What does that mean for how we pay people? What about performance; how are we all connected to the vision and purpose of the business? How can we measure our results real time? And most importantly, how can we help people to give quality feedback? What about attraction; how do we attract people to what we are doing? Are we truly connected to the best people? And how are the best people connecting with us? What about organisational design; how can we design a way of working that really gets the best from everyone? 

What are the hard trends facing us?

Maybe the hard trend is that parts of HR are redundant.

We keep getting the questions like “Is HR dead?” and Angela’s post recently in the HR Game Changer thread “Most CEOs see HR as 'least strategically important' function". I’ll leave you to Google it and you will soon come up with a resounding theme.

So how do we respond?

I loved Perry Timm’s blog this past week - What if all the smartest people came to work in HR?

Do we have the smarts to see it ourselves? Do we have the capability to see the gaps? Do we need to look outside, step into another’s shoes to really see how we can be game changing?

This leads nicely to Daniel Burrus’ final point.

How can we look outside our industry for the solutions we need?

I love hearing from amazing entrepreneurs about how they get the best people simply doing their best work. I love what Kirsti Grant is doing with Vend, I love listening to Xero's Rod Drury talk on this topic, and Melissa Clark-Reynolds was simply amazing at the HR Game Changer Conference in Auckland.

Let’s not hold on to the known, let’s have the courage to keep questioning and try new stuff. Learning just in time.

And, if we learn to simply ask the right questions, then maybe that alone will keep us unfurling…..

#UnfurlingHR unconference – here we come!

  

Sunday 7 September 2014

Leadership - It's A Personal Thing

So this is it.

My first ever blog.

When the lovely Amanda Sterling asked me to write a post only six weeks ago, sadly, my immediate response was “Me? Really? Oh I don’t think so; I don’t have anything interesting to say”.

But I've been encouraged by meeting so many amazing leaders at the HR Game Changer Conference in Auckland this week.

We all have a role to play, a new perspective, a new thought, we can all step up.

So this blog will be a collection of my thoughts as they are still being developed. A summary of the questions I’m pondering as we all change the game. My thoughts are not yet fully resolved, but a work in progress. 

I’m continually learning, but I’ll speak out anyway.

And I've been thinking, observing and learning a lot about leadership over the last while.

I love Mark Sanborn’s ideas on leadership.

He views leadership as influence and he asks the following four simple questions –
- Do you shape your life and career?
- Do you affect the quality of others' experiences?
- Do you inspire or influence others?
- Do you work to achieve specific goals by working with and coordinating the efforts of        others?

It occurs to me that leadership is a very personal thing.

And I want to lead.

I think deep down we all want to lead.

In HR we often say "it’s all about the leadership".

Well I think it’s about everyone learning to lead. And that starts right here with me. I’m learning. I want to always be learning.

So my challenge, how can we as HR Leaders create environments where every single person is encouraged to lead?
- Where everyone is shaping their life and career?
- Where everyone has a positive impact over others’ experiences?
- Where everyone inspires and positively influences?
- Where everyone is working towards clear goals and maximising the efforts of others?

This is our challenge.

A challenge to create environments where everyone sees the possibilities as endless, where everyone spots the opportunities not the problems, where everyone believes they have something great to contribute.

A culture, which at the very heart of it, always encourages people to be better people.

A place where everyone is learning, growing, stepping out and stepping up.

I want to be part of creating great places like this.


The question is, do you?