The paradox of HR in a people dependant business

I just finished reading Anant Rangaswami's free ebook "Elephants in the Room" on the future of the Indian advertising industry. You can download the book for free here.

Once upon a time, I wanted to be a copywriter in the advertising industry. Then I sat for XAT and got into XLRI and discovered HR. But the fascination with the (what I thought) glamourous world of advertising never went away. When I was at 2020 Social my colleague went to the "Cannes of the Indian ad family" Goafest, and I so wanted to go for it too.

So when Anant's book was free for download, I was amongst the first people to download it. He talks about the big challenges facing the advertising industry (the "elephants in the room") and how the industry can meet it.

There were two big "elephants" that stood out for me when I had put on my HR hat. One was, clients were dependent on "people brands" like Piyush Pandey, R. Balki, Prasoon Joshi in the ad industry. Anant says that the clients want great creative people to work on them, so creating a second line of "people brands" is critical once the older folks retire. And yet, no one seems to be doing anything about it.

The other interesting part of the book, is where Anant draws out the HR challenges of the advertising firms, starting with the fact that many of them to do not have full fledged HR managers or follow HR systems and processes.

That triggered this thought in my mind, "why does an industry which is so dependent on people, not invest in HR"

Thinking about it, I have come to the same sorry conclusion as in the past - great HR happens when work is commoditised. When work/people are a differentiator to bring in revenues as in a case of an ad agency or a professional services firm, HR is seen as expendable, without people realising then that it's the most critical.

Even tellingly, better HR professionals don't think of joining as HR managers/heads in industries like media and advertising adding to the vicious cycle of mediocre HR practices and people decisions being taking whimsically by business heads.

Twitter and Career Success by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Interesting post by Harvard professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter on the parallels between having influence on Twitter and the new competencies for success.

In the 21st century, America is rapidly becoming a society of networks, even within organizations. Maintenance of organizations as structures is less important than assembling resources to get results, even if the assemblage itself is loose and perishable.

Today, people with power and influence derive their power from their centrality within self-organizing networks that might or might not correspond to any plan on the part of designated leaders. Organization structure in vanguard companies involves multi-directional responsibilities, with an increasing emphasis on horizontal relationships rather than vertical reporting as the center of action that shapes daily tasks and one's portfolio of projects, in order to focus on serving customers and society. Circles of influence replace chains of command, as in the councils and boards at Cisco which draw from many levels to drive new strategies. Distributed leadership — consisting of many ears to the ground in many places — is more effectives than centralized or concentrated leadership. Fewer people act as power-holders monopolizing information or decision-making, and more people serve as integrators using relationships and persuasion to get things done.

This changes the nature of career success. It is not enough to be technically adept or even to be interpersonally pleasant. Power goes to the "connectors": those people who actively seek relationships and then serve as bridges between and among groups. Their personal contacts are often as important as their formal assignment. In essence, "She who has the best network wins."

Go ahead read the full article - and you can follow Rosabeth Moss Kanter on Twitter too

New Social Business Careers: Technopologist?

The Fast Forward blog pointed me to this interesting article on someone in P&G who is the marketing brand manager for Digital Business Strategy.

I've always believed new careers emerge from a hybrid of earlier careers/skill areas and Dave Knox reiterates my belief. As he says:

In its most simplistic description, a Marketing Technopologist combines the skills of a Marketer, Technologist, and Social Anthropologist. As a Technologist, you might not be a “coder” but you know your way around the language and culture of tech.  You understand things like API and Open Source or why Facebook Connect working with Open ID is a big deal.  Through the lens of a Social Anthropologist, you can then look at that technology and understand the impact it will have on society and culture.  You can recognize that the technology behind the Social Graph can actually have a huge impact on how we make decisions or shop.  And finally, the marketer will build upon both of these elements, recognizing the business potential created.

Interesting to note how social businesses is giving rise to new careers.

Competencies of HR professionals in Singapore

The largest ongoing study of the competencies of HR professionals across the world conducted by RBL Group and The University of Michigan, came up with six key findings that constitute the competencies of HR professionals.

I got the following press release from the Singapore Human Capital Summit 2009, a premier conference on managing and developing human capital (or human resources), organized in Asia. Three studies focusing on HR in Asia will be released between now and the beginning of the conference on September 29th.
Over the last 20 years, The RBL Group and the University of Michigan have conducted the largest ongoing study of the competencies of HR professionals across the world with a database of more than 45,000 people from North and Latin America, Europe, Australia, China and India. In the most recent round of their global research, The RBL Group found that six categories or factors constitute the competencies of HR professionals:

1. Credible Activist,
2. Culture and Change Steward,
3. Talent Manager / Organisational Designer,
4. Strategy Architect,
5. Operational Executor and
6. Business Ally.
7. 
   

The preliminary findings of the Singapore study revealed that while local HR professionals do the best job at being a credible activist, they need to strengthen the rest of the competencies, especially the Business Ally competency, in order to add greater value to business results. These findings are similar to the global results.

Another finding showed that the impact local HR professionals can have on business results and their personal performance is noticeably greater than the impact of their global HR counterparts (by up to 12 per cent) when they can harness these competencies effectively. This is despite the finding that they are rated consistently lower in all categories of HR competencies compared to global findings. This may indicate that the expectations on local HR professionals by their business partners are greater than elsewhere in the world - their line management colleagues expect them to be better and to contribute even more than their global counterparts.

Commenting on the implications of the findings, Professor Dave Ulrich, Partner and Co-founder of The RBL Group, said: “With a higher expectation by their line management colleagues, HR professionals in Singapore need to more effectively translate their business knowledge to strategy formulation and implementation for business success.”

Professor Wayne Brockbank, Partner of The RBL Group and principal investigator for this study, added: “Singapore HR practitioners also need to have greater knowledge and skills at aligning their HR activities to create effective business cultures and to be a more effective change management agent. Essentially, they need to understand their roles and agendas through which they create more customer-focused organisations. The internal clients of Singapore HR professionals expect them to add greater value. The HR community in Singapore has a mandate to develop greater knowledge and skills that enable them to add greater value to the business.”

Broad banding and Skill based Pay

Reader Poonam asks:

Dear Gautam,

 

I am a frequent visitor of your blog and enjoy reading the articles posted on it. I wanted your reflections on the "Difference between Broad Banding and Skill Based Pay" and how can this difference between the two be understood in the context of a start up organisation with an expanding employee strength.

 

Looking forward to your views on the topic.

 

I'm really not a compensation and pay expert what I do know is that broadbanding  refers to clubbing various pay levels into a smaller number of broad pay bands. According to this site:

Broadbanding is still around, although it is getting far less press than it did in the nineties. Like all tools, it's great for achieving specific outcomes, but can cause great damage when misapplied.

Definition:

Broadbanding (or 'broad grades') is the consolidation of traditional pay structures, consisting of many, narrow pay ranges into a few, wider ranges or bands.

Purpose:

Broadbanding is intended to support agile, flatter, faster-paced, de-bureaucratized organizational cultures.

Use:

Broadbands are imperative for companies with competency-based pay programs, but are also used in companies with longevity- and performance-based pay programs. Companies employ broad banding to:

• facilitate change
• avoid multiple pay structures
• drive pay decision-making downward (empowering managers)
• provide greater latitude in management pay decisions
• promote lateral moves or in-grade promotions
• reduce use of promotions to increase pay
• promote career development / learning
• reduce the need for precise job analysis/evaluation
• promote fewer, broadly-defined jobs
• focus on the person instead of the job
• facilitate quick responses to changing goals and circumstances

Any one has experience working in a broad band pay environment? How does that compare with a traditional system? My guess is that people in such an organization must get used to a new culture.

While Skill based pay according to this website is as follows. Prima facie it seems like a good fit with broadbanding pay. Any thoughts?

The payment of additional salary or hourly pay to employees for learning, and being able to perform, additional tasks or skills. It is sometimes expanded to compensate employees for demonstrating relevant competencies.

Facilitating Brainstorming

What or who is a facilitator? I believe one of the key skills to be a great consultant is to be an effective facilitator - in addition to consulting skills and subject matter expertise.

Came across this description on Facilitation at ram Charan's website from his latest book The Game Changer, where he talks about how to brainstorm.

Facilitators need to be skilled at group dynamics, able to read when the team is flagging or when it is hitting on all cylinders. They have to be patient, yet willing to exercise discipline if one person can't stop talking or is becoming aggressive. It is more a matter of personality than formal training, but it can't hurt to bring in people to watch a well-run brainstorming session to see how it works.

HR certifications not any great help says reader

apeksha left a comment on "Talent shortage in HR in India?":

We have a whole lot of graduates being churned out each year..unfortunately most of them though talented, are not from a "recognized" college, or lack the right 'attitude'.

as for having a body like CIPD, i dont know. I just became a graduate member of CIPD, will get my degree from the university of Edinburgh..and i still cant find anyone who wants to hire me becuz i do not have "adequate" experience

Last Friday I attended a meet of SHRM India at the Satyam School of Leadership in Hyderabad. Nina Woodard head of SHRM in India, was talking about the PHR, SPHR and GPHR certifications that SHRM's HRCI body offers. While PHR and SPHR are very US specific certifications, GPHR certification seems to be the only one for non-US professionals to take. However the eligibility for that seems limited to HR leaders who are already delivering global HR processes.

Of course, there exists the other route to develop HR professionals, which is by building their skills like CII, National NHRD Network and XLRI are trying to do together. However, in my view that is a much slower model and might not take newer competencies that are becoming essential to HR professionals into account.

CR and not HR?

DubDubs has a very insightful post on how the "resources" in HR are Competencies and not Humans.

My theory is not that we are the resource, but we have the KSA’s (in old school terms) that can be resources. In today’s terms, I think we’re talking about competencies. In general, we can manage the competencies into a master repository (with a decent knowledge management practice), but in practice, this does not really seem to have been well applied in most organizations. We’re still dependent on people to bring competencies to work with them every day.

Not to beat a dead drum, but this is what talent management is all about. It’s about growing competencies to increase the value of a resource within the organization. It’s about keeping those competencies (managing depreciation?) within the organization. And of course it’s making sure the competencies get used. Any asset in the organization that is sitting in the corner or on the shelf is actually costing the company money to hold and not use it. Same with a competency. We hired and pay a person to use all of their competencies. However, if a person is not engaged, they come to work and hold back some of their productivity or some of their knowledge.

The problem (or so corporations think!) is that competencies are made of three different aspects, Knowledge, Skills and Attitude (the KSAs that DD talks about) of which two can be developed (Knowledge and Skills) while the third - Attitude - is what an adult rarely changes, and will not do so merely because the organization asks or expects him to.

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