Aligning the HR Structure (Bradley W Hall,PHD) - Part 2

HR Is Structured to Produce Programs and Policies Rather than Business Results

Let’s say, as a general manager, you see a leadership deficit in your business unit. Who in your HR function is accountable for improving leadership performance? The organizational development department is not; it creates competency models and assessment tools. The talent management department is not; it runs the succession planning cycle. The performance management department is responsible for appraisals, the compensation department makes pay decisions, and the training department develops and delivers courses. So which department manager will stand up and say, “My department is accountable for growing leaders”?

Today, the answer is “nobody.” 

The reason is that today’s HR is aligned by subprofession (e.g., training, staffing, compensation), the same as it was thirty years ago. Let’s call these subprofessions by their new name, Centers of Excellence (COEs). COEs are factories that produce state-of-the-art HR tools. They are not designed to produce business results and often operate as uncoordinated product development units, as indicated by Figure 3-4, which shows the COEs of one institution.

Many companies refer to both first-level (e.g., organizational development) and second-level (e.g., HR metrics) organizations as COEs. If this was an automobile engine, each COE unit  would be producing a different engine part. The problem is that there is no blueprint of what

the completed engine will look like or do. Just as it is unreasonable to build parts to an engine without a blueprint of the finished engine, it is unreasonable to build HR tools and processes without a Human Capital Strategy.

Aligning the HR Structure (Bradley W Hall,PHD) - Part 1

Today’s HR organizational structure is misaligned with a Human Capital Strategy of sustained competitive advantage through people. There are two critical areas of misalignment:

1. Strategic and administrative work remains tangled.
2. HR is structured to produce HR products and processes rather than business results.

Strategic and Administrative Work Remains Tangled

Several decades ago, sales and marketing organizations were commonplace. Over the years, marketing was split off into its own organization. Although the purpose of both functions is business development, each requires a different approach and skill set. The same is true with accounting and finance. Accounting is an old profession, and finance recently emerged from accounting with the rise of capital markets. The purpose of both functions is to leverage financial capital, but each uses different methods to accomplish the task. Like sales and marketing and accounting and finance, administrative and strategic HR are both about people, but each requires a different approach and skill set.

Over the past decades, the HR profession has aspired to create fundamentally different outcomes, but it has attempted to do so inside the walls of traditional HR. As the model presented in Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma (Harvard Business School Press, 1997) would predict, it is difficult to create a business that represents a discontinuous change inside an old organization: The old will strangle the new. When an organization needs new capabilities, it may need a new organizational space where those capabilities can be developed. Christensen suggests that a successful approach is to spin off an organization so that the new capabilities can be managed in a very different way than in the mainstream business. This has not happened in HR; the old is strangling the new.

Methods For Collecting Job Analysis Information Part 2 (Gary Dessler)

Observation

Direct observation is especially useful when the job consists mainly of observable physical activities—assembly-line worker and accounting clerk are examples. On the other hand, observation is not as useful when the job entails a lot of mental activity (lawyer, design engineer).

Nor is it useful if the employee only occasionally engages in important activities, such as a nurse who handles emergencies. And reactivity—the worker’s changing what he or she normally does because you are watching—also can be a problem.

Managers often use direct observation and interviewing together. One approach is to observe 

the worker on the job during a complete work cycle. (The cycle is the time it takes to complete the job; it could be a minute for an assembly-line worker or an hour, a day, or longer for complex jobs.) Here you take notes of all the job activities. Then, ask the person to clarify points not understood and to explain what other activities he or she performs that you didn’t observe.

Participant Diary/Logs

Another method is to ask workers to keep a diary/log of what they do during the day. For every activity engaged in, the employee records the activity (along with the time) in a log. Some firms give employees pocket dictating machines and pagers. Then at random times during the day, they page the workers, who dictate what they are doing at that time. This can avoid requiring workers to remember what they did hours earlier when they complete their logs at the end of the day.

Methods For Collecting Job Analysis Information Part 1 (Gary Dessler)

We’ll see that there are various ways (interviews or questionnaires, for instance) to collect information on a job’s duties, responsibilities, and activities. The basic rule is to use those that best fit your purpose. Thus, an interview might be best for creating a list of job duties. The more quantitative position analysis questionnaire may be best for quantifying each job’s relative worth for pay purposes.

The Interview

Job analysis interviews range from unstructured interviews (“Tell me about your job”) to highly structured interviews containing hundreds of specific job items to check off.

Managers may conduct individual interviews with each employee, group interviews with groups of employees who have the same job, and/or supervisor interviews with one or more supervisors who know the job. They use group interviews when a large number of employees are performing similar or identical work, since this can be a quick and inexpensive way to gather information. As a rule, the workers’ immediate supervisor attends the group session; if not, you can interview the supervisor separately.

Whichever type of interview you use be sure the interviewee fully understands the reason

for the interview. There’s a tendency for workers to view such interviews, rightly or  wrongly, as “efficiency evaluations.” If so, interviewees may hesitate to describe their jobs accurately.

The Basics Of Job Analysis (Gary Dessler)

Talent management begins with understanding what jobs need to be filled, and the human traits and competencies employees need to do those jobs effectively. Job analysis is the procedure through which you determine the duties of the jobs you are analyzing and the characteristics of the  people to hire for them. 

Job analysis produces information for writing job descriptions (a list of what duties the job entails) and job (or “person”) specifications (what kind of people to hire for the job). Virtually every personnel-related action you take—interviewing applicants, and training and appraising employees, for instance—depends on knowing what the job entails and what human traits and skills one needs to do the job well. 

The supervisor or human resources specialist normally collects one or more of the following types of information via the job analysis:

● Work activities. First, he or she collects information about the job’s actual work activities, such as cleaning, selling, teaching, or painting. This list may also include how, why, and when the worker performs each activity.

Determining the Optimal Blueprint for Your Organization (Bradley W Hall,Ph.D)

The key question to answer here is: What is the most effective Human Capital Strategy for your organization? How can you know if your company is improving the performance of its human capital? How can you know if your company is managing its human capital more effectively than its competitors are? 

The Human Capital Lagging Indicator 

Is there a single measure that concludes human capital improves year- over-year? Or, should we judge the efficiency of a human capital strategy by measuring changes in each of a set of key positions? 

A 2007 McKinsey Quarterly article stated that the value of “intangible capital” of the world’s top 150 companies, as measured by market value less invested financial capital, increased from $800 billion in 1985 to $7.2 trillion in 2005.6 However, annual reports still focus on how a company uses its financial capital—not how it is growing its in- tangible values, the most important of which is human capital. 

A Learning Organization...

· Is not a label but a philosophy to embrace;

· Nurtures new and expansive patterns of thinking;

· Sees reality objectively;

· Has the capacity to multilaterally create and focus upon a shared picture of the future;

· Has the ability for a team to synergistically produce extraordinary results through coordinated action;

· Is a workplace safe for thinking;

LEADERSHIP IN A LEARNING ORGANIZATION

A Learning Organization can be defined as an organization where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together (Senge, 1990).

Learning organizations use shared leadership principles to maximize their resources and develop leadership capacity within individuals. The organization can be described as one that learns continuously and transforms itself. Current literature on leadership development characterizes the leader as a coach, facilitator and guide. Images of leadership have shifted from expert, director, and controller to catalyst, information sharer, and coordinator.

Leadership in learning organizations is based on cooperative and collaborative partnership approaches.

Individuals and their actions are the basis of a learning organization. The culture of the organization, including its history, vision and mission, and both official and informal policies and procedures, forms the

context for individual activities and their impacts.

Senge described five disciplines:

1.) Systems Thinking;

2.) Personal Mastery;

3.) Mental Models;

4.) Building Shared Vision; and

5.) Team Learning as the foundation of a learning organization.

Origin of Organization Development Time Line

Organization Development Defined

According to Clardy (2003, p. 785):

“The field of planned organization change was long equated with organization development (OD). OD proponents were up-front with the bona fides of their approach: full disclosure, informed consent, inclusive participation, and so on. These canons of OD provided the principles and practices that could be applied to any organizational change project. Yet, for a number of years, standing alongside the OD literature were smaller volumes (Zaltman & Duncan, 1977, was an early example) that did not so neatly fit the OD mold. By these accounts, the geography of organizational change management was bigger than that encompassed by OD.”

While some might disagree with the assertions in the preceding paragraph, those assertions are effective in forcing readers to confront what they believe about OD—and what they do not.
Over the years, organization development has been defined by just about every author who has written about it. Here are a few chronologically organized definitions that represent a range of ways to understand OD:

• Organization development is an effort (1) planned, (2) organizationwide, and (3) managed from the top, to (4) increase organization effectiveness and health through (5) planned interventions in the organization’s “processes,” using behavioral-science knowledge (Beckhard, 1969, p. 9).

• Organization development is a response to change, a complex educational strategy intended to change the beliefs, attitudes, values, and structure of organizations so that they can better adapt to new technologies, markets, and challenges, and the dizzying rate of change itself (Bennis, 1969, p. 2).

• Most people in the field agree that OD involves consultants who try to help clients improve their organizations by applying knowledge from the behavioral sciences—psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, and certain related disciplines. Most would also agree that OD implies change and, if we accept that improvement in organizational functioning means that change has occurred, then, broadly defined, OD means organizational change (Burke, 1982, p. 3).

• Organization development is a top-management-supported long-range effort to improve an organization’s problem-solving and renewal processes, particularly through a more effective and collaborative diagnosis and management of organization culture—with special emphasis on formal work team, temporary team, and intergroup culture—with the assistance of a consultant-facilitator and the use of the theory and technology of applied behavioral science, including Action Research (French & Bell, 1990, p. 17).

• Organization development is “a systemic and systematic change effort, using behavioral science knowledge and skill, to change or transform the organization to a new state” (Beckhard, 1999, personal communication).

• Organization development is a system-wide and values-based collaborative process of applying behavioral science knowledge to the adaptive development, improvement and reinforcement of such organizational features as the strategies, structures, processes, people, and cultures that lead to organization effectiveness (Bradford, Burke, Seashore, Worley, & Tannenbaum, 2001).

Source : Practicing Organization Development.William J Rothwell & Roland Sullivan.2005