Wednesday Nov 13, 2024
Wednesday Nov 13, 2024
Monday, 9 September 2013 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
I am delighted to write my 150th column on Humane Results. It was indeed a challenging task to write on a weekly basis despite my personal and professional commitments. I must confess that I never felt writing as a torture but always as a treasure. Being here or overseas, being well or ill did not deter me from quitting from my column. Today, the focus is on what I have always been advocating, which I would call HR imperatives for innovation.
Imagination to innovation
I remember writing some time ago about triple Is. They were Imagination, Innovation and Implementation.
Imagination is all about dreaming or envisioning the future. Every product and every service in the world is someone’s imagination some time ago. It reminds me of Jules Verne. He as a pioneering science fiction author wrote about space, air, and underwater travel before air travel and practical submarines were invented, and before practical means of space travel had been devised. It was Jules Verne’s dream that became a reality when Neil Armstrong landed on moon.
Same is true for what Sir Arthur C. Clark imagined of satellites encircling the earth. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, as the first artificial satellite to put into Earth’s orbit, it was his dream that became a reality. The launch ushered in new political, military, technological, and scientific developments, heralding the space age.
HR professionals need to understand the critical importance of innovation today and how to contribute to an organisation’s innovation mandate by attracting and keeping the most innovative people, constantly improving their skills and creating a culture of innovation. This will enable your organisation to differentiate itself. These are a part of the role of HR.
Innovation in focus
The ideas generated in the phase of imagination are now taking shape as a product or a service. Imagination sparks creativity, in moving beyond the old stale patterns of thinking. Innovation is all about practical application of the creative ideas to the point it generates value to an organisation.
John Naisbitt in his international best seller ‘Megatrends’ tells us the importance of creativity in action. “In the new corporation, creativity and individuality are organisational treasures.” It is an individual who can imagine and convert the imagination into innovation. The respective organisation has to support such initiatives.
Innovation goes beyond technology and requires collaboration from many areas to come together to achieve success. David Neeleman, founder and CEO of JetBlue started a new airline at a time when the marketplace was flooded with airlines. He said; “Innovation is trying to figure out a way to do something better than it’s ever been done before.” To accomplish this edge was innovation.
Impact of HR on innovation
We need HR leaders to foster innovation. Why and how of it leads to an interesting discussion. Professor Dave Ulrich has long argued that HR leaders should assume a more vital, strategic role inside their organisations, rather than merely keeping busy with everyday stuff like: policies, payroll, and picnics.
According to Ulrich, HR leaders should strive to build and strengthen the unique set of organisational capabilities that give an organisation its competitive advantage. In essence, this means developing a particular mix of resources, processes and values that makes it hard for rivals to match what your organisation does.
As Michael Stanleigh reports, IBM completed a survey of global HR leaders in 2011. The results showed an agreement among Human Resource leaders that driving creativity and innovation is their number one business challenge, yet only 50% of these HR executives indicated that they are doing anything about it.
According to Susan Meisinger, former President and CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management, “The takeaway for me in all this is we all think these things matter, but most of us are not doing something about it.” Secondly, she adds, “It is difficult; if it were easy, we’d all be doing it.”
Triple Cs for HR
There are three critical priorities for HR professionals towards fostering innovation. Let me call them three Cs. They refer to Connecting, Creating and Cultivating.
1. Connecting people
for Innovation
This is all about hiring, selecting and assigning people. Right person should be connected to the right task with required resources. Fundamentally, we need to ask about such people the following questions: Can they think outside with people for their innovation capabilities? Are they inquisitive? Are they locked into one viewpoint or willing to consider others? Are they open to new ideas, new concepts? These questions have a lot to do with how people are recruited and how their skills are improved to welcome innovation.
Seth Waugh, CEO of Deutsche Bank Americas, advises, “You must have people with that hunger to always learn, who are always open and who think about things in a different way.”
Sri Lankan HR professionals can do a lot more in this respect. Proper application of assessment techniques to assess the creativity of the candidates with suitable assigning them to create value are of high importance.
2. Creating a culture for innovation
The term culture comes from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning “to cultivate”. It generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activity significance. Different definitions of “culture” reflect different theoretical bases for understanding or criteria for evaluating, human activity.
The ability to help create, protect and build organisational culture is a critical role for HR to play, as it is a major driver for innovation. However, management needs to support, plan for and nurture an innovation culture for innovation to be successful. An unsupportive culture is a critical obstacle to Innovation.
An IBM Global CEO study in 2008 cited an unsupportive culture as the number one obstacle to innovation. Organisations that have a culture that supports innovation are often customer focussed, value-driven and strategic. They ensure that their operating strategies are developed through interactions with their: employees, customers, partners, vendors, suppliers and consultants. They review market trends and identify, through benchmarking, what is required to out-perform their competition.
Google ensures their culture of innovation remains strong by giving their engineers time to invent. They spend 20% of their time working on projects they feel passionate about. And their performance reviews consider how they spent this time. They aren’t afraid to take calculated risks; they hire for taking risks. Also, they have developed a very flat organisational structure to foster innovation. All employees have easy access to face-time with senior management to present their ideas.
The relevance of HR is very crucial here. HR professionals have to be culture builders, together with their leaders. Creating and fostering an ambiance where innovation is respected, rewarded and recognised is a vital part of HR contribution to organisation.
3. Cultivating talent for innovation
The meaning and usage of talent has changed over time. In essence, talent has moved from currency to capability. Yet, capability has its own currency value. In that sense, it has not lost its original meaning. Dave Ulrich calls talent as equivalent to competence multiplied by commitment multiplied by contribution.
HR professionals have to be talent acquirers, builders and retainers. The right rewards system provides a powerful force for reinforcing commitment, directing employee professional growth, and shaping the corporate culture to be more innovative.
HR professionals must look at the reward mechanisms in place and ask if they are doing the right things to develop the employees and culture of the organisation. This should include: compensation strategies, performance management tools, and other targeted recognition and reward programs.
For example, BMW’s continued success is its strategic focus on developing customer-friendly innovations, coupled with an approach to innovation management that is unique within the automotive industry. One of their keys is a constant focus on the culture of innovation – making professional innovative processes a key strategic and cultural constituent of every area of the company.
As Michael Stanleigh observes, this focus on culture is a guiding principle within BMW. They believe that if a company knows what it stands for and what are its strengths, it can more easily develop and implement a clear strategy. They believe that to be innovative, it is necessary to give up the idea that a company can do everything equally well. On the contrary, it seems more likely that a company that tries to do everything equally well will be unable to make full use of its strengths.
The McKinsey Quarterly, 2008 stated that “leading companies for innovation make innovation a formal agenda item at regular leadership meetings. That signals to employees the value management attaches to innovation.” In a similar line, Seth Waugh, CEO of Deutsche Bank Americas, said, “Culture is a critical factor in promoting innovation. Business leaders stimulate innovation by offering incentives to workers, creating an environment, and setting expectations.”
Way forward
HR has a tremendous role to play in enhancing innovation taken place in an organisation. It can strategically contribute to the institutional drives whilst encouraging the individuals to be more innovative in multiple fronts. HR professionals can show their flare for innovation by making their organisations more innovative. Triple Cs for HR described above is the sure-fire way.
(Dr. Ajantha Dharmasiri works at the Postgraduate Institute of Management. He can be reached on [email protected] or www.ajanthadharmasiri.info.)
