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Charting New Paths to the Future

Charting New Paths to the Future

Guest post by Marina Gorbis

We are living in a moment of great transition. Some call it the Fourth Industrial Revolution, others refer to a Great Disruption or the VUCA world, the world of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. At the Institute for the Future (IFTF) we talk about a transition from the First to the Second Curve, from the world of institutional production to the world of socialstructed creation, in which many things are accomplished by aggregating efforts of large networks of people using online platforms and tools for algorithmically coordinating activities. We believe that we are in the early stages of this transformation but the impacts will be profound over the next decade. No organization, no sector of our economy and society will be left unchanged.

We are living in a moment of great transition.

So, how do you ensure that your organization is not only prepared for the future but also shaping it? To start, you need a deep understanding of the big shifts driving the transformation on the horizon. My suggestion is to focus on what my colleague, prominent investigative journalist Drew Sullivan, refers to as “tides, not waves.” This means a focus not on what’s new and ephemeral but what is underneath, what is deep and durable and may be an accumulation of multiple forces building up over decades. These tides are often a combination of myriad technologies, demographic, social, and cultural changes coming together.

The Larger Tides of Change

At IFTF, we are constantly tracking and making sense of the larger tides of change. Once you recognize and understand such changes, you can start asking yourself what do they mean? And informed by those insights, what can you do to future-proof your organization? What should you do to build a more desirable future for yourselves and for others? You can also place your existing efforts in this futures context to see how prepared you are for what’s coming.

This is exactly the journey that the California Community Colleges the largest provider of higher education in California recently embarked upon. Vice Chancellor of Workforce Development, Van Ton-Quinlivan wanted to place their recent investments within a larger future context, as an inventory of preparedness. To do this, we first turned to IFTF’s research map, Learning is Earning in the National Learning Economy, which maps the emerging innovation zones resulting from a world where working, learning, and living are blending together. We then used those eight innovation zones as a lens through which to examine the CCCs current innovation efforts. In which zones are they furthest along? Which zones need our immediate focus? The findings of our work together can be found in the newly released report, Charting New Paths to the Future in the California Community Colleges, now available for free download.

Every forward-looking educational organization should check its efforts against the larger tides of change. A place to start is IFTF’s rich archive of futures research available through our Learn and Work Futures Initiative. And for more inspiration, please read Charting New Paths to the Future in the California Community Colleges.

 

About Marina Gorbis:

Marina Gorbis is a futurist and social scientist who serves as executive director to the Institute for the Future (IFTF), a Silicon Valley nonprofit research and consulting organization. In her 19 years with IFTF, Marina has brought a futures perspective to hundreds of organizations in business, education, government, and philanthropy to improve innovation capacity, develop strategies, and design new products and services.

 

About Bob Johansen:

Bob Johansen is a distinguished fellow with the Institute for the Future in Silicon Valley. For more than 30 years, Bob has helped organizations around the world prepare for and shape the future, including corporations such as P&G, Walmart, McKinsey, United Rentals, and Syngenta, as well as major universities and nonprofits.

The author or co-author of ten books, Bob is a frequent keynote speaker. His best-selling book Get There Early: Sensing the Future to Compete in the Present was selected as one of the top business books of 2007. His latest book is The New Leadership Literacies: Thriving in a Future of Extreme Disruption and Distributed Everything discusses five new leadership literacies—combinations of disciplines, practices, and worldviews—that will be needed to thrive in a VUCA world of increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

HR’s Business Case for Talent Management

Today’s global economy is forcing a shift in the role human resources plays in organizations, moving from a transactional-administrative role to a strategic partner and facilitator of an organization’s most important asset – its people. However, projects in human resources and their functions may find it particularly difficult to obtain funding, and are typically one of the first things to be cut when budgets are tight. This unfortunate reality is principally due to human resource’s inability to align a credible business case followed by positioning it with key executives as having a quantifiable, direct impact on the bottom-line of the organization. Breitfelder and Dowling (2008) suggest human resources sits in the middle of some of the most compelling and competitive battlegrounds in business, where organizations deploy and fight over that most valuable of resources, their talent. Therefore, building a business case for talent management has become a strategic imperative for human resources professionals that will buttress an organizations ability to achieve its goals and objectives and in due course improve the performance of the bottom-line.

What is Talent Management?
The term talent management was conceived many years ago and initially referred to the programs used to manage and develop the top talent in an organization. Today, it has transformed into a key strategic and sustainable competitive advantage for organizations who are looking to recruit and retain talented employees throughout an organization. Where it was once for only the hand-picked few is now for many employees throughout an organization. Talent management today can be viewed from a holistic and strategic view and may be defined as a method to optimizing human capital through integrated organizational processes designed to attract, retain, develop, motivate and deploy employees, with the goal to create strong culture, engagement, capability, and capacity that meets current and future organizational objectives. Avedon and Scholes (2010) suggest talent are employees with strategic importance to the purpose and objectives of the organization. However, in today’s workplace it has expanded beyond the strategic few at the top to the strategic many deep and wide in the organization.

Building the Business Case
When building the business case, human resource leaders must structure it in a way that business leaders can understand the need. Building the business case for talent management begins by defining a strategy in the context of the business strategy. In other words, the strategy should help the organization to achieve its business goals through focusing on its talent. Business leaders understand the need to make money and talent management, when done well, makes money (Bersin, 2012). Therefore talent management needs to move away from just being a human resources project or program and forward towards being a true sustainable business strategy.

Strategy is about change and should not stand alone as a management process (Kaplan and Nadler, 2001). A talent management strategy needs to describe what the changes will be and how the changes will happen. Strategy maps can help by describing the changes an organization would like to bring about and, just as importantly, the systems and processes that ensure those changes happen. Kaplan and Nadler (2001) see strategy maps explaining what will be different and how organizations change in a cohesive, integrated and systematic way. In that same vein, human resource leaders will face a nearly impossible challenge to persuade executives to fund a business case for a talent management strategy if it fails to reflect a genuine understanding of the business. Consequently, strategy is also about a series of choices to do things differently than competitors so to provide a unique and attractive value proposition to attract, manage, develop, motivate and retain key people. (Kaplan and Nadler, 2001). Mapping a talent management strategy will be integral in demonstrating how an investment in talent management processes and programs can deliver value to the organizations customers and the bottom-line.

Organizational Benefits
Organizational benefits of a talent management strategy will vary depending on the industry and mission, vision, and goals of the organization. Bersin (2011) adds that talent management is not something to copy from a book and that the strategy will be unique to the organization as well as the benefits. However, a structured talent management strategy will systematically close the gap between the current human resources in an organization and the talent it will ultimately need in order to respond to business challenges in the future (Smith, Wellins, and Paese, 2011). Closing this gap will mean the organization will be able to remain competitive and retain key talent, attract new talent, and assemble plans for key roles and people in the organization in order to allow for proper development experiences. According to a study by The Hackett Group, Inc. (2010), they found that organizations with strong talent management strategies were like to see an increase in their bottom-line earnings by 18 percent. Additionally a Bersin study from 2010-2011 showed that organizations deployed strategic talent management saw twice the revenue of other organizations, 40% less employee turnover, along with 38% higher levels of engagement (Bersin, 2011). So, the evidence is clear, organizations that spend money and time on strategic talent management efforts will see their investment essentially pay for itself.

Conclusion
Organizations that deploy effective strategic talent management practices truly understand that talent is a key competitive advantage. Building the business case will be the hardest part for human resources professionals, however, they can help themselves by genuinely understanding the business and seek and give guidance to the executives who generally do not want to invest their time in these processes. Building the business case and coupling it with a strategy map will provide for a simple and powerful way for the human resources professional to demonstrate value and communicate visually how the strategy can be executed. Additionally, it will be critical for the human resources professional to decouple the strategy from being just a human resources initiative but instead a whole organization or business initiative. Doing this will allow for human resources to be viewed as a true strategic business partner. When organizations leverage strategic talent management practices they can project confidence to their market and remain nimble and flexible regardless of the market conditions.

References
Avedon, M. J., & Scholes, G. (2010). Building Competitive Advantage through Integrated Talent Management. In Silzer, R. F., & Dowell, B. E. (Eds.), Strategy-driven talent management: A leadership imperative (73-116). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Bersin, J. (2012, January 22). The Business Case for Talent Management: Steve Ballmer Agrees. Retrieved from http://www.bersin.com/blog/post/2012/01/The-Business-Case-for-Talent-Management--Steve-Ballmer-Agrees.aspx
Breitfelder, M.D., & Dowling, D.W. (2008, July-August). Why Did We Ever Go Into HR? Harvard Business Review, 86, 39-43.
Kaplan, R.S. & Nadler, D.P. (2001). Building Strategy Maps. In Kaplan, R.S. & Nadler, D.P. The Strategy- focused organization: How balanced scorecard companies thrive in the new business environment (pp. 69-105). Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation.
Smith, A.B., Wellins, R.S. & Paese, M. (2011). The CEO’s Guide To: Talent Management A Practical Approach. Pittsburgh, PA. Development Dimensions International. Retrieved from http://www.ddiworld.com/ddiworld/media/booklets/ceoguidetotalentmanagement_bk_ddi.pdf?ext=.pdf
Study Finds Experienced Talent Management Brings Higher Earnings & Other Benefits. (2010). HR Focus, 87(3), 8-9.

Impact of Culture on Global Businesses

Like a personality is to an individual, is culture to organizations. Culture impacts every aspect of an organization from its top executives to its newest employee to its latest office environment in India. Organizational Behavior author and Management Professor John Schermerhorn asserts organizational culture is the collective values, beliefs and norms that develop over time and guide the behaviors of those who are part of the organization. Another way to make concrete an abstract concept is to think of culture as the glue that binds and shapes how employees execute the organization’s vision and mission and how customers and communities perceive the organizations value. With the explosion of the global business environment the impact of culture is even greater than before. Therefore organizations that are conducting business in global locations must work to become a local company and integrate the local culture into their business practices. When they succeed they can reap huge rewards, but when they fail they may leave a mark that may be unrepairable to the members of that culture and their own business.

In order for organizations to reap rewards and potentially increase their value, leaders of the organization must focus on becoming a localized organization. When leaders adapt their business practices to match the culture and exert effort to avoid any potential misinterpretations of cultural customs, they are demonstrating a level of respect to the culture and building a foundation of trust. When organizations make the decision to go global, the impact on organizational development (OD) is just as imperative as sales or logistics. In a training capacity, OD should take into consideration language barriers and cultural differences in the context of how content is delivered. Change management also becomes a major element for OD, they must taking into consideration how the culture deals with and delivers change. According to Dr. Dan Denison, Chairman & Founding Partner, Denison Consulting, organizations that value culture and respect members’ participation may generate a return on their investment almost twice as high as those organizations that fail to consider culture.

Organizations that recognize and value culture, especially in a global business environment tend to have exponentially better performance in their respective markets. Organizational culture directly affects performance management in large part due to the climate the culture creates. Dr. Benjamin Schneider, professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, shares that climate focuses around two critical areas 1) how the organization behaves on a daily basis and 2) what the goals are of the organization, these then reveal and make visible how employees understand policies, practices, and rewards. Blake Ashforth of Wayne State University, reinforces that culture, a collective idea of values, beliefs and norms, determines the climate’s policies, practices, and rewards that are considered relevant by its members. An example of this would be if an organizational culture supports a climate of providing a reward, such as a bonus, for a high level of performance. However, in the global business environment, organizations must ‘customize to the culture’ their performance management and rewards, for instance employees in many European countries prefer to receive time off from work, where in Asia employees may prefer additional monies.

For business leaders to continue to be successful in a global environment there are many strategies they can use to develop and manage their organizations. On such strategy this must include the recognition of not just one corporate culture, but their host country culture and that there are many subcultures. Author Guy Saffold suggests that when recognizing the many subcultures, business leaders recognize the varying cultural features spread throughout the organization and their cross-sections of interactions. Saffold adds, it is critical for leaders to understand that culture creates the climate of the organization and climate also acts in a way to modify culture. Claremont Graduate University Professor of Management, Vijay Sathe, shares that with a better understanding of an organization’s culture, management can appropriately enter, deviate from, and change the culture needed to continue their success in the global business environment. While organizational culture remains an abstract concept to many, it’s important for business leaders and employees alike to embrace the culture or find one that is best suited to meet and challenge their professional and personal goals.