HR’s Role in the Agile Ecosystem

While it’s true that Agile is making some in-roads beyond software development, it is often in groups with whom IT is doing Agile projects as opposed to it being planned as part of creating a new Agile ecosystem.

The Human Resources groups in most organizations primarily concern themselves with the on-boarding and off-boarding of employees (i.e. hiring and firing). Few focus on the entire person.

Introducing Agile and agile thinking creates enormous challenges for traditional HR groups.

Agile Challenges our Belief and Value Systems
To become a truly Agile organization, we need to challenge our beliefs and Value systems in a number of ways. Below we show the traditional view, how this view challenges Agile adoption, and the changes that are needed:

HR’s role in enabling the Agile Ecosystem
In most organizations HR is seen mostly as an extension of the legal department — their role is as much to ensure that a firing can happen without legal challenge as it is about hiring the right people.

In the public sector (and some larger corporations) this has translated into a focus on being able to survive an audit of their hiring and firing practices rather than on hiring people who will both fit into and be a part of creating a new organizational culture that fosters an Agile ecosystem.

Here are some changes that HR groups can make to enable the Agile ecosystem in their organizations:
• Refocus hiring on helping to attract and retain the right people — and away from being an extension of the legal department
• Stop focusing on job descriptions — instead focus on the disciplines and their competencies that a modern workforce must possess and on people who have learned how to learn. It isn’t just about what they know today that matters, but how well they can embrace and adapt to inevitable change
• Treat people as people — not resources or assets. Resources are facilities and equipment and money — i.e. things we use. We don’t use people. That also means dropping the term Human Resources as well.
• Recognize the changing demographics of the workforce — the new workforce doesn’t have the same motivators. This new generation of workers tend to hate hierarchies and will often seek out less hierarchical organizations — sometimes for less money or for less perceived upward mobility. Traditional hierarchies are the complete antithesis of what motivates them.
• Focus hiring on leading indicators rather than on lagging indicators. Content expertise is a lagging indicator — it’s what you know today based on what you did yesterday. Look for those who have “learned how to learn” — which is a leading indicator as it tells you they can adapt at the pace of change
• Recognize the shift that Values collective intelligence over individual intelligence — as Rod Collins noted “the smartest organizations are now the ones that know how to aggregate and leverage their collective intelligence by designing organizations not as top-down hierarchies but as powerful collaborative networks”
• Change the performance and compensation systems — As the shift to valuing collective intelligence over individual intelligence and the manifesting of collaborative networks takes shape, performance and compensation systems will also need to be replaced by ones that support the new motivators and drivers of the modern workforce — and surprise, it isn’t just monetary. People want a sense of belonging, of being Valued, of feeling like they are making a difference. A recent survey found that “83% of employees said recognition for contributions is more fulfilling than any rewards and gifts” and “71% said the most meaningful recognition they have received had no dollar Value.”

Organizational agility cannot be achieved simply by giving individual teams the ability to be self-directed and self-managed. It requires changes throughout the organization.

In a recent blog post Collins suggested “if CEOs are serious about improving their companies’ capacity for innovation and collaboration, they need to transform their organizations from top-down hierarchies to peer-to peer-networks.”

This means that traditional management practices have to be rooted out and replaced with ones that recognize these new realities. It is no longer good enough to do what we have always done.

Preparing and Enabling People
HR also has a huge role to play in preparing and enabling people both for the new skills that will be required and for the new behavious that are expected. Many HR organizations already have Learning and Development (L&D) groups in place who can take a lead role in this effort.

For an organization to be agile it needs to combine adaptability with the ability to execute at speed. There are two competing forces at play in achieving true organizational agility:
• People must have the right combination of skill and behaviours that are both taught and supported through continual coaching and mentoring by the organizations leaders at all levels
• For people to learn new behaviours we cannot underestimate the amount of unlearning of old ones that may be needed. Oftentimes, prior experience can be the greatest of encumbrances to changing the culture within an organization.

The L&D group needs to both recognize and address both forces. The new behaviours can easily be overcome by the old ones unless the required support through coaching and mentoring is provided following the teaching of the new skills and behvaiours. Facilitative leadership will be crucial to making the transition.

Interestingly, there are numerous existing courses that were developed to overcome the issues with the traditional command and control hierarchies; though most were developed more from the perspective of finding ways to get people to comply with the wishes of the leaders than from the perspective required to create a truly agile ecosystem. They were marketed as soft-skills courses in areas such as:
• Negotiation
• Conflict resolution
• Communications skills
• Team-building
• Leadership
• Facilitation
• Collaboration
• Dealing with difficult people
• etc.

These and many other skills are required to create an agile ecosystem and the L&D organizations should be well-positioned to take that on. However, they will need to be far more active in not just the teaching aspect but also in taking a direct role in the coaching and mentoring side of it as well — at all levels of the organization.