The Change Champion's Field Guide

Strategies and Tools for Leading Change in Your Organization

Louis Carter, Roland L. Sullivan, Marshall Goldsmith, Dave Ulrich, Norm Smallwood

• Publisher: Pfeiffer
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781118136263
• eBook ISBN: 9781118416372
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Nearly a decade later, leading change pioneers in the field have realigned to bring you the second edition of the Change Champion's Fieldguide. This thoroughly revised and updated edition of the Change Champion's Field Guide is filled with the information, tools, and strategies needed to implement a best practice change or leadership development initiative where everyone wins. In forty-five chapters, the guide's contributors, widely acknowledged as the "change champions" and leaders in the fields of organizational change and leadership development, explore the competencies and practices that define an effective change leader. Change Champions such as Harrison Owen, Edgar Schein, Marv Weisbord, Sandra Janoff, Mary Eggers, William Rothwell, Dave Ulrich, Marshall Goldsmith, Judith Katz, Peter Koestenbaum, Dick Axelrod, David Cooperrider, and scores of others provide their sage advice, practical applications, and examples of change methods that work. Change Champion's Field Guide examines the topic of leadership and change within four main topics including:

• Key elements of leading successful and results-driven change
• Tools, models, instruments, and strategies for leading change
• Critical success and failure factors
• Trends and research on innovation, change, and leadership
• Guidelines on how to design, implement, and evaluate change and leadership initiatives
• Fresh case studies that highlight leading companies who are implementing successful change in innovative and inspired ways.

Part One

Transformational and Large-Scale Change

CHAPTER ONE Driving Change Through Career Models: An Operating System for Integrated Talent Management

David G. White, Jr.

CHAPTER TWO Driving Cultural Transformation During Large-Scale Change

Wendy L. Heckelman, with Christina Garofano and Sheryl Unger

CHAPTER THREE Leveraging Musical Experiential Learning for Organizational Impact

Paul Kwiecinski

CHAPTER FOUR Navigating the White Water of Organization-Wide Change: Best Practice Principles for Change Management

William Q. Judge and R. Steven Terrell

CHAPTER FIVE Practice Positive Deviance for Extraordinary Social and Organizational Change

Jerry Sternin

CHAPTER SIX Restoring Hope During Times of Mistrust

Mary Eggers and Lorri Johnson

CHAPTER SEVEN The Borderless Organization: Its Time Has Come

Roland L. Sullivan, William J. Rothwell, Louis Carter, and Mary Jane B. Balasi

CHAPTER EIGHT The Costs of System Blindness and the Possibilities of System Sight: Middle Bashing, a Case in Point

Barry Oshry

CHAPTER NINE Words Matter: Build the Appreciative Capacity of Organizations

David Bright and David Cooperrider

CHAPTER TEN Whole System Transformation Through a Polarity Lens: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Robert “Jake” Jacobs and Lynnea Brinkerhoff, with Barry Johnson

CHAPTER ELEVEN Whole Systems Transformation: An Effectiveness Paradigm Shift for Strategic Change

Roland L. Sullivan, William J. Rothwell, Louis Carter, and Mary Jane B. Balasi

Chapter One

Driving Change Through Career Models

An Operating System for Integrated Talent Management

Rationale, approach, and the story at Microsoft and ITT

David G. White, Jr.

HR AND BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION

Ask yourself this question: What function in your company is ideally suited to lead a corporate culture and business transformation? Strategic Planning? Finance? Marketing?

If you answered “HR,” you would, like me, be in the minority who see the function’s potential and yet are continually reminded of its limitations. When is the last time you saw HR lead a major corporate change or, for that matter, play a significant role in shaping company strategy? In most cases, it is the CEO or other senior executives who announce “this is where we are heading . . . now let’s get HR on board.”

It is not, of course, as if the strategic potential of HR is unrecognized. For example, John Boudreau and Peter Ramstad (2007) made a compelling argument for an HR “decision science” and provided a comprehensive framework for how strategy can be linked to talent decision making to enable more scientific and precise enablement of business strategy. Similarly, Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood (2003) have called for HR to move away from simply providing support for executing the organization’s strategy toward driving strategy itself.

My experience and those of other academics and practitioners suggests there remains a significant gap between theory and practice. For example, a survey conducted in 2006 of chief HR (CHRO) officers at 188 organizations worldwide found fewer than one in six CEOs assigned a strategic importance to the HR function. And HR ranked near the bottom in importance in “realizing company strategy” (Corporate Executive Board, 2006). In this same survey, more than half of these CHROs responded that HR either played no role in developing business strategy or simply implemented the strategy once it had been developed.

How can a function that purports to be the steward of talent be held in such low regard when it comes to strategy? In theory there is no more well-suited function to manage and lead complex, strategic, and enterprise-wide change. After all, change is fundamentally about people, and no other function has the information access, enterprise perspective, and people processes under its purview to do so. Yet what HR lacks as a change agent is legitimacy. And leaders, employees, and shareholders are the worse for it. So the question is begged: Are there more systematic, rigorous, and data-based ways in which the people system—that is, the sum total of the standards, processes, tools, frameworks, and practices that make up how people are hired, engaged, developed, deployed, and led in the enterprise—can enable business and culture transformations?

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People systems can be architected to drive change.

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I believe there are. People systems can be architected to drive change. This is not just theory. The framework and methods described here have been successfully implemented in companies like Microsoft and ITT. They are not based on new management ideas or fads but on familiar tools like competency models and job family definitions that have been around for fifty years.1 What is new and different is how these tools have been refined, implemented, and combined with other tools to form a comprehensive “operating system” for aligning talent to business and change strategy. Based on research on employee engagement and exciting advancements in cognitive science, the approach laid out here is based on two simple and powerful ideas:

1. A firm’s talent management system must engage employees by providing relevant answers to questions they care about, such as What does success look like? How do I get ahead in my career? and What is the workforce capable of, given our particular strategy and culture.

2. A firm’s talent management system must be based on an architecture that easily and efficiently allows it to know the “truth”—about what capabilities it has and needs and in what quantity and how these relate to existing jobs.

What is presented here will not transform HR practice or organizational life overnight (I would be skeptical of any approach that claimed as much). It will provide HR leaders with powerful and foundational levers for credibly shaping the way an organization thinks about and engages in change. In the pages that follow, I lay out what integrated talent management based on career models is and why it matters, as well as what some of the challenges and pitfalls are in developing and implementing it. I draw upon my experience as a practitioner in both corporate HR/OD settings with companies like Microsoft and IBM (Lotus) and as a consultant at Mercer Human Resources Consulting and in our own boutique practice. I hope the reader will take this overview as a starting point to a longer journey exploring the ideas laid out below.

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Why is HR an afterthought when it comes to strategy?

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To begin, it is worthwhile to come back to the opening question: Why is HR an afterthought when it comes to strategy? There are three main reasons, each owing to HR’s professional culture and historical legacy. Understanding these contexts makes understanding why an approach based on the two ideas above is relevant and timely for HR.

Service Orientation

The HR profession shares a cultural model of service that fundamentally undercuts its ability to be strategic, that is, to act in the long-term interests of the corporation as the steward of its strategic agenda as well as its key resource, people. Instead, HR management (HRM) is often implemented by asking clients what services they want. This reflects a service delivery paradigm that fundamentally limits potential strategic impact because it assumes clients know what they need (Boudreau & Ramstad, 2007). This model plays out in many ways, notably through how HR departments operationalize HR strategy through functional silos, how they sacrifice being strategic for the sake of expediency in order to meet (perceived) client needs, and in the formal and informal reward structures through which HR professionals are compensated, promoted, and developed.

For example, in many companies HR designs programs and supporting tools in relative isolation from each other. Each function (recruiting, training, compensation, etc.) traditionally tailors well-meaning programs targeted at specific issues that solve immediate needs, such as pay-for-performance schemes, management development programs based on generic success criteria, or localized employee selection practices based on idiosyncratic ideas. While perhaps important to the clients who ask for them, such programs by themselves are not sufficient to achieve or sustain any large-scale strategic objectives of the corporation. In some cases, the programs may operate at cross-purposes with other parts of the HR system or the overall corporate strategy.

Another example is in how HR leaders sometimes choose quick and easy solutions to client problems at the expense of more thoughtful and systemic interventions. One example is the reliance on best practices to craft identical solutions, even though their own company or business context might be very different from the best practice case. Or on using “off the shelf” solutions, such as “book” or generic competencies to try and drive performance improvement (discussed in more depth below). Yet another example is in how HR rewards its own. Every HR function I have worked in or consulted to has done so either exclusively or primarily on the basis of how well the HR professional served the (perceived) needs of his or her clients.

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There is no HR ontology or common decision-making framework for measuring and valuing the one resource for which HR is fundamentally responsible: people.

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There is no HR ontology or common decision-making framework for measuring and valuing the one resource for which HR is fundamentally responsible: people. By “ontology” I mean a universal taxonomy for classifying work, people, and their capabilities in the same way that, say, classifying expenses, defining amortization, or allocating assets exist in accounting or finance (Boudreau & Ramstad, 2007). This is one reason why organizations still struggle to establish a single source of “truth” for who works for the company and what they do (Forrester Research, 2009). Despite the efforts of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer resource management (CRM) systems, the “who does what, where, how, and why” problem remains because of the lack of a universal taxonomy for classifying work, people, and their capabilities.2

In the same way that cash flow is for finance or brand or message is for marketing, there is no common methodology that allows any HR function anywhere to assess, develop, measure, and deploy talent using the same logic based on an acknowledged body of knowledge (Boudreau & Ramstad, 2007).3 This is not to say HR departments don’t use frameworks and methodologies, but that there is no consistent, grounded, and evidence-based standard for doing so. Too often the “evidence” and rationale underlying a particular organization’s talent management philosophy is based on suspect “science” (e.g., the narrow use of intelligence tests or personality inventories on which to base hiring decisions), or fashion informed by limited or anecdotal case study data (e.g., “top-grading” approaches to performance management).

Part of the reason for this is that the underlying academic literature on the impacts of HRM, or on underlying social and psychological phenomena such as motivation, group dynamics, personality or organizational culture (to name but a few), is inconclusive.4 This leaves practitioners and business leaders free to draw up their own theories or use their own experiences to make consequential decisions about people. For example, if you ask any senior executive what his or her theory of human motivation is, you are liable to hear very different and, in most cases, very unscientific answers (although perh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• List of Figures, Tables, and Exhibits
• Acknowledgments
• Who Should Read This Book?
• About This Book
• How to Use This Book
• Introduction by the Editors
• Foreword
• Part One: Transformational and Large-Scale Change
• Part Two: Fundamentals of Leading Change
• Part Three: Transformational Leadership and Sustaining Results
• Part Four: Case Studies of Change Methods in Action
• References and Suggested Readings
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• About the Contributors
• About Best Practice Institute