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Ben Baran 4/12/17 Ben Baran 4/12/17

What Everyone in HR Needs to Know About Change

Models for planning and executing organizational change abound—for example, Kotter’s eight steps, among many others. These models are helpful in highlighting many of the critical aspects of organizational change, and I highly recommend immersing yourself in them.

That being said, I find that such models often deal more with planned organizational change than with unplanned or continuous organizational change.

And in an increasingly turbulent world, it’s important for human resources (HR) professionals and the HR function overall to

That being said, I find that such models often deal more with planned organizational change than with unplanned or continuous organizational change.

And in an increasingly turbulent world, it’s important for human resources (HR) professionals and the HR function overall to take a more fluid, proactive and strategic approach toward change. The realities of the business environment continue to drive changes within organizations, and it’s time for HR to get up to speed.

From what I’ve observed and experienced in HR during the past decade, the HR profession has an opportunity to contribute meaningfully to how organizations adapt. But we in HR may need to consider organizational change from a slightly different angle. We must start with connecting with the organization’s strategy, and we can then use that direction to guide what we do. Furthermore, we’d be well served to think about what we do a little bit differently, adopting some of what’s working well elsewhere, to get things done quickly.

Specifically, those of us in HR would benefit from the following regarding our approach to organizational change:

1. Know your terrain.

It’s critical for HR professionals to understand their environment, or their terrain, both within and outside of their organization. While it’s important to know what people in HR care about, it’s even more important for HR people to know what their top leaders outside of HR care about—what are the main concerns of the c-suite? We in HR also must start thinking much more than we do currently about the environment outside of the organization—where does your organization compete? How does it win? What are the big trends in your industry, and how can HR address them? These questions and others like them allow HR professionals to better understand what’s ahead and anticipate change.

2. Think like a startup.

The ambiguity of working in a startup is extreme. Everyone has advice; most of it seems plausible, yet some of it is contradictory. Yet you must forge ahead and create that which has never existed. Given the nature of startups, it’s worth thinking about how they deal with ambiguity and change to see what lessons we may glean for HR. I advocate for a more strategic, proactive, entrepreneurial and agile HR function that will quickly add value to the business. In addition, startups can deal with change in a more iterative fashion, taking some of the lessons we know from design thinking to develop fast prototypes, test them and continually improve—instead of letting the perfect become the enemy of the good.

3. Embrace agility.

As organizations attempt to cope with a turbulent business environment, they may need to move from continually seeking equilibrium to being nimble. Agility, generally speaking, is the capability to sense and respond quickly to the forces of change at all levels within the organization. HR would be well served to assess its own agility, along with the agile capabilities of the organization overall. But agility isn’t about reckless flexibility. Rather, we all need some “North Star” to cling onto as our organizations adapt and evolve. As such, HR can help provide stability through working with top management to clarify and communicate continually its core values. Additionally, “agile HR” involves moving from some of our tried and true dogma (e.g., job descriptions) to practices that reflect how people actually work (e.g., project and team charters).

I see the next 10 years as ones in which HR will likely go through a number of dramatic shifts—because if it doesn’t, it may become a victim of accelerated obsolescence. And when it comes to remaining relevant through a different understanding of change, having an increased focus on (a) knowing the terrain, (b) thinking like a startup and (c) embracing agility will serve the HR function and those who work within it well.

I’ll be discussing these topics in much more detail next Tuesday, April 18, from 3 to 4 p.m. EDT in a webcast with the Human Capital Institute. Click here for more details.

I’d love to have you join the conversation.

UPDATE: The webcast was great--hundreds of people joined me for a wonderful conversation. Click here to access the full recording and the slides I used.

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About Ben Baran
Ben Baran, Ph.D., is probably one of the few people in the world who is equally comfortable in a university classroom, a corporate boardroom and in full body armor carrying a U.S. government-issued M4 assault rifle. Visit: www.benbaran.com.

Ben Baran 11/25/15 Ben Baran 11/25/15

How a Startup Revolutionized its Meetings

Some parts of life are easy to dislike. World hunger and terrorism come to mind.

For many people, so do workplace meetings.

But the startup Gild Collective—comprised of three cofounders, Jessie Deye, Kelsey Pytlik, and Rachel Bauer McCreary—has realized that meetings can not only be helpful, but they can be essential for driving alignment and productivity.

Some parts of life are easy to dislike. World hunger and terrorism come to mind.

For many people, so do workplace meetings.

Gild Collective cofounders (from left): Rachel Bauer McCreary, Jessie Deye and Kelsey Pytlik

For the past five months, I’ve been following the Gild Collective team by asking them to complete a survey every single week. That survey has included ratings by the team across the 15 capabilities within The AGILE Model®, a recognized best-practice framework for nimble leaders, teams and organizations. It has also included a series of open-ended questions designed to help the three cofounders align their goals and activities, as well as ratings of their perceived levels of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA).

My thought upon starting these surveys was to provide the team with a weekly snapshot that they could use to guide their discussions and help them get on the proverbial same page.

Sometimes they did that, sometimes they didn’t.

But a few weeks ago, the team asked me to meet with them in person to discuss how they could better use their weekly snapshot to revolutionize their weekly meetings. I gladly obliged.

Our conversation seemed to me to last about 15 minutes, but when I looked at my watch, I noticed we’d been talking for almost two hours. During that time, we discussed:

Why even have meetings, what problem should they solve?
Prior experiences and lessons learned from attempting to have meetings
How to use weekly survey feedback to improve as a team
A template for their weekly meetings that would keep them on track and allow them to discuss items efficiently and effectively

The team has now had the chance to use this new approach a few times, and the results are highly positive. Their meetings have energy and purpose, creating alignment of priorities and goals along with necessary collaboration. I’m looking forward to continuing to work with the Gild Collective team as they hone their teamwork and communication through these meetings.

What might this mean for the rest of us? How can you revolutionize your weekly meetings? A few tips come to mind based upon my work with Gild Collective:

Obtain a shared understanding of WHY you are meeting. What problem are you trying to solve and what do people need to get out of the meeting?
Have a mechanism in place for making sure everyone prepares. This could be some sort of shared agenda creation, but with the Gild Collective team, this is the weekly survey I have them complete. I send it to them on Friday mornings, they complete it on Friday or Saturday and I send them their team report on Sunday or Monday. Then, they have time to read through it prior to meeting on Tuesday afternoons.
Create a template for your meeting structure. This will help you avoid getting in conversations that go nowhere—like going down a cul-de-sac.
Agree to hold each other accountable and keep a regular schedule. It’s important to note that I’m NOT advocating meeting just for meeting's sake. But when you have a senior-level team in a high-VUCA environment, weekly meetings are probably the bare minimum.
Periodically check in with each other about your meeting structure and process. Ensure that the meeting is still working well and solicit improvement suggestions.

For startups, this kind of meeting is particularly important for a few reasons.

First, the team is moving at high speed. Startup time is not the same as big-corporation time. What Gild Collective has done in five months is probably equivalent to about five years in many companies.

Second, teams of cofounders—whether they know it or not—are setting in place norms and routines that will ripple throughout their organizations when growth occurs. It’s best to be intentional about those norms and routines so that the culture you get is the one you want.

For any team wanting to get things done, having effective meetings is critical.

I don’t think it’s that everyone actually hates meetings. I think it’s that we hate bad meetings—those ones that waste time and generate more confusion than alignment.

What do you love or hate about meetings? Leave a comment below!

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Also: The Gild Collective team is really excited about its special holiday promotions. For those of you who are crafty or know someone crafty, check out www.gildcollective.com. They’re running a Black Friday through Cyber Monday promotion, so don’t delay!