Skunk Works...Innovating from the Outside-In...

My team went through a major change initiative starting in 2006 that involved merging with ten organizations with geographic and functional responsibilities. While each conducted the same mission by collecting, analyzing and disseminating information to support leadership decision advantage, in many respects...each felt it was unique and did their mission differently. Each had learning functions that ranged in size of 1 to over 40...so this was the environment and scene my team faced in building a global learning enterprise that leveraged my organization's learning capabilities, while integrating their capabilities.

What my team came to find out that in order to integrate effectively and efficiently...we would have to change from the "Outside-In." What this meant is that in many respects, while trying to integrate and align these various learning capabilities, changing how we conducted business at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) would be possible by changing how we operated with our new customers. For example, within DIA's schoolhouses we used different course evaluations with some standard questions, but in large part no common standards. One of the first initiatives with our learning integration efforts was to develop and accept a common set of evaluation questions. This move precipitated a similar discussion internally.

We accomplished this and other key initiatives by treating our effort as a Skunk Works...Made famous at the height of the Cold War, Lockheed Martin created a group that revolutionized and transformed airborne reconnaissance.

Our internal Skunk Works supported change management during the integration and alignment period. By leveraging a world-class best practice in defining a common set of skills, knowledge and capabilities for all organizations...we were able to integrate learning and align existing solutions at a quicker pace. It allowed our new customers to see that while their organizations had different responsibilities, the challenges faced, the work they did and the type of human capital capabilities needed were very similar.

The lesson for Human Capital Management (HCM) leaders, creating a team within your HCM organization that has the green light to try creative and disruptive new approaches can enable change across the HCM organization. That can lead to new efficiencies and effectiveness in meeting customer needs and in our case...accelerating major change initiatives...from the Outside-In.

Cheers,
Keith

You Don't Know What You Don't Know...In This Case...We Do...

I'm a big fan of Cisco and their CEO John Chambers. In a recent Newsweek interview, he focused on "Knowing What You Don't Know" and impact on the future of leadership. His perspective, always refreshing to me, gets to heart of issue facing strategic Human Capital Management (HCM)...looking into the future at what is coming and its impact on HCM leaders to enable business and mission success.

We recently hosted an Enterprise Symposium at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) focused on looking at areas of collaboration across the Defense Intelligence Enterprise. A very good friend and I were co-leads for a session titled "Developing the Workforce of the Future" where we sought to frame the 2020 workplace, challenges faced executing the mission in 2020 and attributes of both leaders and intelligence professionals needed in 2020. The session provided a great opportunity to engage participants and provide an update to the DIA Workforce of the Future white paper from 2003.

We were honored to have Karie Willyerd (Former Sun Microsystems CLO and now Future Workplace) share with the audience insights from her and Jeanne Meister's new book "The 2020 Workplace". While there were many key points and new knowledge taken away...several things stood out for me.

1. By 2020, the Generational mix at the workplace will be drastically different per the attached slide. The implications to leaders and leadership development are significant.

2. The understanding that to become an expert requires 10 years of dedication. However, knowledge is doubling every two years and in some areas every one year. Impact to you and I you ask? We can't possibly keep up with that much data. Hence our reliance on social networks will continue to grow and expand.

This gets to topic of this DNA of Human Capital blog today...The old phrase "You don't know what you don't know" is really not applicable to HCM leaders and the tsunami of the 2020 workplace, five generations in the workforce and the continued expansion of knowledge that will make expertise not nearly as important as your social network to get work done.

The task at hand for HCM leaders is to prepare their organizations for what the future is bringing. In today's challenging environment, it is difficult sometimes to look into the following week or quarter, much less at 2020. Yet, like the certainty of the tides...this new environment and workforce will inevitably come ashore like oil in the Gulf of Mexico. We will have to collectively look at this new future and determine how we position our human capital capabilities to ensure success in this environment.

For our own credibility, we will not be able to say we didn't know what we didn't know...because in this case...we did.

Cheers,
Keith

The Holy Grail...Human Capital Development Aligned to Strategy...

For a long time our profession seems to have had an identity crisis. We wanted to be strategic business partners but we couldn't get there. IBM's 2009 report titled "Getting Smart About Your Workforce: Why Analytics Matter," showed key strategic human capital (HC) challenges that Human Capital Management (HCM) leaders face and their perception of importance vs. effectiveness in overcoming them to impact business results. One of those areas with a significant gap in importance vs. effectiveness (48% in last weeks graphic) was the definition of "knowledge, skills and capability requirements to execute business strategy."

In my honest opinion, the HCM leader's capability to act on this particular human capital challenge is more important than other importance-effectiveness gaps the report identified. Why? Because as HCM leaders...if we can't define organizational capability requirements (That is really what our customers want...not HR speak like knowledge, skills and competencies...we can do that internally) to execute the business strategy...we are in essence lost. No "seat at the table" is forthcoming. So we have to execute on this one human capital challenge gap with the agility and adaptability the organization requires to function in the global complexity. And we have to do it...flawlessly.

At the Defense Intelligence Agency, we faced a similar challenge as DIA merged with ten worldwide Combatant Command Directorates of Intelligence. Treating the merger as a major change management project as Combatant Command civilian employees were integrated within DIA, the DIA learning team decided that for a successful merger, we needed a simple approach. The approach was to define the individual Combatant Command capabilities that would allow the team to look at common, core, and critical capability requirements across the Combatant Commands.

Pioneered by Dr. Reza Sisakhti of Productivity Dynamics and used by successful companies like IBM, Cisco, and HP, we were able to focus on three mission critical job roles at the Combatant Commands to drive our efforts...Intelligence Analysts, Collection Managers and Intelligence Planners.

The process involved two simple steps...

1. Engage strategic leaders and determine each Combatant Command's mission, strategy, strategic initiatives in place or planned, and the challenges faced in executing the strategy.
2. Identify top performers in the organization. These top performers are top performers because they are able to overcome challenges and achieve results. What behaviors make them successful at executing the strategy and overcoming challenges?

With this data, the team was able to start alignment of available learning at DIA and at the Combatant Commands in direct support of mission strategy execution. From a change management perspective, ten Combatant Commands with different functional and geographic responsibilities were able to see the knowledge and skills necessary to execute their mission strategies for the three identified roles were the same. The only difference was the application of these human capital capabilities in their respective environments.

The decision to take this simple, but proven approach in a massive change effort was risky. But the payoff was a group of global learning professionals at the Combatant Commands and DIA that are considered the vanguards of enterprise integration by senior leaders within the Defense Intelligence Enterprise. It has ushered in a new level of collaboration and innovation that led to the team's recognition in 2009 by Chief Learning Officer Magazine with a Learning-in-Practice Gold award in Division I for Global Learning.

So the message this week HCM leaders...focus on defining knowledge, skills and capability requirements to execute business strategy and take a risk...it could lead to a huge payoff for your organization and HCM.

Layoffs, Cash and Strategic Human Capital...The Connection

There are a number of things happening that seem disconnected, but when you dig a little deeper have impact on our profession and the role and responsibility we should play in any economic upswing.

The first is the article from Newsweek titled "Lay Off the Layoffs." Written by Jeffrey Pfeffer, he contends that the normal approach when an economic downturn occurs is corporate leadership reduces headcount. He uses the example of the airline industry after September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, which laid off tens of thousands. One who didn't was Southwest Airlines. An airline with a larger market capitalization than the other domestic airlines combined according to Pfeffer. The former head of Human Resources at Southwest makes the statement:

"If people are your most important asset, why would you get rid of them?"

Pfeffer's thesis, backed by research, is that layoffs hurt the company and the economy. There are the obvious costs to employees who are laid off, but the research also indicates that there are impacts to the company in higher costs because of severance pay, unemployment taxes, and reduced productivity to name a few. And if the bottomline is the end goal by protecting it with layoffs...the research indicates it doesn't work.

Combine this information with a blog post and more detailed column in CLO Magazine by Dr. Michael E. Echols of the Human Capital Lab at Bellevue University. In both he references a Wall Street Journal report that companies have more cash assets on hand than in the previous 40 years. At a CLO Magazine Breakfast Club event I attended that Dr. Echols presented at in late 2009, he put a number to that cash reserve comment...$14 trillion. That's right...companies are sitting on trillions in cash assets. Dr. Echols view is that companies since 2008 have reduced infrastructure, headcount and services to develop these large cash reserves because it provided flexibility to deal with the current economic situation...it provided liquidity.

Dr. Echols makes the case that talent and learning leaders need to play a more proactive role in advocating for the investment of these cash assets in the one thing that can create competitive advantage...human capital. That we need to champion for the right investments in leadership, business-critical skills and develop new strategic human capital capabilities and capacity.

Now...to make this kind of engagement with the CHRO, CFO and CEO successful, it will take planning and data. My perspective is that you have to understand the business strategy, what the environmentals are looking like related to globalization and change and determine what strategic human capital capabilities the business needs to execute its strategy. Defining these capabilities and then determining the current workforce capacity to execute those capabilities will provide you the information to influence key decisions on resource allocations like increasing headcount by buying critical talent from the talent pool, developing new capabilities in the current workforce or renting talent through outsourcing.

While I work in the public sector at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the concept is the same. At DIA, we have a mission that is about providing the right intelligence that enables decision advantage for our customer...the men and women that serve our country in the Armed Forces. Within that mission are a number of challenges that we have to overcome by identifying the key strategic human capital capabilities related to collection of information, analysis of information and planning based upon the intelligence process. We have executed in the last year a Human Capital Development (HCD) model that enables making informed resource recommendations.

If you are interested in hearing how DIA has executed this HCD model, I encourage you to take advantage of a American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) Benchmarking Forum webinar on Tuesday 16 February where we will share our story in more detail.