You Can’t Delegate Change to the HR Department

One of my all-time favourite business books is “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance”. The book traces the turnaround of IBM in the mid 90s by its then CEO, Louis Gerstner.

Gerstner, in the book, states that it is extremely hard to develop a unique strategy and even harder, should you develop one, to keep it proprietary. At the end of the day, he argues that every competitor fights with the same weapons and as such, execution is really the critical part of a successful strategy.

“Getting it done, getting it done right, getting it done better than the next person is far more important than dreaming up new visions of the future”

Gerstner was once a consultant at McKinsey & Co. He writes about his frustrations of companies that spend a lot of time and money working with the global management consulting firm to develop solid strategic plans only to find that the CEOs were unwilling to drive change through the organisation. On other occasions, Gerstner shared that the CEO thought that change was taking place but failed to inspect what, in fact, was going on.

“Proper execution involves building measurable targets and holding people accountable for them. Accountability has to be demanded, and when not met, changes must be made quickly.”

Of late, I have been approached by many organisations with the agenda to drive change - a result of the challenging economic climate and the need for employees and managers to start thinking and executing differently. These requests usually come through the HR (or L&D) Department and the brief is more often than not for a series of training and development programmes. It is definitely a great starting point but as Gerstner points out, many organisations do not put an equal amount of emphasis on measurement and accountability - making the change journey, a futile one.

I recently shared a HBR article on Linkedin entitled “You Can’t Delegate Talent Management to the HR Department”. Gerstner’s views on execution and my own observations, only underline the fact that the article may as well have been re-titled as “You Can’t Delegate Change to the HR Department”. In fact, the key takeaways from the original article is just as applicable to the agenda for 'Change'. By replacing 'Talent Management' with 'Change', we arrive at the following key points.

1. Identify how 'Change' will help to drive the business

2. Ensure managers understand the connection between business success and 'Change'

3. Drive accountability for 'Change' throughout the management ranks

Gerstner is highly regarded for turning around IBM from near collapse. He had everything stacked against him - old technologies, employees that were set in their old ways and a new breed of competition. If you are the CEO of a company that is stagnant with no end in sight, you do have to realise that you cannot delegate 'Change' to the HR Department alone. You and your lieutenants would need to lead from the front.

The original article on “You Can’t Delegate Talent Management to the HR Department” can be found here :HBR Article

Sekar Shanmugam is the MD of ProfitAbility in SE Asia. ProfitAbility based near Oxford in the UK designs and delivers fully blended and customised business simulation programmes to some of the world’s leading organisations, such as Siemens, Nestlé, Roche, Volkswagen and GKN.