Thomas Otter
Photo via the cc of sgt. PepperedJane. thanks!
To score well at Scrabble, you need to look at the score, not the just word. Long words across the board might look good, but unless they land on double or triples, you simply waste letters and open up the board for the others to score. Literary types like to think that they are good at Scrabble because they know lots of words and are well read, but Qi or QANAT aren’t something that even the most literary of souls come across in literature. To win at Scrabble you need to look at the numbers and the odds, know what letters have gone already, and have a mental database of short nasty words like ZO and XU. Sure, a love of words helps with Scrabble, but to score well, you need to engage the numeric side of your brain.
It may be stretching it a bit, but I think HR has a similar challenge.
To be a top HR professional, you do need to have empathy for people. It is probably what attracted you to the job in the first place. But if you are going to succeed you need to be analytical too. HR professionals that can see patterns beyond the incident, abstract the problems from the personal, and make the best move given the constraints they have been dealt with, will have a real impact on shaping the business and their careers.
We are doing a lot of work at the moment on pattern based strategy here at Gartner (clients see this). I’m going to be exploring this is in an HR context later this year. Extracting and analysing patterns out of the mass of data sources and conflicting signals. HR is going to get a lot more analytical.
Category: HR measurement Tags: HR;Software;Patterns;
3 responses so far ↓
1 Mark September 7, 2009 at 1:47 pm
That’s a great comparison, Thomas. You are right that “knowing the score” and “the odds” i.e. risk, is becoming more important in HR. The trick is going to be doing that without getting so caught up in the numbers that the point is lost. Likewise, I see that empathy for people and sociological skills that often sit idle and ignored in HR becoming more important in the operations side of business. This will gain adoption when in turn operations sees that HR speaks the language of business.
2 Michael Jakob September 17, 2009 at 9:05 am
Hello Thomas, I’m very curious about the outcome. From my point of view current HR is trapped with it’s tools in Performance Management, Talent Management, etc. With Target Dialogue agreements, Potential Analysis HR is mostly well prepared to be people centric. Unfortunately I can’t see the link and added value to the Business Strategy. These stragetic link, we can call it the business’ language, is from my point of view the critical success factor for HR in the future. Questions, e.g. how can HR support business strategy on five years horizon? does the business have the right people with the right capabilities? what must be invested to get the right people? what for the right skills? Will HR be able to work on the time constraint?
I’d like to ask the question, does HR has to leave best practices and to move to “next practices”? What comes after Dave Ulrich?
3 Thomas September 18, 2009 at 8:23 am
Mark,
Thanks. The language of business is where it is at. Seems obvious really. But somehow difficult. If you do HR in a mine, you need to know about mining.
Michael,
I’d agree. There is a big gap between the language and world of employee performance management and corporate performance management/strategy. It high time they collaborated.
Workforce planning is a major issue, and yet I see very few organisations doing it well.