Three ways HR can ensure the business is set up for success

We advise organisations to approach this by following some simple steps:

1. Define  

What will it take to achieve your business strategy, in human capital terms?  Aside from leaders, are you clear on which roles are critical to future success in this new operating environment, against your revised business strategy? Are you clear on the leadership and critical talent capabilities - both mindsets and skillsets - needed to succeed in your changing operating environment? 

• This will require you to look at your internal and external environments in parallel, to determine how the external environment and your organisation’s strategic, operational and organisational responses to it will challenge your leaders in the future. 
• You then need to identify the mindsets and skillsets needed for leaders to adapt and succeed, developing a framework that combines the specifics of your business with the leadership strategies required for success within that context. Then embed this into both your formal HR processes, and informal practices throughout the organisation. 

2. Assess  

• To what extent do these capabilities currently exist within the business? How confident are you? If they don’t currently exist, is the potential there?
• In practice, managers’ assessments of line reports’ capability, performance and potential are problematic. Judgements of an individual’s potential are often confused with assessments of current or past performance; it’s assumed that great performance in a current role will automatically lead to success in a future role, although this is not necessarily the case. Business Psychologists’ training in assessment methods is rigorous in relation to reducing bias and enhancing reliability and validity. 
• We recommend using a range of assessment methods, but critically in terms of assessing potential, a business simulation. Benchmarked simulations create a learning and assessment environment that replicates the leadership challenges that individuals are likely to experience in future, in your business. These stretch-level simulations allow you to create the challenges of a future role, and in doing so, provide an indication of an individual’s future capacity, avoiding conflation with current job performance.

3. Accelerate

• Armed with this data, you can ensure that development is targeted at closing any gaps and on strengthening succession planning; no time or money is wasted in developing leaders or critical talent in areas that won’t make a difference to the bottom line.

• In an unpredictable and rapidly changing environment, the development of leaders and other critical talent needs to be agile, individualised and in-context.  Specifically, development needs to be highly applied (hands-on) and emphasise ‘learning as doing’ as much as possible, to reduce downtime and minimise the learning-doing transfer gap.  It needs to be highly personalised, to give leaders absolute clarity on ‘what do I need to do differently in my role?’