Posts

Triumpha article one of the most popular in Strategic HR Review

The article, ‘Mapping a Strategic Approach to HR Leadership’ is amongst the most frequently downloaded in Strategic HR Review. Receiving over 700 downloads since publication in 2012.

 

How pleased am I? Thrilled actually, and wanted to share this news.

 

I started to write when I founded Triumpha. There were things to say about what matters in organisations and what works in practice, and I was ready to fuel my ambition. Namely, helping others develop extraordinary leadership, leadership teams and breakthrough organisation performance led by people.

 

I believe that strategic HR has significant potential for modernising management practice, bringing it into line with the needs of the twenty first century organisation. The strategic HR role is typically understood, but there is a difference between this understanding and what happens in practice – the ‘knowing-doing gap. Unfortunately, this means that the potential for HR leaders to make an impactful difference is often never realised.

 

Mapping a Strategic Approach to HR Leadership uses a case study about our work with a leading retailer and shows:

  • How we closed the ‘knowing-doing’ gap.
  • Five crucial conversations that strategic human resources leaders must catalyse within their organisations.
  • How human resources leaders can build their confidence and strategic capability by working through a planned change process.
  • How to build appetite and expectation for a strategic Human Resources contribution among line colleagues.
  • A staged approach for developing and embedding strategic human resources capability in an HR team.

 

To read more, download a copy of the full article below.

Enter your details to download "Mapping a Strategic Approach to HR Leadership"

Broadening The CEO Selection Pool: Where Will Our Future Leaders Come From?

Broadening the CEO Selection Pool: where will our future leaders come from includes:

  • Typical CEO Career Paths
  • The four most significant changes to the CEO role in the last five years
  • The top five leadership challenges
  • CEO Success Factors
  • The CEO differentiator: the one factor that makes for a stand-out CEO
  • Recommendations for aspiring CEOs
  • Recommendations for those who recruit and develop CEOs

The research was conducted by Jo-Sellwood Taylor and Sharon Mullen, Co-Founding Directors of Mullwood Partnership in collaboration with Dr Sukanya Sen Gupta, Associate Professor at Warwick Business School, Andrea Adams, Managing Director at Triumpha and supported by Criticaleye (Network of Leaders).

Executive Summary of the findings

To read the full report use the download link below

The CEO’s role is changing and with it our understanding of the skills and experience needed to fill the role. The skills that selection and nomination committees looked for in the past may not be enough to run tomorrow’s organisations successfully, as research by Mullwood Partnership makes clear. As the external business environment changes, so, too, must the role and priorities of the CEO. In order to succeed, organisations need to re-think their idea of the ‘typical’ CEO and look beyond the usual suspects for future leaders.

Globalisation has brought with it increasingly diverse teams, a dispersed workforce, ‘24/7’ working and more widespread competition. Technological developments have introduced a range of new workplace-related words to us — digital natives; crowdsourcing; consumerisation; virtual offices.

The CEO’s role is changing and with it our understanding of the skills and experience needed to fill the role. The skills that selection committees looked for in the past may not be enough to run tomorrow’s organisations successfully, as research by Mullwood Partnership makes clear.

As the external business environment changes, so, too, must the role and priorities of the CEO. In order to succeed, organisations need to re-think their idea of the ‘typical’ CEO and look beyond the usual suspects for future leaders.

Globalisation has brought with it increasingly diverse teams, a dispersed workforce, ‘24/7’ working and more widespread competition. Technological developments have introduced a range of new workplace-related words to us — digital natives; crowdsourcing; consumerisation; virtual offices.

The upsides have been plentiful – new business models have emerged; barriers to entry are lower – but a downside is added complexity.

Economic volatility, meanwhile, has been the backdrop against which most organisations have had to work over the past five years.

All of these have combined to change the way we work – and the way we run organisations.

The role of chief executive has evolved far beyond its clubby roots. Arguably, it has changed more in the past five years than in the previous decade.

Expectations of today’s leaders are higher, and their exposure to public scrutiny greater, than at any other time in history.

They are judged not simply on performance measures, but on personal propriety and their ability to inspire people. Tenure is short and competition fierce.

It is against this background that Jo Sellwood-Taylor and Sharon Mullen of Mullwood Partnership began researching the career path and the role of the CEO. How have they changed, and what are today’s leadership challenges? Does the traditional route to the role still offer enough breadth and depth to meet these challenges, or should the selection criteria be broadened?

The research also sought to address a specific question: why do so few HR professionals progress to CEO roles?

The findings paint a picture of a role in transition. A background in finance, operations or marketing is still the most prevalent route to the role for 50 per cent of respondents, with only five per cent coming from HR.

However, functional background is becoming less important to selection than specific experience.

The pre-requisites for today’s CEOs appear to be proven capability as an MD, followed by sector-specific experience and a multi-functional background.

“Intellectual horsepower” is essential, with a master’s or MBA degree increasingly expected for CEOs wanting to compete for roles globally.Changes in the external environment have significantly altered the way a CEO allocates his or her time: external issues make greater demands on the CEO’s time and changes to the business environment are re-shaping what, and how, senior leaders operate.

The result is a shift in priorities: with external focus the greatest challenge, people leadership and the ability to build a strong internal team has become a priority. In fact, people leadership was cited as the most important capability by the group containing chairs, CEOs and nomination committee members, with some now seeing their role as “chief talent officer”.

This, say respondents, is the differentiating factor for successful senior leaders and encompasses team building, delegation, insight, the ability to inspire and communicate long-term vision, while also having the drive and strategic abilities considered standard in the role.

Is HR a viable candidate for the CEO Role?

With talent management, organisational development and people leadership coming to the fore, it is perhaps surprising that more HR professionals don’t move into CEO roles.

The reasons for this appear to be a mix of individual and organisational reticence. The majority of HR leaders have aspirations beyond their function, and 40% had been offered the opportunity to broaden their role. Yet 89% of the organisations in which respondents worked had never appointed an HR professional to CEO. Participants were however able to name over 25 individuals from a HR background who had held the role of CEO or who were currently en route in other organisations.

The key barriers – a perceived lack of ambition and a negative perception of HR from other parts of the organisation – suggest more work needs to be done to raise awareness of just how HR can contribute to wider organisational success.

HR practitioners have the edge over other functions in several essential areas – setting people strategy, developing a talent pipeline to sustain and retain knowledge, supporting organisational change, and fostering a culture of employee engagement.

HR professionals can do their part to improve their chances of progressing. Gathering the advice of current CEOs, the report recommends first and foremost that aspiring CEOs from HR make their ambitions known. There are steps they can take to broaden their experience, building strength beyond HR and filling in any gaps in knowledge, behaviour and capability.

They can use their natural abilities to plot their own talent development. But this only goes so far: external perceptions of the contribution HR can make to the wider business need to be recognised. More needs to be done to broaden the CEO selection pool.

The findings of this report demonstrate clearly a shift in the CEO’s role and challenges. Anyone with aspirations to become CEO should include them in their career planning and leadership development work. Selection committees should include these in their specifications.

The findings of this report demonstrate clearly a shift in the CEO’s role and challenges. Anyone with aspirations to become CEO should include them in their career planning and leadership development work. Selection committees should include these in their specifications.

Enter your details to download "Broadening The CEO Selection Pool: Where Will Our Future Leaders Come From?"

Leadership Coaching: How CEOs & Senior Leaders Build Resilience and Capacity for Change

Where do you turn when you want to improve leadership effectiveness, resilience and capacity for change? Leadership coaching is a proven approach, so we invited Ann Scoular, founder of  Meyler Campbell and author of the Financial Times Guide to Business Coaching  to join a Triumpha network event group of CEOs and HR Leaders to share her views.

We transcribed the event so if you would like a copy of the transcript, please use the download link below.

Key Discussion Points

  • How to think clearly and effectively using the ’Big 5’ approach.
  • Key insights from neuroscience about behavioural change and how to sustain performance over time.
  • The hallmarks of effective leadership coaches.
  • 10 tough questions to ask a leadership coach.
  • An explanation for teenage behavior and why education is worth the effort.

Compared with only one generation ago, the amount of incoming data leaders need to process has multiplied hugely, and our processor (the brain) isn’t keeping pace. So where do we turn for that extra edge? Leadership coaching is often the answer.

Anne’s view is that working with a great leadership coach is “the equivalent of plugging in some extra processing capacity. With a great coach its like plugging into the National Grid – a surge of energy and clear focus that recharges the batteries and hauls us back to peak form.”

To download a copy of the transcript from this exclusive networking event, please enter your details below.

Enter your details to download "How Chief Executives and Senior Leaders Build Resilience and Capacity for Change"

Mapping a Strategic Approach to HR Leadership

The quality of HR Leadership in organisations is mixed. When we talk to HR professionals about working strategically, we typically find that ‘common sense is not common practice’. Sometimes people don’t understand what to do, or more usually they understand what to do, but they don’t do it, what we call the ‘knowing-doing’ gap.

Building the strategic capability of Human Resources leaders and their teams is essential. Strategic Human Resources has the potential to modernise management practice, bringing it into line with the needs of the 21st century organisation. HR leadership must strike the balance between business demands and the needs of the organisation and its workforce to adapt to change. This delivers sustainable value for all of the organisation’s stakeholders.

In this paper we cover:

  • How we have closed the HR leadership ‘knowing-doing’ gap in a leading retailer.
  • Five crucial conversations that strategic human resources leaders must catalyse within their organisations.
  • How Human Resources Leaders can build their confidence and strategic capability by working through a planned change process.
  • How to build appetite and expectation for a strategic Human Resources contribution among line colleagues.
  • A staged approach for developing and embedding strategic Human Resources capability in an HR team.

Enter your details to download "Mapping a Strategic Approach to Human Resources (HR) Leadership"

How to Lead in the New Normal

The business environment will never be the same again. As the new decade unfolds, more and more business leaders and managers who have survived the recession and are rebuilding their organisations are coming to realise that their business models must be overhauled and that the old ways of improving performance and managing change will no longer work. Enter: leading in the new normal.

Leading in the New Normal Key points:

  • We need to steer away from the practice of employing people from the ‘shoulders down’. Today’s knowledge economy demands that we capitalise on individual’s from the neck up, releasing them from command and control management and liberating them to contribute more meaningfully.
  • Leaders must ‘future proof’ their organisations by building the strategic and cultural capabilities which enable them to win in their market place, adapt to change and produce the conditions where people can thrive.
  • Only by looking strategically at the people side of the business can organisations have any chance of delivering sustainable performance.
  • The importance of strategic clarity and having a compelling purpose that goes beyond making money to also making a difference.
  • The power of using pictures and creating the space for conversation in helping make change happen.

Enter your details to download "Leading in the New Normal"

Value of Organisation Development from the CEO’s Perspective

Organisation Development (OD) has had a bad wrap, often accused of being a ‘fluffy’ discipline with some practitioners demonstrating an unhealthy bias towards a people agenda disconnected from business goals.

However given the scale and complexity of the challenges facing today’s organisations, the contribution that organisation development can make to the success of organisations is vital. There is a need to design and develop organisations that are more adaptable, innovative, collaborative, inspiring and ultimately accountable. As such the natural place for the leadership of system-wide organisational change is the CEO.

CEOs need high quality Organisation Development support to help them lead essential business transformation. 
Key points in this article include:

  • The four most significant changes to the CEO role in the last five years.
  • The Leadership challenges that must be addressed are not new. We have been wrestling with them for a while. Today’s ‘stretch’ comes from the amplification of these existing challenges.
  • The one factor that differentiates the most successful CEOs.
  • Organisations that strike a balance between shorter term performance goals and longer term organisational resilience perform two and three times as well as those which only focus on health or performance respectively.
  • Creating and leading organisations that are adaptable, innovative, collaborative, inspiring and accountable used to be the concern of the few. It is now the concern of the many.

Enter your details to download "Value of Organisation Development from the CEO’s Perspective"

The Changing Role of HR

The role of HR has changed. The industrial age practice of employing people ‘from the shoulders down’ is outdated. In today’s knowledge economy HR must capitalise on individuals ‘from the neck up’ to create a culture in which every employee is liberated and contributes meaningfully.

This article the Changing Role of HR was featured in HR Magazine’s Vision section, a series of in-magazine articles and web content exploring key themes of increasing importance in the future of work. Triumpha’s Andrea Adams was invited to close the series.

Key points in the Changing Role of HR include:

  • To be fit for the future an organisation must have a compelling purpose which goes beyond making money. It’s about doing well (making a profit) and doing good (making a difference).
  • Meeting human needs in the workplace is essential. Human Resources professionals need to design systems and approaches that provide meaning and shape how business is done.
  • People commit to what they help to create:
    •  Goals and change will most likely be accomplished when people are involved in co-constructing the goal, assessing the current state of affairs and defining the route map to move from the desired state to the desired goal.
    • Creating the space for conversations and dialogue which unifies effort and team spirit and supports employees to make the wider agenda relevant to their day to day work is essential leadership work.
  • Developing leaders who have the competence and character necessary to lead the web of complex institutions that have become so vital to the health of modern societies is essential.

Enter your details to download "The Changing Role of Human Resources"