Lean | agile will be the prevailing business and leadership model by 2020, transforming businesses into more innovative, engaging, and attractive enterprises. Human Resource Management needs to be foresighted and courageous to become inspiring agility leaders for their organizations.
Lean | agile approaches are not new, but their impact on the business world is accelerating fast. Soon they will have become the quintessential business and leadership model. Organizations of various sizes and across all industries apply practices such as Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe® to name just the most influential ones. These practices are all built on a specific set of values and principles, geared to help companies master the challenges of a highly demanding, fast-paced, and talent-stricken environment.
Especially organizations heavily depending on the innovation power and performance of knowledge workers are achieving phenomenal results on so many different levels – ranging from strengthened employee engagement to increased bottom line. They understood that innovation power, performance, and value creation is driven by highly skilled and motivated employees.
Their business and leadership model is so compelling because they ignite their people factor with determination and tenacity. Therefore, it is not surprising that winning enterprises acknowledge and utilize the power and strength of workforce dynamics and topnotch people operations. This, inevitably, means the spotlight is on Human Resources – otherwise known as Human Relations, Employee Relations or People Operations.
The key challenges are not so different: they still need to appoint, grow, award, and engage talent. However, the way they are doing it is very distinctive, since they successfully translate lean | agile values and principles not only into powerful structures, processes, and tools but also embed them into their corporate culture, mindset, and behavior.
HR tools are no longer geared to measure individual performance and personal advancement. Instead they ease the way for their empowered, collaborative, and self-organizing teams to work together in a highly coordinated and disciplined way to achieve sustainable results in short iterations – without being micromanaged.
Another example is their view on retaining employees: Instead of focusing on retention they shift their efforts towards boosting engagement, creating shared experiences and forming a strong sense of belonging. Also (when it comes to it) they even help employees move on, turning them into ambassadors instead of begrudged former employees.
All in all, it will take an unconventional take on HRM to turn employee experts into compelling agile advocates. And lean | agile HR pros need to be persevering enablers, influencers, and facilitators. Building a powerful workforce and then trigger that potential to boost engagement, innovation, and value creation to turn their organizations into thriving and attractive businesses.
