Talent

SMART MACHINES: THE NEW “HUMAN” CAPITAL?

March 26, 2020 by John Boudreau

As algorithms and robots get smarter, workforce planning systems need to strike the optimum balance between people and machines.

Stephen Hawking and colleagues warn that “success in creating artificial intelligence would be the biggest event in human history.… Unfortunately it might also be the last.”

From self-driving cars, to intelligent assistants on smart phones, to IBM’s Watson beating humans at Jeopardy, to potentially autonomous military weapons, the effects of increasingly sophisticated automation are undeniable. With leading companies like Google spending millions to acquire artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics startups, financial markets are also betting that AI will become a bigger part of our lives and society.

When it comes to your strategy for people and human capital, the age of smart machines is often framed in traditional terms of job losses and gains. Oxford researchers predict that 45% of American occupations will be automated within the next 20 years. The first stage will be using computational power to replace jobs that rely on such things as pattern recognition, data gathering and distillation, and computational algorithms. Jobs like transportation/logistics, production labor and administrative support will go after that.

However, if you think your job is safe, the researchers also predict that artificial intelligence will eventually put jobs in management, science, engineering and the arts at risk.

Can sophisticated jobs in finance and investing be automated? Consider computer traders, once epitomized by hundreds of humans shouting on a trading floor. An Economist article titled “Dutch Fleet” notes that with the advent of trading algorithms in ultra-fast computer systems, some Amsterdam-based trading firms that formerly relied on traders and saw large bid-ask spreads now occupy a “high-volume, low-margin industry in which market-makers take a sliver of revenue from lots of transactions.” One firm saw a peak of 3,000 trades in 60 seconds. Trading is now the province of algorithms, software and decisions made in milliseconds by automated systems.

The analogy between commodities trading and human capital recruiting is obvious. It seems likely that planning and managing your people will be done more and more by algorithms, not humans. Algorithms can increasingly predict things like employee turnover and future job performance better than typical supervisors or hiring managers. An analysis of 17 studies on applicant evaluations concluded that equations outperform human applicant-selection decisions by 25%. A recent HR-technology conference provided stunning examples of the power of automation to improve and replace human processes in managing people, and admonished HR and organization leaders to prepare for a future driven by predictive analytics.

For CFOs and CHROs, it is tempting to focus on the job displacement and economic cost savings that future technology will produce. Yes, it will mean massive shifts in the balance between the humans and machines doing the work, with a resulting impact on productivity and costs.

Yet, beneath the surface of this issue is something more nuanced. Your concept of work and human capital may need to change, not simply to think about machines versus humans, but about a more nuanced future as humans and machines collaborate.

For example, algorithms can digest thousands of scientific articles much more efficiently than biochemists, producing promising hypotheses for scientists to study. The U.S. Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center estimates that only 20% of the knowledge that human doctors use to diagnose patients is based on published scientific evidence, because it would take at least 160 hours of reading a week just to keep up with new publications. IBM’s Watson computer has been trained to read the medical literature on certain cancers, search up to 1.5 million patient records, interact with doctors in real time with natural language, and present verbal opinions about the best treatment.

I have written that “deconstructing” work will revolutionize talent management by revealing new opportunities to get work done, ones that today are obscured by typical job descriptions or organization charts. The job of “software engineer” includes software coding, project management and team leadership. Rather than hire software engineers to complete a computer coding job, why not deconstruct the job, take out the coding, and employ TopCoder or other talent platforms to post your coding tasks to thousands of freelance coders worldwide? Rather than maintain your own R&D function internally, why not form an alliance with other firms to pool your R&D, as Eli Lilly and Immunocore did?

Scientists working side by side with conversational algorithms show the power of combining the idea of deconstructing work with the idea of the smart machine. The trick is to get the balance right. Today’s human capital planning systems are still largely built on a platform of job descriptions and organization charts, which can lead to a traditional mindset of deciding whether to replace humans with machines. Learning to creatively deconstruct the work and your organization chart can reveal ways to optimize your talent and your work that strike a more creative balance of humans with machines — essentially, an alliance with the machines.

The authors of “The Second Machine Age,” Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, point out that machines are unlikely to take over all jobs. “I don’t think this means that everything those leaders do right now becomes irrelevant,” McAfee told McKinsey Quarterly. “I’ve still never seen a piece of technology that could negotiate effectively or motivate and lead a team.” He suggested that an increasingly important skill for senior managers will be to figure out, “Where do I actually add value and where should I get out of the way and go where the data take me?”

Leaders not only should ask that question about their own jobs, they should partner with their HR leaders to answer it with respect to the full spectrum of current and future work. Deconstruct, automate and reconstruct.

Might the future bring a conversational computer with a seat at the strategic workforce planning table? Let’s just not name it after Toby on the television show “The Office.”

Previously posted on CFO.com

DEVELOPING THE NEXT GENERATION OF LEADERS: TRENDS & TRUTHS ABOUT THE FUTURE OF LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

March 20, 2020 by Ian Ziskin

The ancient Roman dramatist, philosopher, and politician Seneca said, “Luck is when
preparation meets opportunity.” His point was that while luck is terrific, it typically has very little to do with success, especially that which is sustained over time. Instead, success is more often associated with great preparation and the ability to take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves. Leadership development is all about living at the intersection of preparation and opportunity. It is our job to ensure leaders are well-prepared, and to find or create the right opportunities that will further reinforce their development and readiness for even bigger or more challenging roles.

As leaders, we must develop other leaders to be ready and relevant for what organizations will confront over the next five to ten years and beyond. This responsibility will be significantly shaped by the following ten trends and truths about the future of leadership development:

1. The “Chief Organizational Capability Officer” Emerges

While the chief organizational capability officer (COCO) may or may not become a real job title, the concept is indicative of the direction that many leadership roles will be heading. Increasingly, operating and HR leaders alike will be responsible for integrating and driving agility, business context and environment, change, culture, innovation, leadership, networked organizations and communities, talent, and/or transformation. The power of leadership will be derived from connecting the dots and turbo-charging the in-between points, not by mastering the hierarchy or formal organization. Leadership development will focus on these intersections as leaders become chief organizational capability officers.

2. Outside In Is More Important than Inside Out

External environmental context and understanding will likely trump deep mastery of internal organizational issues as the leadership currency of choice. It will simply not be enough to know the business and how to get things done in a particular company. Rather, breadth of perspective about what is happening around and outside organizational walls, the ability to see around corners, and the willingness to appreciate and learn from others will become highly valued. Leadership development must address the outside in perspective.

3. Hero Leadership Gives Way to Collective Leadership

Highly charismatic and visible individual leaders can symbolize an organization’s brand and culture—in positive or negative ways. Over-reliance on singular iconic leaders can make leadership succession difficult at best, and undermine the employment value proposition because employees have every right to expect to work for multiple leaders who embody the values and behaviors espoused by their companies. Therefore, companies must increasingly invest in leadership not only as an individual capability but as a collective organizational capability as well, whereby leaders are taught, developed, and held accountable for the appropriate leadership attributes and behaviors. Leadership development will emphasize collective leadership mindset and skillset rather individual heroics.

4. Multi-Disciplinary and Cross-Functional Solutions are the Norm

Most challenges that organizations will face in the future are large, complex, multidisciplinary, and cross-functional in nature. Leaders must therefore learn to orchestrate highly collaborative and broad-based approaches to driving solutions. They will be called upon to reach out well beyond the traditional boundaries of their own organizations and functional disciplines to deliver an integrated set of solutions and to engineer answers to complex organizational issues. CEOs and other senior leaders don’t care where these integrated solutions come from or who leads them. Leadership development must focus on integrated, multi-disciplinary, cross-functional perspectives and solutions.

5. Collaboration Across Boundaries has a Multiplier Effect

Most organizations tend to prefer developing leaders by focusing on internal company specific issues and challenges, because they believe their company culture and business issues are so unique and special. In reality, while every company is unique, they also share many common issues, problems, solutions, and leadership learning opportunities. Cross company leadership development programs that help leaders better appreciate broader strategic context and business solutions will be essential. Development opportunities that allow companies to move leaders from one company to another for short-term assignments that would not otherwise be available in the leader’s own company will become much more prevalent. Leadership development will feature experiences outside the arbitrary boundaries of specific companies, industries, and roles that will have a multiplier effect on leadership
capabilities.

6. Coaching Builds Muscle Memory

Leadership coaching has become an increasingly popular and well-accepted tool for
developing leaders, and has evolved from “fixing the broken leader” to investing in the development of highly regarded and successful leaders, by building on their strengths and closing development gaps. Helping leaders reach for broader and more complex leadership roles will often require preparation for unfamiliar and uncomfortable responsibilities. This process necessitates understanding and then practicing to handle scenarios and situations that leaders are likely to face on the job—much like an athlete or musician would practice to prepare for a game or performance. Preparing leaders to address key decisions and situations they might face, before they actually have to face them, helps them develop the “leadership muscle memory” they will need under real life conditions. Leadership development will include a growing reliance on coaching to prepare leaders for situations before they encounter them, rather than only learning from experiences and fixing mistakes
after they occur.

7. Mass Customization Capitalizes on Diverse Needs and Interests

Leadership development used to be about putting in place large-scale organization-wide practices and programs that covered as many people as possible so as to maintain both the perception and reality of fairness and inclusiveness. While fairness and inclusiveness are certainly important and legitimate goals, they are not necessarily achieved by treating all leaders the same. The most common leadership development trends will be higher transparency of feedback, increased segmentation of pivotal roles and people, and greater frequency of talent reviews and action plan follow-up. Ownership for successful leadership and talent development efforts must rest with line leaders and be supported by HR leaders. But, these roles will have to go well beyond making sure meetings happen and that forms are filled out and submitted on time. Leaders must actually know the talent, and will be called upon to selectively differentiate leadership development experiences based on each leader’s unique capabilities and role. Leadership development must allow for mass customization of solutions to capitalize on the diverse needs and interests of leaders.

8. Purpose Complements Performance

Historically, leaders have wanted to work for high performing winning organizations, and while that aspiration is still fashionable, it is no longer sufficient. It is becoming even more attractive to work for organizations that strike a healthy balance between performance and purpose. Increasingly, many people—especially Millennials —want to affiliate with institutions that value the importance of economic and social contributions. People want to be where the organization’s values and purpose align with and reinforce their own. Leadership development is therefore quickly evolving to include more of a “whole person” construct that promotes the importance of becoming a healthy, balanced, well-rounded, purpose-driven leader. Leadership development will become as much about creating and fulfilling purpose as it has been about planning for and driving performance.

9. Bite-Sized/On-Demand Solutions Reflect Changing Workforce Expectations

The workforce is becoming more mobile, virtual, and globally distributed. Work will
increasingly be done when, where, and how the workforce prefers. The traditional
employment model is steadily giving way to more bite-sized, freelanced, project-based, and shorter-term gigs. So too must leadership development practices reflect this revolution. Developmental assignments and leadership development programs need to accommodate for more agile, quick-turnaround, quick-hit, on-demand, and technology-enabled design and delivery models. Six week in-residence programs at prestigious universities are not going away completely or anytime soon, but they are also not the prevalent model for the future. Leadership development must be more virtual and in the moment, and delivered in smaller more digestible bites to better reflect changing workforce expectations and technological realities.

10. Ready Now Gives Way to Ready Able

Leadership development experts used to say, “Past track record predicts future success.” In the future, we will likely say, “Past track record is only a valid predictor of future success if the past looks anything like the future.” The connection between past and future conditions is tenuous at best. At worst, we could make determinations about leadership development, readiness, and succession based on all the wrong factors and criteria because the future may look nothing like the past. The conditions, challenges, and pace of change may be completely different. So, all our emphasis on developing ready now leaders must give way to developing ready able leaders. We no longer really know if leaders are ready now. At best, we can prepare them to be ready able—to have the situational awareness, flexibility, savvy, and leadership capabilities required to quickly understand and adapt to changing conditions. Leadership development in the future will be about identifying and developing potential,
which in turn translates into being ready and able to handle whatever the future throws at us.

A TALENT OPERATING MODEL FOR THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

March 14, 2020 by Edie Goldberg

co-written with Kelley Steven-Waiss

Given the changing nature of work and business models, there is an urgent need for companies to become more efficient and effective in their use of human capital. The old models for work, where we slot people into prescribed roles and expect them to execute against their job description, is partially to blame for the high rates of turnover in organizations today. Employees want continuous learning and growth opportunities, yet we place them in jobs and expect them to work with the same people to execute the same tasks day after day, week after week.

In today’s competitive landscape, companies need to develop fresh approaches to managing talent by more dynamically assigning talent to projects and responding to changing business models that democratize work relationships. Work relationships are democratized when they put into balance the needs and control of individuals and companies. The rise of machine automation and the Internet of Things (IoT) has fundamentally transformed not only the nature of work, but the speed at which it’s necessary to learn and deploy new skills that are often in higher demand than supply. This remains true no matter how an organization plans to source talent; whether it be with full-time employees or “talent on demand.” We must challenge what we thought was novel in talent management as recently as two to three years ago. Now it’s a race to acquire skills. And just when everything seems under control, another emerging skill domain becomes both critical and scarce. Without a crystal ball, today’s CEOs and CHROs are managing their most valuable competitive resource – blind.

Given resource constraints, companies cannot afford to be wasteful or leave any asset untapped. Furthermore, losing strong employees who leave for development opportunities is wasteful. We have developed a new talent operating model that is based on 6 Core Principles to help companies better leverage and develop their existing talent. These 6 principles will enable your company to create a gig economy for talent on the inside.

Principle No. 1: You Get What You Give

Most members of the Generation X and baby boomer cohorts have grown up with a management style that focuses on owning and controlling employees on their teams or in their functions. For them, talent sharing across departments or functions is an uncomfortable concept. However, encouraging greater sharing of talent across organizational boundaries (talent mobility) can create abundance rather than scarcity of resources in an organization. The idea is simple; managers give away some of the hours employees work to other departments, and in return they can get help from employees from different departments. Over time, this swapping of talent should be equal whether “give” or “get”. The talent that managers are able to access this way might have a critical skill set not available from their current team members. This enables managers to temporarily borrow talent, saving the time and expense of hiring an external contractor or consultant or opening a position requisition to hire a new employee for a skill that is not regularly needed. “You get what you give” is one of the most challenging mindset shifts necessary to embrace the new talent operating model, but the one that pays the biggest dividends.

Principle No. 2: Know What You Have

It’s a common problem for companies not to be aware of the skills their employees bring to their organizations. At best, they know all their employees’ job titles. And companies don’t take advantage of existing technology to monitor skill gaps and encourage employees to acquire new skills that are important to the company. Human capital management systems have traditionally been matched to an old infrastructure that emphasizes jobs and doesn’t easily illustrate an inventory of skills. An ability to clearly identify the full range of skills within an organization allows talent acquisition and deployment to be optimized by focusing on filling strategic gaps for work that must be performed today while planning effectively for skills that will be needed in the future.

The talent supply chain is an application of traditional inventory supply-chain management to talent. Supply-chain management is the optimization of product inventory and supplies so that those items can arrive on time and to the right destination. Similarly, a talent supply chain is based on skills inventories and knowing how much to have “in stock” to ensure that supply matches demand. Organizations that deploy those right skills at the right time will be well positioned when emerging skill domains (such as artificial intelligence) reach higher demand than supply. Failure to manage supply of skills efficiently could lead to loss of market share and profits, and ultimately, if a company doesn’t have the skills that are crucial to pursue their strategic goals, failure to thrive.

Principle No. 3: Create a Learning Organization

Given that the half-life of skills is now only five years, employees must constantly update their learning. Millennials have a reputation for wanting continual career advancement. However, when we dig deeper to understand what that means, it is really a desire for nonstop learning and career growth. Being able to further their learning is an important incentive for employees in today’s relentlessly evolving business environment because, without continuous learning, skills easily become irrelevant. However, organizations have a difficult time keeping up with employee demands for personalized, dynamic, ongoing learning and development opportunities, which require exposure to different experiences that build new skills. Gaining access to micro-learning opportunities through short-term projects facilitates skill acquisition and career growth more quickly than yesterday’s approaches. Bite-size on-the-job learning and online learning have become the new normal for rapid skill development.

Principle No. 4: Democratize the Work

Millennials bring to the workforce a new set of values and expectations along with an inclination to be more entrepreneurial in nature and more in control of how, when and where they work. This drives a need for a more consumer-like experience, not unlike the ways employees experience their personal lives. They get to choose, for example, which airline to fly and when they want to go to fit their individual needs. When employees are allowed more freedom and choice in how they contribute in the workplace, they can select work that suits them. This flexibility helps employees get unstuck from narrowly defined roles and the boredom that comes with doing the same set of tasks day after day. They can use the full breadth of skills they can contribute to their organizations. Using technology and artificial intelligence, companies can automatically match employees to potential opportunities, which opens up possibilities beyond the old boys’ network, which only gives access to new projects to those who are politically connected within the company.

Principle No. 5: Create an Agile Organization

A move away from a traditional hierarchy toward more project-based teams can increase a company’s responsiveness to changing business dynamics. Historically, organizations have been built to be efficient and effective, which was appropriate in a time of predictability. Organizational hierarchy was a natural outgrowth of this desire to be efficient. But the resulting business models created strong silos that discourage cross-boundary collaboration (e.g., sharing information across marketing and engineering). In today’s era of unpredictability and constant business model disruption, organizations must be designed for speed, agility and adaptability to respond to evolving business priorities and customer demands. Part of designing for adaptability is a shift away from hierarchical structures toward models where work is accomplished in teams. Using self-managed work teams and providing appropriate support structures, the management and the workforce become more fluid and responsive to business needs while remaining focused on the goals the teams are designed to achieve.

Principle No. 6: Bust the Functional Silos

Breaking down organizational silos allows for cross-functional collaboration within the company to foster innovation. The resulting cross-pollination of ideas ensures that the product or service is representative of customers in a diverse marketplace. Individuals from different disciplines look at business challenges in different ways. When teams that represent a variety of disciplines focus on the same problem, diverse ideas can be generated and then combined to achieve novel solutions. One of the greatest benefits of cross-functional collaboration is that employees are exposed to a different part of the business and thus gain greater insight into how the company operates.

Now is the time to disrupt the existing 20th-century operating models and create a new talent operating model that helps companies optimize their internal resources. With the advances made in artificial intelligence and machine learning, there are new and effective tools to deploy talent within organizations and create an internal gig-economy. But the technology only enables the process.

We believe the new talent operating model is the most critical component of creating an internal gig-economy. It is about changing the way a company operates to best use and reskill the talent it currently has. To employ talent in a different and more dynamic way, modifications are needed in all areas of the talent operating model: culture, leadership, ways of working, HR programs and processes, team development processes and so on.

We believe the future of work will look very different than it does today. Organizations must adapt to become more agile as they shift and change based on new technologies, new skills, and new business competitors. You can follow this path to create companies that are more productive and more innovative, while offering employee experiences that drive high levels of engagement and organizational performance.

FUTURE HR ROLES & ARCHETYPES: LESSONS FOR SEARCH FIRMS & THEIR EXECUTIVE CLIENTS

February 29, 2020 by John Sigmon

Recently a long tenured human resources executive for a Fortune 500 company announced her retirement. With no successor in place, the CEO and Board began the vetting process for an Executive Search firm. During the consultation process several firms made convincing presentations of the talent landscape for HR leaders and the critical nature of the role of HR in achieving the corporate objectives. One vital common element of those presentations was the importance of the CHRO reporting to the CEO. So, when the CEO informed the search firm candidates the new head of HR would report to the COO and a key first year deliverable would be evaluating and recommending changes to the human resources information system, several of the firms raised concerns. In the end, the CEO selected a firm that committed to find a slate of candidates to meet his objectives. This is a fictional account but very common in my experience.

Shaping expectations of key stakeholders by defining what is needed to move beyond today’s expectations (including those that are antiquated) of HR is a challenge that has been taken up by the Global Consortium to Reimagine HR, Employment Alternatives, Talent and the Enterprise (CHREATE). A key deliverable for CHREATE is to develop tools to diagnose and shape constituent expectations about HR. In 2014 a group of key CHROs and HR though leaders/stakeholders came together to accelerate the development of the HR profession to meet the dramatically rapid pace of change in business and society. As a volunteer group, CHREATE identified several pivotal areas of focus; one of which is to shape expectations of HR key constituents. CHREATE defined five key constituent groups including Boards, CEOs, investment analysts, private equity, and search firms. These constituents are key influencers in advancing beyond today’s expectations of the value creation delivered by HR. This essay, as you may have guessed, focuses on the search firm constituent group.

Search executives operate in an extraordinarily competitive environment. They compete with each other, their potential clients (who may have robust internal talent acquisition functions), and external forces such as social media which support existing HR talent acquisition activities. The competitiveness of the environment increases the stakes for securing search engagements. In our fictional account, the search firm may be correct- the CEO may very well need a strategist to serve as a top officer, to move the organizational culture forward. But the CEO does not see it that way. From the CEO perspective, people have always been paid on time, productivity is good, shareholders and proxy advisors are happy; why should the CEO spend valuable time being “sold something” that is not wanted? Pushing too hard could mean the business goes to another firm and the search consultant loses a valuable client and potential future revenue stream.

I began this journey by asking three relative strangers to work with me to develop tools/resources for search firm executives designed to shape expectations of their clients around the human resources leadership role in delivering value. Further I asked this group to be prepared to present our findings at a national event in less than four months. The only promise I could make was that it would be messy.

Our collaboration, ingenuity, and common passion to develop solutions to advance human resources as the critical partner in meeting the rapidly changing needs of business was the driving force behind our development of a prototype application (app) for CHREATE as a possible solution to this challenge. This app, tentatively, called “Engage” provides a non-threatening vehicle for the search consultant to engage with the CEO around their needs and is based on input from the CEO.

Other essays in this book describe how CHREATE teams defined four future roles needed to transform the nature of work:

Organizational Performance Engineer
Cultural Architect and Community Activist
Global Talent Scout, Convener, and Coach
Trend Forecaster and Technology Integrator

The “Engage” app demonstrates how these might be used to diagnose the CEO’s needs. In the “Engage” app, the CEO provides a self-assessment of what they believe is needed in each of the four roles. Here are examples of questions and their scoring from the prototype:

Organizational Performance Engineer
has clear roles and responsibilities and formal structures of governance	1
uses ad-hoc teams to solve key business problems	2
has a network of interdependent teams that proactively solve organization issues	3
has organic communities of expertise that come together to address issues	4

Cultural Architect and Community Activist
has a formal plan to understand how our employees currently view our culture	1
takes regular actions to improve the culture	2
empowers employees to solve organizational problems	3
harnesses the best of everyone	4

Global Talent Scout, Convener, Coach
uses traditional sourcing and external recruiting capability to fill positions	1
has employees and managers actively involved in relationship recruiting	2
uses a marketing approach to attract talent	3
uses our customer base as a possible source of talent and referrals	4

Trend Forecaster and Technology Integrator
has strong business acumen	1
understands how business trends impact the workforce	2
is able to “sense” and real time strategic responses	3
systematically uses scenario planning	4

Based on the responses the app displays one of eight different archetypes or personas of the HR leader. The archetypes/personas are adapted from “The Eight Archetypes of Leadership” (Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries, Harvard Business Review December 18, 2013) as follows:

The strategist: leadership as a game of chess. These people are good at dealing with developments in the organization’s environment. They provide vision, strategic direction and outside-the-box thinking to create new organizational forms and generate future growth.
The change-catalyst: leadership as a turnaround activity. These executives love messy situations. They are masters at re-engineering and creating new organizational ”blueprints.”
The transactor: leadership as deal making. These executives are great dealmakers. Skilled at identifying and tackling new opportunities, they thrive on negotiations.
The builder: leadership as an entrepreneurial activity. These executives dream of creating something and have the talent and determination to make their dream come true.
The innovator: leadership as creative idea generation. These people are focused on the new. They possess a great capacity to solve extremely difficult problems.
The processor: leadership as an exercise in efficiency.These executives like organizations to be smoothly running, well-oiled machines. They are very effective at setting up the structures and systems needed to support an organization’s objectives.
The coach: leadership as a form of people development. These executives know how to get the best out of people, thus creating high performance cultures.
The communicator: leadership as stage management. These executives are great influencers, and have a considerable impact on their surroundings.

For demonstration, the eight archetypes were derived from the answers to the questions by summing up the total of the scores for the four roles. Because each role score can range from 1 to 4, the total score can range from 4 to 16. The archetypes might be assigned this way:

“Engage” App Total Score	Archetype/Persona Assignment
1-2	Communicator
3-4	Coach
4	Processor
6-8	Innovator
9-10	Builder
11-12	Transactor
13-14	Change Catalyst
15-16	Strategist

The archetypes/personas are not judgments, and one is not necessarily better than another. The appropriate archetype/persona for each organization depends on how they match the organization’s needs. So, they are designed to help the search partner and CEO understand the organizational needs, and to plan for what the CEO/Organization should expect of the type of the candidate the CEO is presented.

I believe this or similar tools can serve as an important catalyst, capturing the organizational need in a non-threatening manner. Additionally, it provides a level of segmentation across HR leaders. For example, if the organization seeking a HR leader is a startup, the CEO is likely to select inputs that reflect this need and the app will respond by suggesting the archetype/persona of “builder”.

The app is open source and available through CHREATE. I believe this is an excellent starting point for further discussion and development. During a recent presentation to a CHREATE community (including search executives), over 88% responded that they see the potential and want to learn more. Over 70% responded positively to the question “If the tool were fully developed and validated can you imagine it as something you would use?”

The competitive nature of search notwithstanding, further development of the app is a project that should be undertaken in a collaborative, co-creation environment by the search community. It would be suitable for an innovation lab/hacking experience. Since the tool is open source there are multiple possibilities to individualize development or use the framework to create other tools.

Some potential areas to be explored include:

Input validation
Use of maturity index from CEO working group
Programming of algorithms
Can the education/development component be developed and validated?
Is this app the best user experience, or is another platform (e.g., gamification) more appropriate?

I hope you also see the potential and value in this tool and will take up the charge to join CHREATE in helping to refine, adopt, and adapt this tool for your unique use.

*note- the prototype app has been disabled in order to complete the coding work required.

This article was published in Black Holes & White Spaces: Reimagining The Future of and HR with the CHREATE Project

Learn more about John Sigmon