Canadian HR Reporter

SEPTEMBER 8, 2014 CANADIAN HR REPORTER & STRATEGIC CAPABILITY NETWORK Credit: Ollyy (Shutterstock) Taking off the blindfolds Why HR needs to help guide reinvention in the age of disruption BY LIZ BERNIER Good leaders must be able to deal with a world in motion, accord- ing to Kate Sweetman, founding principal and chief client offi cer at SweetmanCragun in Boston. "We've got speed and we've got complexity — and it's only getting faster and it's only getting more complex. And unless we can help leaders to deal with that, we're not doing much good." There's plenty to read about how to be a good leader, but the primary things you need to deal with right now are speed and complexity. So, how does one eff ectively deal with these? "You need everybody to be do- ing the same thing at the same time," said Sweetman at a Strate- gic Capability Network event in Toronto. But in regards to the fast pace of change right now, is this just a weird blip people are collec- tively facing at the moment — or is this something that's going to continue? Rapid change is going to keep happening and it's going to in- tensify, said Sweetman, citing the modern era of change, "which we consider to have started in 1981." at's the year Toyota arrived on the scene in America and shocked the big three auto manu- facturers (General Motors, Ford and Chrysler). "It really was an amazing glo- balization of manufacturing, and so we consider that to be the start of global competition," she said. en, in 1989, there were huge technology shifts coupled with geopolitical shifts, in addition to thought-leadership shifts. Outsourcing began to sweep the way business was done, as did smartphones, according to Sweetman. And then came the crash. "Why is it in our era that organi- zations slide into irrelevance and failure so quickly — seemingly overnight, sometimes?" she said. "It's because all this stuff is hap- pening and they're not far enough ahead of it that they can actually make their own shifts. "How is it that some companies can live for hundreds of years, but most companies only live for 20 years? How is it that companies like Nokia, which at the time had 34 per cent of all the phones in the entire globe, and within a few years, they're basically out of business? How can that happen so quickly?" One answer is those companies failed to reinvent themselves, said Sweetman. "We define reinvention... as quantum individual and organiza- tional change accelerated. So what we try to do is help create leaders who breathe life into whatever it is you're trying to do. Because too many people suck life out of it, and we're trying to breathe life in." Six blindfolds ere are six "blindfolds" com- mon in organizations that can lead to a failure to reinvent, said Sweetman. " ey all basically boil down to ego, but the ego has many diff er- ent facets to it and faces to it." The six blindfolds are: arro- gance; believing problems don't exist; dismissing competitors' success; not acknowledging negative feedback; an inability to "know what we know"; and "as- suming we know what's best for the customer. " "We define arrogance as an overbearing and unwarranted display of superiority, self-impor- tance and false pride," said Sweet- man. "We know that people at the top of organizations unwittingly fall into that same place… it hap- pens all the time. "When we get power, we all fall into this. You have to be very aware of it, and you have to fi ght it." As an example, retail chain Kmart was doing really well years ago but it comopletely ignored the rise of Walmart, and by the time it did take notice, it was too late. As for believing a problem doesn't exist, Sweetman cited as an example GM and the ignition switch issue in 2014, asking, "How could they not know the problem exists?" "Somehow, you're either com- pletely blind to a problem or you simply dismiss it because it's in- convenient to think about, you don't want to deal with it." As for failing to learn from what the competition is doing, "there's nothing wrong with being a sec- ond mover sometimes, there's nothing wrong with that," said Sweetman. "You can learn a lot from other people." Another common blindfod is failing to acknowledge negative feedback, she said. "You've got agendas, you've got deadlines, you've got people being rewarded for staying on track — you can't aff ord to hear something negative about it." It's the "hope and pray" meth- od, and people can literally die — as seen with the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986. "It was known, it was known. And yet feedback was brought and yet it was ignored. Why was it ignored? Well, because you've got agendas, you've got milestones, you've got deadlines, you've got people being rewarded for staying on track. And so you can't aff ord to hear something negative about it," said Sweetman. At the very least, organizations can get into hot water by failing to acknowledge the feedback, said Sweetman. It can be very diffi cult to have leadership hear unpleasant feed- back — which is frustrating for team members trying to bring problems to light and being con- tinually unheard. " at's why our retention rates are so low, here's why our engage- ment scores are so low," she said. " e people we're trying to infl u- ence have blindfolds on that we can't fi gure out how to help them take off ." When it comes to the blind- fold of "We can't know what we know," sometimes it is about cor- porate politics and egos — but sometimes it's just about missing systems. " ere's some kind of inability to transfer learning, knowledge, ideas and information across boundaries that result in actual ac- tion taking place," said Sweetman. "Sometimes, there just isn't a system that can sync up to allow a bunch of noise and data out "How is it that some companies can live for hundreds of years but most companies only live for 20 years?" BLINDFOLDS > pg. 9

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