Let's talk about ... Resourcing for Performance

 

In my previous articles we highlighted the People side of Business Performance and Business Transformation. When we say People in fact we talk Resourcing. Without the right people in the right roles, Change and Transformation simply won't happen. We can be straightforward about this. Having the right people in your organization is key to drive business performance. In other words, Resourcing for Performance is what we need to address, so let's talk about it in this article.

 

Without looking for a great article on google to underwrite this, I think we can safely say there's people that like the constant and there's people that like the change. Both are good and we talked about this in previous articles already. Having the right mix, linked to business priorities and objectives is key. Having the right mix is one, having them in the right roles is another.

 

But, business priorities change over time. They may change as a result of a change in market dynamics. The competitive landscape might have changed. Diversification might be required or business ownership might have changed which may result in increased ambition or a change in strategy. All of these causes, are a trigger for the need to change or transform towards a new state. Are we confident that an existing organization, that group of people doing their utmost to achieve great results, can always handle the changes required of them? And is the mix we referred to above, still the right one? Of course it ain't! In fact, with the increased speed of change and with it being a constant, the mix is never right. This makes organizations less agile than they aspire to be. In other words, we're leaving an opportunity for performance improvement on the table.

 

What is the solution? The solution is simple but requires a different organizational mindset. We're all familiar with having a flexible pool of resources to scale up and down in capacity; in resources. But there's much more we can do with a flexible pool of people if we select them based on their ability to drive change, their power to change and to drive transformation. But, we need to put those people in the right roles. So no longer 'just' a flexible pool of people to 'scale up capacity', but also a flexible pool of people to 'scale up performance'. The latter are obviously very different people from the traditional pool of resources (or 'hands' like we sometimes call them).

 

When you like something, you automatically get to become good at it. People that like change also like or don't mind about risk, because it comes automatically with it and they don't seem to mind, or else they would look for more certainty & security. In fact, there's a group of people that gets motivated by change and risk. If we add to that the factor of Power to Change, we're talking about the resources we need to drive performance. Those are the ones, if we can figure out how to recruit them based on unambiguous factors, that could be the change agents that we need to drive transition. Next crucial step is to empower them and put them in the right roles and positions.

 

So this automatically leads to strong involvement of the HR department. So they need to be closely linked to strategy and business priorities. But are they? And do they have the background to recruit for performance (at the right moment), talking all of the above into account? And are they flexible enough to scale up for performance as and when required. From what I've experienced I see a lot of room for improvement, room for improved business performance.

 

I strongly believe that 'the organization of the future' will be very different from the one like we have it today. Change is coming faster and will be more and more complex all the time. And the mix of change agents vs. stable people in the background will have to be much more flexible (or agile) and we'll have to go about this much more strategically and with more insights into the link between performance and resourcing than ever before.

 

In summary, driving business performance is a complex matter which requires experienced and independent change agents in the right positions.

 

Let's change!

 

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