Excerpt – The Talent Revolution, Chapter 11

Strong cultures are built on strong relationships. In their work, Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright (2008) identify the strength and power of triadic relationships. Groups of three are both a self-reinforcing structure and a natural way for people to engage with each other. To turn an ageing workforce into a competitive advantage, three corporate functions must be aligned and made to work together. Only then will the key ideas and action items take hold.

Today’s VPs and senior VPs of HR need to step up to become tomorrow’s CHROs, and to ensure that the long-term equity of the workforce is maximized with the right talent infrastructure to support the strategy.

Tomorrow’s CHROs need to lead executive teams through the changing nature of the world of work. They must determine the way talent platforms and structures will transform who does what within the organization. In the case of the ageing workforce, CHROs must start with the leadership team to demonstrate how intergenerational approaches that span the full working-life continuum can lead to greater workforce collaboration, efficiency, and innovation. Like their IT colleagues in the mid- to late 1990s who moved from being VPs of IT to the elevated position of CIO, HR leaders cannot make this transition into a CHRO role alone. Others around the executive table must recognize that the critical competence, skill, and analysis required to make sense of the changing workforce resides in the senior HR leader—and that confidence must be earned. Luckily, HR has the support of the other members of the talent revolution triad, and can rely on partners with analytics and communications expertise.

To be leaders of the talent revolution, HR managers must claim their due and rely on sound, relevant, and granular data. Too often HR is faced with a mandate to solve the succession concerns of an ageing workforce. They know the average age of their workforce—perhaps even down to the departmental level—and they begin to recommend programs and approaches to lower the age. The average age of your workforce is a good example of a meaningless metric that feels like it should be important but is not. The overall average age is as useless in helping leaders identify where there is trapped talent equity potential (described in chapter 10) as it is in divining which teams within your organization are at greatest risk as demographic shifts occur. It’s equally ineffective at revealing which departments are most suited to Legacy Career® paths that might draw employees from across the organization. Nor will knowing the average age of your workforce illuminate how the organization might be best served by creating or leveraging talent platform strategies that capitalize on the freelance economy in ways that include existing talent.

Many HR leaders recognize and rely on the expertise of data analysts as integral members of their teams (Bersin 2012). But just as there is an evolution from VP HR to CHRO, so, too, must workforce data analysts build new, future-focused models that provide the data required—which is often very different from what is usually requested by leaders not trained in analytics. Once the data is available, HR can look to its partner in employee communications for guidance on how best to share the information with their executive colleagues, leadership teams, and employees.

While HR and employee communications are typically aligned on organizational charts, they don’t routinely rely on each other as critical triad partners. In these changing times, the way messages are conveyed is more critical than ever before. Since any change that affects the workforce has the potential to be stressful, and every change will certainly feel intensely personal, getting the messaging, timing, reinforcement, and support exactly right is critical.