If you want to be an innovator, a creator, the person who leads the company, then “It’s not OK to just be doing great HR.”
That is the essence of disruption, Jennifer McClure says in her presentation last summer to a Brookings, SD audience. If anyone should know, it’s McClure. She’s the CEO of DisruptHR and a former and great, award-winning HR leader who was disrupted. Disrupted from leading her company because, as she explains, what she was doing was within her comfort zone, “and therefore was not doing what my organization needed to go into the future.”
Most HR people, she says, “are doing improvements, if anything, within our organization. We need to at least be moving to innovation and then beyond to disruption.”
To put it another way, no matter how effectively you improve compliance or achieve high satisfaction scores with the benefits, it’s not going to make much difference in helping the company to be competitive. The most in-demand HR skills, McClure says as the list from Mercer’s Global Trends Study flashes up on the screen, are all about innovation, problem-solving, leadership.
“We need to make sure that we have the skills to take our organizations into the future and the first step that we need to take,” she says, “Is to look for problems in our organizations to solve. Disruption doesn’t occur without a problem to solve.”
“The good news,” McClure explains, is that there are many problems that are squarely in HR’s wheelhouse: attraction and retention of top talent and the development of next gen leaders are at the top of a list of challenges identified by the world’s CEOs. And then there are those in every workplace brought about the changing nature of work.
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How HR can be disruptive in solving problems and how you can avoid being disrupted is what McClure’s presentation is about. Listen as she explains what you can do.
In partnership with DisruptHR, TLNT presents some of the best Disrupt presentations from events across North America and now the world. Disrupt talks are modeled on the TEDx concept: Short, to the point talks on all things HR — talent, culture and technology.
