My experience in systems transformation occurs in two contexts— organizational and community. In this blog, I’ll focus on the ways human resource processes act as a powerful place to nourish systems change in an organization. And how HR can push systems transformation past the tipping point.
Why HR?
HR is often where traditional thinking and existing processes hold the current organizational system in place. If we want to create a new path forward, we have to let go of the old ways that reinforce current systems thinking and practices. This “letting go” is critical for sustainable systems change.
HR is integrated into hiring, training, supervision, and performance evaluation. Because the function of HR touches everyone in the organization, it’s a place to shift the whole organization. By shifting their focus, human resource leaders can unleash their processes to serve the larger transformation our organizations often aspire to.
The power of self-direction
Nature has a strong higher purpose that all species support, and each member is designed to self-organize without needing direction. A bee knows how to pollinate, for example. A blade of grass knows how to grow, and an acorn knows how to become an oak tree. All this action happens through self-organization.
Nature has no CEO, in fact living systems are designed around the connection between purpose and self-directed behavior.
As I mentioned last week, our human systems work much the same as Nature’s. Within our organizations and teams, employees who are aligned with the organizational purpose, and can initiate their own work decrease the need for supervisor time and energy. Performance reviews are a great example of an HR process that can shift focus in the right direction. For example, HR could consider adding these components to performance reviews:
- Feedback on an employee’s ability to initiate their own work and learning.
- Assessments on how well the person supports the organization’s purpose.
- Emotional intelligence feedback to help reduce drama within teams and departments.
These are just a few examples of the tremendous power of HR processes to reinforce and realign an organization’s system and culture.
Unfortunately, I’ve personally experienced or observed a much different pattern of organizational dynamics. How many organizations have you been involved with that directed transformation from the top down? That ignored performance reviews or hiring criteria as a facilitator of that transformation?
Shifting HR systems to power organizational transformation
Traditional HR systems are designed to reinforce control functions in the organization. These customary processes are focused on individual accountability and reward contributions aligned with specific job duties. As an example, job descriptions rarely articulate outcomes, nor do they assess the depth of our relationships and ability to collaborate with others. A job description focused on individual behavior reinforces a culture of self-interest and individual job performance.
If we want to transform culture to support collaboration and innovation, self-interest and competition are counterproductive. Think about what it would be like if we switched our hiring criteria to evaluate the potential person’s track record of teamwork and ability to self-organize. Our organization would introduce new people to the organization that matched the aspiration behind the systems change.
If we are rewarding the type of creative thinking that powers innovation, the performance review would look very different. Once hired, an employee’s review should offer feedback to the employee on that very capacity!
We should think of ways to write job descriptions that articulate the collaboration and outcomes that define success for a person on the job. By doing so, we shift the focus to how the team member contributes to the whole organization—not just how they execute their individual duties.
HR processes can create powerful shifts toward the systems transformation we aspire to in our organizations. In my next post, in this series I’ll provide an example of one organization that used HR processes strategically to support and accelerate a massive culture shift toward distributed leadership.