So you've gotta start by saying,
"What is it that we're trying to do
"to make our organization successful?"
And my starting point from that
is first of all, it's all about the people.
And it's also all about people doing things differently.
In other words, any organization can
kind of follow the norms in their industry,
and just copy one another.
But to be successful, you've gotta rise above that.
And the only way to do that
is through people being entrepreneurial,
people doing things differently.
Entrepreneurial is about pursuing new opportunities.
So the starting point for me is that
for HR to be relevant in today's world,
we've got to see it about enabling our employees
across the organization to do their best work.
And best work doesn't just mean
a good job in my defined job.
It means doing something different,
trying to deliberately go above and beyond.
- So how does HR do it though?
'Cause HR has fantastic performance management systems,
and they say, "If you do your role well,
"then you get a thumbs up."
That's probably not the way to do it.
- Exactly, and of course, there's a classic distinction,
isn't there, between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation?
Extrinsic motivation is all about being given rewards
for doing a good job, and that means that we can define
what the job is in the first place.
Intrinsic motivation says
that actually most people would like
to do a good job in the first place,
if we would only let them.
And most people are actually motivated
by such things as having a little bit of freedom,
the opportunity to learn a skill,
the opportunity to do something worth doing.
And so of course, we can't completely get rid
of the old, traditional rules and regulations.
But for the most part, our job as HR leaders,
is to release that inner spirit,
that desire that everybody has to do a good job.
Which is not easy to do, but the starting point
has to be that as a form of motivation.
- So how do you do it if on the one hand,
you have a business to run, and you need continuity
of the goal processes, while on the other hand,
you're also looking for extra role behavior-ish?
How do build them at the same time?
- And of course, we've gotta be honest
that there's a spectrum of jobs.
On the one hand we have hugely creative jobs.
If you're an advertising guru, you can do it how you like,
excuse my language.
There are other people who are working
in a call center, who have very, very narrowly defined jobs.
So we gotta try to figure out an answer
which allows us to even open up a conversation,
even for people with very constrained jobs.
My starting point is simple.
Which is that, let's assume you have some sort
of process for evaluating performance.
We have to have the two, or three, or four objectives
which somebody has to meet.
But we can always define one
or two additional opportunities alongside that.
I think Unilever, for example,
calls this your plus one objective.
And what it is is, I'm in a conversation with you,
I want you to do these things this year.
But I'm gonna say, "Look, let's talk
"about something you can do a bit differently."
What is that plus one thing?
What is that one or two extra things
that you're excited about, that if it really worked
it would make a significant difference?
Not just to you, in terms of your enjoyment of your job,
but also to the company as well.
And as a good leader of others, I want to support that.
And I want us to actually build
that into our formal process.
So at the end of the year I can say,
"I'm glad you checked the boxes on your traditional jobs.
"Tell me about your plus one.
"What is the thing that you did there,
"which actually tried to move the needle,
"that actually tapped into your personal drive."
That's one very practical way of doing it.
In other words, I don't want to throw out the old.
I just wanted to give an opportunity
for something new in addition to it.
- So you see it as something going together with the old,
coexisting to each other.
- That's right.
And of course there's lots of different ways of doing it.
There are some organizations which say,
"We're actually gonna deliberately give you
"a very loose job description.
"And we're gonna encourage you to figure out
"for yourself what it looks like."
They say that if you don't do your narrow job description,
you get fired, but if you wanna get promoted,
you've got to do more than
what you're job description actually says.
Those so-called extra role behaviors
are what makes the difference.
And so we've gotta find a way for HR
to sort of talk about that stuff in a sensible way.
And that is partly through annual reviews,
but it's also through the culture
that we set at the top.
In other words, as a leader of others,
what's the best way of figuring out a way
of getting people to behave differently.
It is to behave differently yourself.
People role model themselves on your behaviors.
- Tell us something about that culture you mentioned.
How do you build a culture
to support corporate entrepreneurship?
- So it really,
it comes down to the leader of the operating unit.
And when I say an operating unit, I mean anything
from 20 to 200 people.
That leader has the opportunity to create a culture,
a way of working within their operations,
that may or may not be the same
as that of their parent company,
if you see what I mean.
And so the way that that leader does that
is by having a very clear sense
of what they're trying to do,
by deliberately role modeling
the behaviors they're looking for.
Being a bit more creative, being deliberately challenging,
in a positive way, in meetings.
And then when they see people behaving in that way,
they are explicitly kind of supporting that.
I really loved the way that you challenged me
in that meeting because it forced us
to be a little bit more honest
about the issues that we're working on.
And sometimes I've seen people sort of bake
into their meetings explicit ways of doing that.
I've seen companies, for example, that say,
"Look, innovation requires taking some risks.
"Taking risks means not everything's gonna work out.
"Therefore we've gotta be more tolerant of failure.
"So let us at the beginning or the end of a meeting
"have a failure discussion."
In other words, let's go around the table.
Each meeting we're gonna have a different person
who's gonna be talking about a project they did
that did not work out.
Why didn't it work out?
What did we learn from it?
Why this is something we should then build on.
What I'm trying to say
is that there are mechanisms we can put in place
to institutionalize, or make normal,
some of the behaviors that we associate
with trying things differently.
So that's the sort of culture that I'm looking for.
That's what I'm trying to create in my own organization.
At London Business School I've got a team
of 120 people reporting to me.
And so that's what we're trying to do.
- That's fascinating.
I think that that boils into the concept
of what's called failing forward.
You know, failing earlier, and then learning from it.
So what's the role of learning in this entire process?
- Yeah, so learning is obviously
something we do as individuals.
And of course, it's very hard to put your hands
around exactly what that is.
But certainly, learning comes from diverse experiences,
and failure is part of learning as well as success.
But I wanna make the point that organizations also learn.
In other words, organizations build new and better ways
of working as a function of what has worked
and what's not worked in the past.
And I think we've gotta see organizational learning
as a two-dimensional thing.
We want those individuals to get better at their jobs
and more open to trying new things.
But then we want the organization itself
to develop routines, patterns of behavior
that actually support even more of that sort of thing.
So for me, if you're trying
to create that innovative culture,
you're trying to create a learning organization.
- So you talk now about organizational learning.
What is the role of the individual, individual learning?
So an HR professional who's watching now,
they see a digital disruption taking place.
Think 5% of people need to fully re-skill in the next
tentative years? - Yes.
- What's the role of individual learning in this process?
- So look, ultimately an individual has
to learn for themselves.
I mean, we can help them.
We can show what sort of activities and behaviors
are supported by the organization,
then we can encourage individuals
to figure these things out for themselves.
But you're touching on an important point,
which is that it doesn't just happen through experience.
Learning also happens through formal education.
I mean, we absolutely do need to read
and go on formal training courses,
take online webinars and things.
And relearning, of course, is the back and forth
from doing something differently,
reflecting on it and making sense of it
in the context of what other people have written.
And then using that insight to try new things.
So we've gotta be very thoughtful
about the environment we create
that allows people to learn by iterating
between challenging work assignments on the one hand,
and formal learning on the other hand.
That's where learning is the most powerful.
- I think that's brilliant.
Thank you very much. - Okay, thank you very much.