Building people management capabilities in line management

Alan Wexler who shared his perspective recently with the whole company on the evolution that is taking place in the world around us. As Alan says, “Technology and consumers evolve at a pace unlike anything we’ve seen before; organizations are having to rethink everything about their businesses, from how they operate to their purpose for being — a prospect that’s both exciting and scary. Many companies are looking for guidance on how to stay relevant. They need a partner who can help them through this journey, who understands the urgency to evolve, the motivations of their customers, the challenges of their business, the nuances of their industry — and possesses the ability to help them change the way they work to be ready for the future. We can empathize because we find ourselves addressing similar challenges.” 

These words are apt in the context of how HR needs to think about itself and how HR professionals need to think about their roles. Organizations need to evolve internally to be able to help their clients and their customers. This, in no small measure, applies to how our people and HR processes evolve. 

Our value lies in our power to leverage technology, employee insights, creativity, data, diverse perspectives, and new ways of working to close the gaps between what employees expect and what we actually deliver. Being purposeful is a starting point of playing a strategic HR role. We’re re-aligning the HR fraternity towards the common purpose of our roles as:

Being anchored in business: It is imperative that the HR goes beyond just understanding the business, to being embedded in the business. This is to experience the struggles and successes that the business faces so that HR can have a greater influence on business outcomes. But this requires a mindset shift from providing HR solutions to business problems, to solving business problems along with the business. Out of that will emerge the themes that will shape the HR solutions. 

Culture ambassadors: HR business partners have to be anticipators of cultural and systemic fundamentals required to make a success of any emergent business need. 

Focus on capability: Going beyond business acumen and developing core consulting capabilities which will enhance the ability to diagnose, establish the need for change, partner for adoption and adaption (where required) and ultimately, enable businesses to solve their own problems. Apart from this, the other capabilities that need focus are financial acumen, technology, and analytical abilities.

Understanding our people: Employee journeys that are based on the people’s personas enable us to create personalized and customized experiences and are key to how we enable and retain employees in the workplace. 

As an organization, we’ve started on this journey by igniting conversations amongst the HR fraternity to impact real business problems. The focus is on the 4 Es – Education, Exposure, Experience and Environment, that will drive capability across levels in the HR team. These conversations will also enable the exchange of ideas across generations/teams making for a richer blend of ideas. 

Our primary focus is to inspire curiosity and empower people to diagnose their own learning gaps more effectively. We’re giving people access to a wide range of tools that are enabling self-reflection and ultimately, leading to a higher level of self-accountability towards learning outcomes. We are looking at a movement of mindset as well as creating an environment for enablement where our HR teams will evolve to who they need to be.

The primary focus is to inspire curiosity and empower people to diagnose their own learning gaps effectively

It has long been rhetoric that we need our line managers to be HR managers – in other words, to manage their teams’ aspirations and needs. At Sapient, while this has always been the belief (we called line managers career managers over two decades ago), we formally undertook a journey towards a more fluid, transparent and conversation-based performance management philosophy a few years ago. The success of this hinges on a more empowered, enlightened and enabled tribe of people managers. In this context, we hold our people managers accountable for having frequent and quality conversations and embedding the required discipline and rigor in how they manage their people. There is a huge enablement focus to build skills around coaching, managing performance and having impactful conversations which are being delivered through customized learning programs and self-learning. Increasing the focus on holding people managers accountable for their people and making client impact emphasizes the importance of this role of people management.

The opportunity to help our business teams is greater than ever and the truth is that they need more from us. Our success, going forward, will hinge on our ability to transform alongside them refining our capabilities and operations, making it easier to do our work, enabling our people and cultivating our culture so that we can be the partner our business needs us to be.