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An IBM executive recently noted that, “Nothing is more critical to enabling transformation than skilled, motivated people who can learn and relearn at a moment’s notice.” Of course, IBM has by its own example in transforming from hardware to services demonstrated the efficacy and market power behind an organization being learning, skills and competencies ready – and being positioned to leverage that into transformative prowess.
The learning and training departments of many companies admire the learning and competencies power demonstrated by IBM’s transformation from a hardware company to a service company but are stuck trying to just meet the day-to-day training challenges of workers. In a sense, they simply don’t have time to get transformative or strategic. The Learning Strategies thought leader panel convened on Sept. 8, 2005 with an eye toward helping companies find a path to move a bit closer to the IBM competencies level – toward a skills development and training path that would be proactive and strategically linked to HCM. Like IBM demonstrated, the ultimate goal would be to link learning and training initiatives to the broader human capital strategy and thereby experience meaningful enterprise impact.
MOVING LEARNING FORWARD STRATEGICALLY BY GOING BACK TO COMPETENCIES MANAGEMENT
The panel’s focus was how to get learning management behaving more transformatively and strategically within the enterprise – with ties to Human Capital strategy. Paul Storfer was invited to join the panel as its special guest to get the panel back to looking at competency management, He was perfectly suited to topic.1 Paul is the managing partner of Human Capital Science, a firm dedicated to understanding how competency management impacts business performance.
Paul presented the Strategic Human Capital Map (HCM) (presented above) to illustrate the overall picture of human capital within the enterprise, and demonstrate the impacts of competency management (in the center) on all elements. The map illustrates the six main categories of human capital areas: Plan, Evaluate, Develop, Advance, Lead and Analyze. What is most critical about the Map is that it illustrates the intersections between all human capital strategies and activities, and that “competencies” overlay all activities.
REDISCOVERING THE STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE OF LEARNING
Paul Storfer also emphasized that the first step in linking learning to HCM is not building complex new training content but rather recognizing the strategic importance of learning within the enterprise. According to Storfer, “Corporations are so focused on the operational benefits of maximizing the potential of human capital they lose sight of the real impact of learning.” Storfer sums up the strategic impact with two straight-forward maxims about competency and business performance:
· Behind every business problem is a human competence challenge that needs to be addressed. (He argues that organizations spend far too much time investing in equipment, technology and other resources and far too little on meeting human development needs.)
· Understanding and developing job competencies are key to unlocking the full profit power of your firm’s human or intellectual assets. (Thus, learning is critical to meet objectives.) The strategic nature of learning and mapping competencies becomes clearer if we see skills at the heart of the challenges facing organizations in the form of business problems. Instead of taking this view, Storfer insists that, “most organizations are focusing on other resource problems – giving short shrift to human capital investments and development.” Ironically, for all the lip service on human capital, Paul Storfer notes that he once had a Senior VP of HR say, “I almost wish we’d treat our people as well as we treat our equipment – it gets attention, it gets maintenance on a regular schedule – but our people don’t have that same level of attention.” Bottomline: Storfer says that maintaining the competitive balance in companies really comes from building human competencies.
So, given the strategic importance of learning and our goal to link learning to the Human Capital Strategy a question arises: how do we immerse the learning tactics used today into a strategic level human capital map? The panel suggests that the aim of such an initiative is not to transform the organization (some broad complex vision of a learning organization) per se but to simply keep it competitive as a business and to make sure that its actually flexible enough (like IBM was) to respond to market imperatives – which in turn may determine whether or not it survives and is around a year from now.
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