Learning innovation can outpace market change in the digital age

Citation

Helps, I. (2015), "Learning innovation can outpace market change in the digital age", Strategic HR Review, Vol. 14 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/SHR-08-2015-0061

Learning innovation can outpace market change in the digital age

Article Type: HR at Work From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 14, Issue 6

Ian Helps

Ian Helps is Director at Consalia, London, UK.

This project represents my first ever critical self-reflection in eight years of working for [my company].

This quotation captures the tragic waste of human capital prevalent in many organisations today. By encouraging staff to “execute and not think”, companies expect high performance. What they increasingly get is obedience, low performance and an organisational inability to adapt fast enough. But there is a better way, one that is in tune with today’s relentlessly changing marketplace.

By critically self-reflecting and immediately applying new insights into business projects for his team, the student quoted above went on to develop a whole new set of opportunities for both himself and his company. He was clear that the old pattern of unquestioningly following old habits would not have brought this success, and this matches recent research at Harvard Business School and HEC Paris showing that reflective practice increases performance by over 20 per cent.

The imperative of disruptive change

According to PWC’s Report, The future of work - A journey to 2022[1], the role of HR is changing in response to an increasingly disruptive business environment. The report states that HR is at a crossroads and will go one of three ways. First, with a proactive mindset and focused on business strategy, HR will take on a new wider people remit incorporating and influencing many other aspects of the business. Second, the function will become the driver of the corporate social responsibility agenda within the organisation or, finally, it will be seen as transactional and almost entirely outsourced.

Many of our customers are at the leading edge of disruptive change in their own industries and offer rich lessons for HR leadership operating in many different sectors, yet they share a proactive mindset to drive business success for their companies. Companies like SAP, moving its services to the cloud, Sony Mobile as it moves to content-rich offerings and Toshiba Tec UK Imaging Systems moving to new service-based document management offerings. They are all choosing an innovative and different way to learn because, as more markets move at digital speeds, today’s traditional approaches to learning are not fit for purpose.

Today’s best practice is often out of date before it can be codified and, when it is trained, it rarely meets the specific market reality of the learners. And, simply going online with training does not solve this basic flaw. A global head of sales enablement summarised his quandary as “trying to download 300 days worth of information into two days of enablement per quarter”. And it is going to get worse.

Developing the reflective professional

To stay relevant, professionals must develop greater learning agility through thinking and adapting for themselves. By providing an innovative environment which makes the learner think, reflect and challenge their own ways of working, they can find new and original answers that can be rapidly deployed to the business front line. Nowhere is the need more pressing than in sales, which is undergoing transformational change as customers’ expectations ratchet up constantly, as they experience what is possible via the Internet.

Sony Mobile has already begun successful deployment of this approach, doubling its market share in some of its key areas over the Christmas season 2014/2015, as key account personnel honed their ability to find relevant insights and to challenge their customers’ thinking with “tactful audacity”.

Reflective practices work because they have been tuned by the people using them and through working collaboratively with their employers. To achieve organisation-wide impact, reflective practice should be incorporated at the heart of a learning system, based on a number of core principles:

• The participant experience drives everything.

• Follow academically verified best practices for successful adult learning.

• Provide leading edge, business relevant material that radically challenges. students’ existing worldview and triggers them to seek new answers.

• Students immediately apply the new learnings to a business-relevant project.

• Use reflective practice and individual, peer-to-peer coaching and virtual collaboration to encourage real learning.

• Place this in a formal academic framework that ensures quality standards of education and a goal. (For instance, in our case, Master’s degrees in Transforming Sales or Transforming Sales Leadership that provide student “pull”).

Tangible results of reflective practice

A student’s journey starts by transforming their ability to think and change, and we have seen them constantly surprise themselves with the results that stem from their ability to transform their practices and those of their teams. Seeing them re-ignite their passion for learning and watching them become much more agile learners than before is like watching Rocky getting back into shape after years out of the boxing ring. They also become thought leaders for their areas of business, as they seek new ideas and information to keep them one step ahead. The benefits for their employers are just as significant as they get to retain their top talent and test their best and brightest; many of whom we have seen get promoted off the back of their transformed perspectives.

Paul Devlin is a director of SAP Middle East North Africa (MENA), currently studying for a Masters in Leading Sales Transformation with Consalia and Middlesex University. Taking the time to reflect, Paul concluded that improving the quality of recruitment was the single biggest impact area for the business. He took it upon himself to lead the transformation of recruiting sales people. SAP MENA subsequently recorded its highest performing year ever in 2014 and doubled its rate for converting sales opportunities into contracts.

Another student on the same Master’s course was a sales manager with three team members on performance improvement plans (PIPs) facing imminent redundancy. Sales managers are notorious in finding it hard to turn around PIP situations, but to the student’s delight and surprise, after reflecting and using an Appreciative Inquiry approach of looking at the positives rather than the traditional negative mindset, all three PIP employees were coached to success and are now solid performers.

Overall, reflective professionals tell us that they feel more confident in their role, better understand what works and what does not and have the mental tools to continue to improve at pace – a vital legacy.

I firmly believe that this reflective practice approach that focuses on the learning agility of students is an innovative new blueprint for learning that can outpace the needs of the market in any profession. It marks a seismic shift away from traditional learning and towards actually delivering performance improvement by working smarter. And what HR leader seeking increased business relevance can afford to ignore that opportunity?

Web sites

http://www.microscope.co.uk/opinion/Learning-innovation-driving-revenue-growth-in-the-IT-world

http://telecoms.com/opinion/learning-innovation-can-outpace-market-change-in-the-telco-world/

http://social.eyeforpharma.com/commercial/learning-can-outpace-market-change-pharmaceutical-world

Note

1. http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/managing-tomorrows-people/future-of-work/journey-to-2022,jhtml

Corresponding author

Ian Helps can be contacted at: ihelps@consalia.com