Moving Forward - Developing Organisational Capabilities | Managing for Knowledge: HRs Strategic Role

Moving Forward – Developing Organisational Capabilities

Ensuring The Right Leadership

Leadership was at the heart of the model, Towards a Blueprint for a Knowledge-Centric Culture, introduced in Chapter 2. Both knowledge management practitioners, and writers, see leadership as being key to organisations capitalising on their knowledge assets.

Peter Senge, for example, points out that:

In a learning organisation, leaders’ roles differ dramatically from that of charismatic decision makers. Leaders are designers, teachers and stewards . . . In short, leaders in learning organisations are responsible for building organisations where people are continually expanding their capabilities to shape their future (Peter Senge, 1998:587).

So what competencies do leaders need to have if they are to help the organisation’s overall capabilities?

As a practitioner I have worked with many organisations over the years, helping them develop their competency frameworks, particularly behavioural competencies. From this work, combined with what is emerging in the literature, it seems that organisations require leaders who can:

Think and act strategically

Able to work in partnership with others to create a vision for the business
Able to inspire trust and motivate others
Always alert to change, both inside and outside their own business
Takes a broader perspective
Spots and act on opportunities to grow the business and the people within it
Understands and applies the principles of systems thinking
Use difference as an enabling force for change

Build and mobilize knowledge

Knowledge aware – recognises knowledge as being a critical business asset
Incorporates knowledge capital into strategic management processes
Ensures that lessons learnt from successes and failures are used in future organisational planning
Creates a climate for learning and experimentation
Develops a knowledge ecology, i.e. creating an environment to support knowledge building and sharing
Manages the generation of new knowledge
Well-connected, both inside and outside the organisation
Understands the social architecture of the organisation

Lead change and innovation

Inspires, engages and supports others through change
Understands the emotions associated with change
Demonstrates respect for other people’s ideas
Creates the right amount of turbulence to foster creativity
Helps others to see things (i.e. problems, situations) through a different lens

Build effective teams

Creates an exciting and challenging work environment
Builds alliances with internal and external teams
Adopts a consensual approach to decision-making
Demonstrates a willingness and self-discipline to listen
Makes time to get to know individual team members and what makes them tick
Demonstrates trust by regularly sharing information, insights and ideas with team members
Values difference, in its many forms
Demonstrates multi-cultural awareness

Raise performance and deliver results

Focuses on what is important and ensures that others understand why what they are doing is important too
Challenges embedded assumptions
Sets stretching targets and standards
Has a continuous improvement mindset
Creates a context for collaborative working
Links dispersed knowledge and skills
Creates a sense of fun and playfulness at work
Breaks down organisational barriers
Addresses the things that get in the way of people doing their jobs effectively

Develop self and other

Has regular coaching conversations with others
Willingness to make time to exchange ideas with others
Develops others through a variety of approaches
Helps others to learn from their mistakes
Uses feedback as a means to improve performance – invites feedback, rather than waiting for it to be offered
Draws on a broad range of learning resources and opportunities
See every task, every project, and every event, as a learning opportunity

In order to be able to deliver on these broad areas of competence, some of the ‘soft skills’ that need to be developed include:

Self-awareness
Self-regulation
Personal motivation and energy
‘Metaskills’ (Hall, 1991): adaptability, tolerance of ambiguity, and identity change
Risk-taking
Emotional resilience
Holistic view of self and the world around them
Generous in spirit and time
Non-egotistical – willing to help others to shine

Leaders In Knowledge-Businesses – ‘Knowledge Experts’ Or ‘Knowledge Facilitators’?

If leaders are to focus on developing the capabilities outlined above, this leaves a question mark as to the extent to which they also need to invest in developing their own technical specialism. Should the leader of an R&D team, for example, be the leading expert in a particular discipline, or should his primary responsibility be that of bringing on and nurturing future experts? To what extent then do leaders need to be ‘knowledge experts’ in their own right?

There are mixed views on this subject. The English Nature case study (see Chapter 11) suggests that leaders of communities who act as facilitators add value by focusing their energy on encouraging and facilitating multi-directional knowledge exchanges. This helps to ensure that knowledge is spread across the organisation, rather than remaining localised.

However, a study of how leaders develop creative potential in their teams (Whatmore, 1999), identified that unless leaders are recognised as being the best in their field they are unlikely to have the necessary qualities to make them good leaders. The research also found that having a knowledgeable leader added to the leader’s credibility, from the team’s perspective. What we have here though is an inherent paradox; the demands of the leadership role today suggests that leaders need to move away from their technical specialism so that they can focus on developing the knowledge, skills and behaviours needed to become a first-class facilitative leader. However, organisations need to provide some reassurance that in making this shift, leaders will not be moving down a path of obsolescence.

Getting The Right Leadership – Selecting And Developing Leaders

Given the range of leadership competencies discussed above, it is no wonder that organisations have difficulty in getting the leadership element right. However, having defined and agreed the competencies relevant for your organisation this makes the job of selection and development a little easier.

Increasingly organisations are aspiring to make the selection and development process more transparent. Indeed, if one of the critical leadership qualities is that they should be self-managing and self-regulating then it is important that prospective leaders have an opportunity to self-assess themselves against the competencies needed for their role. Providing leaders with access to Development Centres is one of the formal approaches used within organisations to help them develop. The big question though is whether organizations should wait until someone has been appointed to a leadership role before giving them the opportunity to attend a Development Centre, or should this opportunity be provided earlier? There isn’t a clear-cut answer to this. But looking at the list above, commonsense shows that waiting until someone is in post is leaving it too late.

However, someone, i.e. HR, needs to be keeping an eye on the talent pipeline so that those with high potential are given the right development opportunities at the right time. It could be that individuals need to be moved, or helped to find an ‘out of the box’ development opportunity, which gives them the chance to develop/refine some of the competencies outlined above.

Developing the organisation’s leadership needs constant attention. Leaders need regular feedback, both formal and informal, as well as someone to help them interpret and decide what to do with this feedback. Who should be responsible for nurturing the organisation’s leadership? Should this be a key deliverable for senior managers? If so how much of their time should they allocate to this task? What should HR’s role be? Where can external developers add value?

Getting The Right People, In The Right Place, At The Right Time

One of the essential building blocks for building a knowledgecentric culture is defining and developing the core competences needed by those in non-leadership positions. To be able to operate effectively in the knowledge society individuals need:

Basic skills, including . . .

Questioning – our ability to ask good questions enhances and deepens our knowledge
Observation – given that people know more than they can tell, observation can be a way into other people’s ‘know how’
Listening – this means applying all of our senses
Communicating
Problem-solving
Information handling – research/investigative skills
IT literacy – adept in keyboard skills, using the intranet and internet and basic tools such as word processing and database packages
Active learner – curious, seeks out learning opportunities for self
Creative thinking
Collaborative working
Sociable and networked
Experimenter – ‘try it and see’ and ‘what if’ mindset
Making connections – between ideas, insights and people
Knowledge aware – recognises and understands the critical importance of building knowledge for the organisation and own career
Working with change

Soft skills, including . . .

Self-managing – sets and works within high-performance standards
Self-reliant
Critical reflection
Comfortable working cross-boundaries
Hunter-gatherer – willingness to seek things out for themselves
Honesty – able to be trusted to give credit to other people’s ideas and not to abuse relationships
Generous
‘Mindset’ flexibility
Risk-taker

Of course for individuals to optimise their performance they need to combine their knowledge, skills and attitude, which means engaging the head, heart and hands. In practice this means individuals need to develop:

The Knowledge to know and understand The Will and Attitude to apply their knowledge and skills, and The Skills to apply the knowledge that they have to everyday tasks and situations