I was preparing my weekly Uni lecture earlier this week on the subject of Performance Management, for the part-time CIPD PostGrad course at Leeds Met University.
As is my want, I was looking for an angle to help inspire the students, who have just come from half a day at work ... and aren't usually in the mood to re-enact the classroom scenes from Dead Poet's Society.
I can empathise with them - remembering well my own early career - where the strategic thinking & "big stuff" learned on the CIPD course seemed very distant from the hurly-burly of day-to-day HR Operations. For the part-time students, they're considering Egdar Schien's models of Corporate Culture... having just finished a disciplinary into a mobile phone theft in the admin dept earlier that day.
My response has been to bore them into submission by reminding them that they are indeed the 'HR leaders of tomorrow' -and that their job matters.
So onto the inspiration. It's a Yorkshire story full of symbolism - Pace: a business of the digital age housed in Sir Titus' Salt's gargantuan mill in Saltaire.
It's a story of an HR Director - with CEO backing - making a clear and substantial contribution to business success. Using all that "big stuff" to actually make a difference.
It crosses engagement. organisational change, culture, internal comms - and above all a total re-calibration of the values and behaviours of the business. All driven by HR. And it's genuinely uplifting. I shared it with the students yesterday and hope it remains with them.
At a time when certain high profile HRD's are 'dissing' HR itself (claiming they are far too business oriented for the title), Jill Ezard has gone a long way to putting that one right - whilst hopefully inspiring the next generation of HR leaders that they really CAN make a difference in their chosen profession.
It's very well worth a read... and I suspect may well end up being cited in an exam answer or two, in a little under a month's time....
http://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/pm/articles/2010/04/interview-with-jill-ezard-pace-in-the-top-set.htm
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