Innovation in Human Capital Management
In my existential search for meaning in HR, I’ve tried for a very long time to understand what HR could really do for the business. Certainly talent and our ability to contribute to directing talent’s growth through talent management is very important to our organization’s viability and competitiveness for the future. But this doesn’t change the way we look at human capital. In fact, to most of us, human capital are simply producers. Yes, we are increasingly a service society, but our view of human capital has not substantially changed. For HR to be viable in the future, we need to rearrange our understanding of what human capital is and what their contributions are. Without this fundamental change, we cannot successfully change our approach to HR strategy.
7 U$ U8 `, E% |- p+ l$ bAs I stated before, the new value of human capital is innovation. The days that workers brought skills, labor, know-how to their jobs is over. Today, we call ourselves a knowledge economy. But we’re so far past looking for simple knowledge that if we treat knowledge and intellectual capital as our most important assets, we’re screwed. Innovation capital is so much more. Beyond simple knowledge, it’s our employee’s ability to analyze, problem solve, and innovate. It’s the ability to be constantly creative and bring new ideas to the table consistently. It’s the ability to collaborate as a complete organism to develop and retrieve the best ideas out of the organization.
6 _( `" u. S9 e- S3 dInnovation and new knowledge generation is not new, we just don’t think about it in HR. We’re so involved with our HR workforce planning and our talent management, we’ve missed out on the fact that all this talent operates within an organization. It’s not the organizational culture that makes success. Neither is it talent that makes success. The interplay between culture and talent to create an environment is what will breed success. I’m not saying that we get away from talent management, HR metrics, and workforce planning. These are all good and necessary pillars that will hold up true and ongoing innovation.
2 ^" X' Q# s- C) }# P A* z* u+ |But why can’t we just stick with talent management? Because talent management does only addresses a small part of the core business need of the organizations we work for. In today’s knowledge economy, what matter is the creation of ideas. While necessary, talent simply allows us to fill orders (perhaps very well) and increase performance capacity. It does not modify the way people “think” and connect ideas. The only way this is done is through careful and cultural attention to how we create ideas, and ideas are not created individually.5 z! F$ j T, A
I’m not saying that innovation is an important output of or employees. I am also obviously not saying that innovation is the sole domain of the operations and production side of the business. I’m specifically saying that innovation is the single most important value element that our employees produce. Employees bring talent. Therefore we must manage the talent of our employees. But the output of talent is innovation. Therefore we must manage of talent must be directed to the production of innovation.
