How can HR support its managers in change and OD?

This is the final post in a short series looking at aspects of organizational change and development during a recession. The series expands on some of the points in Annie Hayes's feature article on the topic in HRZone.co.uk.

This final offering examines HR's role in supporting its managers in their leadership of successful organizational change and development.

What should HR's contribution be?

I found this a difficult question to answer. The ability of a particular HR (or OD) department to support managers in their change-leadership role will vary immensely. Perhaps most crucially, though, it will depend on how the department as a whole, and individuals within it, are viewed by their peers.

Change leadership is strategic leadership (at whatever level of the organisation it occurs). So HR/OD needs to be seen to be capable of addressing hard, strategic issues and to command the respect of other departments. If HR/OD is associated solely with "the soft side of change", it is unlikely to be able to bring its influence to bear on the 'hard' aspects of the business change agenda.

In reality, of course, it is often the so-called "soft" side of change that many managers find hardest to get to grips with. And perhaps this is why these more challenging aspects of the leadership role are often shied away from or spoken about in disparaging terms - as a sort of defence mechanism.

A revised agenda for HR?

In some instances, HR help to perpetuate this view themselves, by avoiding or ignoring the hidden, messy and informal aspects of organizational life. In such cases, they limit their own attention to the 'safer', less contentious territory that is bounded by the conventional HR agenda.

But, professionally, HR practitioners would see themselves as the ‘people experts’. As such, it would be valuable if they recognized that organizations are socially complex. And that this unavoidable complexity arises solely from the fact that organizations are made up of people in interaction.  By adopting this stance, they would be much better placed to advocate effectively for the revised change-leadership agenda that these in-built dynamics of organizations imply.

In many (most?) cases, this would require a broadening of the scope and philosophy of HR. Amongst other shifts in perspective, it would need to embrace the following points: 

• The focus of leadership communication needs to move beyond ‘getting management’s message across’ to one of influencing the local sense-making process.
• Organizations are unavoidably political processes, in which in-built and emerging tensions between diverse individuals, organizational units and competing interest groups are both the source of potential conflict and of organizational vitality.
• Power relations are critical in determining what, when and how things happen.
• Effective working of the organization depends on informal, get-the-job-done processes and social relationships as well as - if not more than - those shown on the formal organization chart.
• Organizational culture is not something that can be designed, built and "rolled out" as a formal set of values and behaviours; it is an ongoing process of shared meaning making, which is itself influenced by the patterns of past, sense-making interactions.
• Much of what happens in organizations is paradoxical and cannot be reduced to simple either-or choices (e.g. between continuity and change; team working and individuality; centralization and decentralization; and so on). Conventional, "keep it simple" wisdom would see the removal of these tensions as a key purpose of management. As a result, managers often seem content to ride the organizational equivalent of the ‘Big Dipper’.They shift their strategies and structures back and forth, for example, between centralization and decentralization, control and empowerment, diversification and divestment, growth and downsizing, team working and individuality and so on. This has become so much a taken-for-granted aspect of organizational life that the underlying assumptions on which this constant restructuring and upheaval is based are rarely if ever questioned.

All of these factors, and others, arise because organizations are dynamic networks of people interacting with each other. So it seems to me that an understanding of these dynamics, and how they impact upon business performance, should be at the heart of HR practice.

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See also the earlier posts in the series:

Organization development in the downturn

Should change/OD strategies be different during a recession?

Is the current economic climate the right time to be thinking about OD?

How can we ensure attempts at change and OD succeed?

What is the leaders' role in OD?

Comments

[Stephen Billing]

Hi Chris,
Once again you make some excellent points. I am struck by your first conclusion bullet point, that leadership communication needs to be about influencing the local sense-making process.

You are pointing to this as an HR role, which I agree if HR are responsible for the leadership messages. Sometimes line managers want to do this themselves.

And often they engage the internal communications people, or (in my experience the worst option of all) a PR firm to do the communications.

PR firms especially, and internal comms people also in my experience seem to be focused on flashy (and often expensive) means of getting management's message across.

The sense making process gets no look in when this perspective dominates the communications approach

[Chris Rodgers]

Hi Stephen,

Many thanks for your comments on this and earlier posts in this mini series.

On this particular post, I was puzzled when I read your comment about my apparent advocacy of a leading role for HR in the local sense-making process. Having re-read it, I can see how that perception might have arisen. My intended position is fully in line with yours. That is, I see this as primarily the responsibility of line managers.

What I had intended to convey was the view that those in HR need to expand their philosophy and understanding to recognise and support this key aspect of organizationl dynamics (along with the other aspects I have pointed to).

As I see it, only line managers can lead change. Others (including HR) can help to facilitate change but they can't lead it. And a critical leadership role of line managers is to actively engage in the local sense-making process.

[Stephen Billing]

Ok, that sounds fine to me, Chris.

I do think HR does not get involved enough in what is going on in the shadows - more concerned about the formal channels. But that's another story!