CSHRP Event - October 21 - Peter Cappelli from The Wharton School - Sustainable Agility: How HR Can Survive the Rapid Pace of Change

Session Objectives:

The age-old HR goal of supporting the business by aligning with strategy has become untenable. Business strategies now change too fast for supporting practices to keep up, and the demand from business leaders to become agile with faster change is heaping major stress on employees. The director of The Wharton School’s Center for Human Resources details how HR leaders can straddle the apparently conflicting goals of advocating for employees’ interests and helping their organizations pursue sustained agility.

A 麦肯锡 survey found that three-quarters of business leaders said that organizational agility was among their top three priorities. Furthermore, those leaders believed more of their employees should undertake agile ways of working. On average, respondents believed 68% of their companies’ employees should be working in agile ways, compared with the 44% of employees who currently do.

The Conference Board survey of HR leaders indicates that HR is getting the message. A full 94% of HR leaders say it is important for HR to be able to “reconfigure its capabilities and resources rapidly.” In ranking their own most important needs for change, “more flexible deployment” and “adopting agile methods” took two of the top three positions, beaten only by leveraging AI.

But HR leaders still think their organizations have quite a way to go when it comes to actually making the necessary changes. A Gartner survey of HR leaders found that only 19% feel their workforce is capable of changing direction in the face of changing needs and priorities.

The reason for needing agility is to respond to uncertainty. We don’t know what the next business opportunity will be, so we don’t know which competencies it will require. We don’t know which of our management practices would support or fight those needs. The traditional HR focus on planning and then aligning with the plan is simply at odds with any serious attempt to deal with uncertainty. It was hard enough to develop competencies even when strategy was stable. How we go about developing them when strategy may be in continuous change is not at all obvious.

Session Format: Introductions, Presentation, Q&A Discussion, Wrap Up

Who Should Attend: CPO/CHRO, VP/Directors/Managers of People/HR, HR/People Business Partners from CSHRP Member Firms

Speaker:

Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at 美国宾夕法尼亚大学 - 沃顿商学院 and Director of @Wharton’s Center for Human Resources.? He's also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, MA, served as Senior Advisor to the Kingdom of Bahrain for Employment Policy from 2003-2005, was a Distinguished Scholar of the Ministry of Manpower for Singapore, and was Co-Director of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center on the Educational Quality of the Workforce from 1990-1998. He was recently named by HR Magazine as one of the top 5 most influential management thinkers, by NPR as one of the 50 influencers in the field of aging, and was elected a fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources (NAHR) .? He received the Michael Losey Award for lifetime research from the Society for Human Resource Management? and an honorary Doctorate degree from the University of Liege in Belgium.? He is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and writes a monthly column for HR Executive magazine. His work on performance management, agile systems, and hiring practices, and other workplace topics appears in the Harvard Business Review. His latest book is Our Least Important Asset: Why the Relentless Focus on Finance Hurts Employees and Business (Oxford 2022).

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