Finding the Heartbeat of Your Talent Acquisition Transformation

Part 2 of Allyn Bailey’s Series on Driving Talent Acquisition Transformation

I am thrilled by the response I got to part of this series, Building a Business Case for Talent Acquisition Transformation, in which I walked everyone through the first 7 lessons I have learned while driving TA transformation for the past six years. I love that others are getting value out of my frank conversation on what it takes to create change in talent acquisition which is a fast moving yet highly conservative business function. 

In this part 2 of the series I am going to focus on the lessons I have learned about creating and aligning an organization around a central belief system in order to gain traction for your change efforts and momentum in your executions. I call this center of your transformation efforts the heartbeat of the transformation. A repeatable rhythm that resides underneath all the choices, decisions, actions, plans, success criteria and value propositions you undertake to deliver. In my mind it is the most important place to start and the place you must return most often in your transformation work.

“For a songwriter, you don’t really go to songwriting school; you learn by listening to tunes. And you try to understand them and take them apart and see what they’re made of, and wonder if you can make one, too.”–Tom Waits

Lesson 8: Transformation requires a “why “ before you start defining all the “whats”.

Driving transformation is not the same as driving a project. Projects have a beginning, middle and an end. Aligning people to a project charter is made simpler because of the clarity that comes with defining the final product. Transformation is more challenging because it is not about a final product it is about changing a way of working, of thinking and of defining success. These are things to both articulate and, for those you want to engage with the transformation or be transformed by it, to visualize. Because of this challenge, all too often transformation programs revert quickly from their conceptual roots and begin defining themselves as a set of deliverables or products. The intent of the transformation becomes overwhelmed by the hyper focus on pinpointing products or service outputs. In fact, teams often rush to this space so quickly that they never solidify the real heartbeat of their transformation. The heartbeat is their “why”. As a result, they find themselves roaming directionless without an ability to connect the things they have identified as outputs with how they will achieve a transformative goal or how those outputs will even connect to each other. Imagine your favorite song. Now ask yourself if you could recognize it, play it on an instrument or even hum along in unison with someone else if the beat was removed. You may wander your way onto some sort of musical sound, but it is not very likely to sound harmonious without a beat to guide you. The beat connects the elements of the song together to make them all make sense and coordinated and produce a song made up of multiple notes and tones. Like a song your transformation needs a “why” to pull the disparate pieces together, to keep everything aligned to and in the end ensure you end up with something that makes sense, and is recognizable as a thing.  

It must belong to everyone not just you.

Lesson 9: You are going to define a “why” and then you need to be comfortable letting it take a back seat to your fellow travelers’ interpretation of the “why”.

One of the biggest challenges of any transformation change agent is coming to terms with the fact that you will spend countless hours, years even discovering the why, understanding the “why”, marinating in the “why”. You do this all in an effort to gain belief from others in the “why” and alignment to the “why”, but in the end if you do your job right, your fellow travelers will become so connected to the “why” they will start to alter it in ever so slight ways so that it speaks directly to them and their needs. They will take over the “why” and morph into something that will meet the intent of your original “why”, but be translated through their own words, their own experiences, their own priorities. It can feel in those moments they have taken your beautiful baby which you have nurtured and raised and given it a mohawk, pierced its ears, handed it a leather jacket and strapped it on the back of a motorcycle to show it off without any consideration to you and all your efforts. It can feel like it was bastardized, and it can feel frustrating. I am here to tell you from experience, get over it. If you want your transformation baby to live your fellow travelers need to feel like the “why”, its heartbeat is not just something they sign up to support, but something they feel as deeply about as you do. You must let them think the “why” is their baby to dress up and show off however they need to.

"Transformation literally means, going beyond your form." – Wayne Dyer

Lesson 10: The trick to getting people to understand the “why” of your transformation is to use psychological learning theories.

So, here is where I let my brain development, psychology geek flag fly and talk to you about how you get those fellow travelers to adopt your transformation “why” and become so enamored and aligned to it they feel like it is not only theirs but that it is like a second skin to them. You need them to understand the heartbeat of the transformation, so when faced with decisions, choices, forks in the road they will be able to reflect on the “why” and instinctively make the decisions necessary to achieve the transformation. This is how a transformational heartbeat works. It becomes the jiminy cricket on everyone’s shoulders reminding them of what to do versus what not to do. Getting to this nirvana state of stakeholder consciousness is easer philosophized about then done. It requires discipline and purposeful planning. I am going to provide you with some key concepts to help you do this that come from my roots as an early childhood educator and are foundations of learning theory. First, the primary thing you need to know about how people learn something new, like your transformational “why”, is in two mental steps. First, they assimilate the knowledge. This means they mentally associate the new information with a thing they already know that their brain feels it is most like. Like a child just learning words may see a cow and call it a dog because they know dog. They have a dog a t home and the cow is like a dog to them. It has four legs and head and a tail etc. Therefore you find yourself frequently disavowing your stakeholders of strong beliefs that what you are proposing to them is just like something else they saw somewhere, tried before, or think already exists. When you find yourself in these dialogues know your fellow travelers are in the assimilation phase of adopting your transformation “why”.  Your goal is to get them to the accommodation stage, this is where they are saturated with enough information that their brain can no longer justify continuing to lump your transformation “why” with another thing or concept. It is just too different. At that point they will create a new mental file card that is unique for the transformation “why” and they will be at a place where they can leverage that file card to interpret the world around them. 

The next learning strategy I recommend you adopt is scaffolding. Scaffolding is actually a simple process but requires a bit of purposeful planning in your interactions. Scaffolding is feeding your stakeholders information bit by bit, so they understand it and then applying some psychological tactics to make that more impactful. In scaffolding your role is to facilitate the learning be observing your fellow travelers. When you think they have started to absorb one step of the information ask them questions that push your participants to think forward one more step. The difference between this and standard strategies is that you are not telling people things you are leading them to discover new ideas that they are more likely to assimilate quicker and feel a stronger affinity for then the ones you just told them. My last geeky psychological tip for you it to recognize when your audience is in the process of assimilating information and when it is a good time to up the critical questioning you provide to push them into the full assimilation process. This moment of optimal learning is called the zone of proximal development. It is easy to recognize. It is the moment that after what felt like a seemly peaceful series of interactions where your fellow travelers are engaging with you, seem interested and are being basically pleasant they start to freak out. They suddenly ask you to prove things again. Explain something you told them ten times before. They are freaking out because they are seriously uncomfortable and feeling confused, their brain is recognizing that the idea, the “why “, you are showing them is actually not the same as what they accommodated it to be and they are birthing that new file card. You are witnessing the struggle of assimilation, through their frustration and irritation. The whole reason their brain ends up having to create a new file card is because they will reach a level of mental fatigue where trying to cram the new ideas into the old file card becomes too much for them to mentally tolerate.  So, with this knowledge of how the brain takes concepts and makes use of them for making decisions, and choices, reflect on how many times your took that moment when your stakeholders seem to go a bit batty and see it as a sign to back off and give them a break. It is at that moment you should have and you should in the future purposefully and with grace push them forward with probing questions that force them to continue to reflect on how the new idea is in fact different than the old one.

"Dancing Apart to Music With a Beat is My Legacy." – Chubby Checker

Lesson 11: A beat needs notes added to it to make it a song. The notes need to resonate together to make a song.

A transformation is not a project. I said that in the beginning, but it does have several projects embedded in it that breathe life into it. These projects are made up of the “whats”, the deliverables, the things you are going to act on, tangibly create, or emphasize. I like to think about these outputs you will generate, like process changes, technology implementations, organizational structure changes etc. as individual notes in your transformation song. In isolation they are ok, but when you combine them in just the right way, playing them with the beat in the background connecting them together they create something amazing and unique. To get to this you need to make sure you are clear in everything you choose to do or create in your transformation that you clearly say, show, tell, reiterate and tell people again, how it support the beat, the “why”. The “why” is first. The “what” is second and must support the “why”. Each additional “what” you choose to add into the transformation song needs to not only be in support of the “why” but connect to the other “whats” in a way that makes sense. Your job as a transformation leader is to ensure every “what” moves the organization closer to realizing the “why” and that everyone of your fellow travelers can see how the dots connect.

“When opportunity knocks, it’s too late to prepare.”― John Wooden

Lesson 12: You need to be front and center on the opportunity train.

The unwritten reality of transformation in talent acquisition is that it is not a straight line. One of the other ways it differentiates itself from a project is that it is much more a movement then a moment. Let that sink in for a minute, because to maintain your sanity in the transformation game you need to be very comfortable with things taking off, stopping suddenly, being forgotten, and then arising from the ashes in some unexpected place. If you are tied to your transformation as being a project executed on a linear timeline you will live disappointed and frustrated. All the work of embedding your “why” in your fellow travelers and the purposeful planning of their new assimilated thought patterns is to allow you to drive transformational change in what may look like a series of disconnected pieces of work that you were able to leverage as an opportunity to make progress. Your fellow travelers, who by this point are invested in their interpretation of the “why”, will serve as your forward scouts. As they participate in ongoing projects and keep the business running, they will without realizing it be advocating for transformational thinking, ideas and initiatives that connect to the heartbeat of your transformation. Sometimes they will run alone, slowly creating bottoms up change and sometimes they will realize what they are seeing as an opportunity for you to help take the transformation movement further and they will find ways to include you, invite you in and maybe even clear the way for you to leverage an opportunity to make a big move or create a big “what”. 

Your job as a transformational talent acquisition leader is to be like an owl. First to set the bait by providing a clear “why” that you get others to assimilate. Then you sit there quietly going with the flow, almost so still the others forget you are there, but you are watching your head spinning 360 degrees looking for any moment to spread your wings swoop in and catch your prey. First you focus on the “why” then the “what”.

In the wise words of Megan Trainor in her classic "Can't Dance", focus on helping your fellow travelers find the beat and the rest will take care of itself.

I met this shy boy, cute as hell and grabbed him by the hand.

He pulled me back, I asked what's wrong. He said, "oh, I can't dance".

I said, "that's fine, just keep in time and show off what you got".

If you mess up, boy, I won't mind as long as you don't stop.

Woah, na na, don't stop.

Oh, na na, don't stop

I’d enjoy hearing your lessons and experience in driving talent acquisition change. Please share them in the comments below and join me in part three of the series when I dissect the lessons, I’ve learned in Understanding what your customer needs and framing your commitments to provide it.