How not to become a Bay City Rollers fan

As the dust from the GenAI chatter of 2023 settles, business reimagination is thankfully once again being talked about in more grounded terms: as a talent challenge rather than a technology challenge.

2023 was filled with previously rational people who became possessed by GenAI super-fandom. Is this something deep in our nature as humans – the need to rally and swarm periodically? GenAI? Agile? Automation? There’s always something coming over the hill to get excited (or super-excited) about. A well lived life, in a way, is a constant effort not to get caught up in the madness of crowds; not to become a Bay City Rollers fan.

McKinsey’s Eric Lamarre is worth listening to on this -- especially that if businesses want to be good at technology, they need to own that themselves, not outsource it over the long term. They need to take software development out of the IT department and make it part of the fabric of the organisation to create a culture and operations of distributed innovation.

To do this successfully and (fairly) quickly means hiring from outside, retraining intensively within, offering new career pathways to some and, yes, closing them to others.

So, if transformation is primarily a talent challenge, then what is the role of HR and talent acquisition to nurture and support distributed innovation? That depends to some degree on the preferences of the target talent.

For example.

1.???Obvious case example: Ava is a great technologist. She doesn’t want to work for a business that’s not playing on the pitch of innovation, automation and digital transformation. If she takes a job at a company that’s not already on this journey, it may be an act of self-harm. She understands that her skills will have atrophied in 5 years.?

2.????A more subtle but important example: Ian has a brilliant business mind, or maybe just quite a good one. He will see (because of his understanding of the organisation’s structures, operations, processes and costs) applications of technology and automation that Ava won’t necessarily see. Is a company that is fully on its tech transformation journey attractive to Ian as an employer? Maybe a job with a company that has one foot on the dancefloor and a toe in the water is more attractive to him in terms of career. With a business not yet fully committed to the data/tech/automation/AI transition, it’s clearer to see how to affect progress and it may be easier for Ian to hit incentive targets.

?

3.??Take another example. Harry is a great and experienced marketing or HR person. Does he want to work for the exciting company in the crucible of (probably quite painful, or at least unsettling) change, transformation and re-imagination? Or, does he want to work with the company with one foot on the dancefloor, flirting with ideas about serious change but not yet committed? Or, is he more attracted by a third entity – the comfort blanket of a slow moving, conservative incumbent where he will be well paid and pensioned, where people talk about transformation but nothing much ever happens??

Talent acquisition teams at businesses that want to out-compete their rivals in the next phase have to chase all three of these people. The business wants and needs them all to work for the same company, but very different strategies are needed to persuade them to do so.

?

#HR #Talentacquisition #AI #Automation #GenAI #transformation #baycityrollers #careerpaths #incentives #consulting?