Leadership Lemmings

Every time I hear, “But we’ve always done it this way, Marc,” I feel like screaming.

Bruce Banner turning into the Hulk sort of thing. Deep breaths and count to ten. Control yourself, Marc (and stop talking about yourself in the 3rd-person). Honestly, it makes me feel a bit crazy when customers buy or upgrade to our HXM tools, then tell me they won’t be changing their processes to suit the new technology.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.

With that moment taken, I tell them that even with all the whiz-bang technology in the world, they won’t be seeing a different outcome in their results. Unless it's a deterioration. The value they’re leaving on the table for themselves, their employees and their business is incalculable.

Technology is an enabling tool. It allows users to do things in better ways for better outcomes, but it doesn’t do the job for them. New tech might look different, but if it’s being used in the same way as the old tech, the only difference is the shine.

Kicking the can

Performance management is a great example of a process SuccessFactors can improve, but even post-purchase some customers still manage it the HCM way, using talent management tools like 9 Boxes and bi-annual meetings to talk about development plans and interactions that happened months ago. Seriously, why move off spreadsheets if you don’t want to change the way you do things and the only reason you’ve bought new software is because it might keep stakeholders off your back for a while under a pretense of embracing change.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.

A Kodak moment doesn’t mean a nice photo anymore, does it? They invented digital photography technology, continued to kick the analogue printing can down the road, and their own creation ate them. When we search online, we don’t Lycos, we don’t Yahoo, we don’t Infoseek; what do we do? We use the search engine developed years later, but which still became the leader thanks to listening and adapting to the needs of its users.

Imitation; the sincerest form of competition

Google was the one, two, three, four, five, sixth commercial search engine to market. It copied the idea of selling search terms from goto.com, listened to its customers, and blew the competition away. And despite the efforts of some of the biggest companies in the world to copy and improve on its products and services, Google has continued to disrupt itself and innovate; it continues to listen to the changing needs of its customers and eats itself to survive in preference to being swallowed by a hungry competitor.

Power in the people

Returning to the HR context, SuccessFactors (and the slew of HXM competitors who have since copied us) give companies an opportunity to disrupt their HR processes and improve outcomes for their employees. And in a career environment where people can move from one job to another without needing to stand up from their home-office chair, providing people with a poor employee experience is exactly how businesses will have their own Kodak moments.

HXM processes can and do enable the type of interactions that help to keep people engaged at work, so kicking on with HCM will not end well for leaders who persist in doing it the same way they always have. They may as well be the proverbial lemmings walking off a cliff.

Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six...