People Analytics: A key component to your HR Technology strategy

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

Deloitte Capital H Blog, October 28, 2021

by Jamaal Justice and Albert Hong

What do you get when you combine promising new technological advances, a host of evolving solutions, and droves of eager customers who see the potential of these new solutions to move their businesses forward but are uncertain about what they should buy? The people analytics market.

The promise of generating actionable insights in every aspect of work, the workplace, and the workforce has created fast-growing demand for people analytics (PA). A myriad of vendors are seeking to meet the demand with an ever-expanding mix of solutions (e.g., tools for Human Capital Management Systems (HCM), data ingestion, data warehouse/lake, extract/transform/load (ETL), business intelligence, and advanced analytics that are evolving as quickly as their underlying technologies.

The explosive proliferation of Human Resources (HR) technology and solutions is a challenge for HR leaders at every step along the PA maturity curve for two principal reasons. First, the ideal set of PA tools and solutions for meeting all organizational needs has not yet emerged. Second, most organizations are still in the process of developing the capabilities needed to evaluate their PA needs: Deloitte’s 2020 High-Impact People Analytics study found that 82% of organizations globally are in the earlier stages of their maturity journey.

Whether HR leaders are in the early stages of building PA capabilities or trying to stay on the cutting edge of what is possible, they need a North Star — a guiding light and a path that will lead them to a strategy and HR technology architecture capable of delivering on the promise of PA across their organizations over time. Read the rest here.

What’s Your Return on Visibility?

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

MIT Sloan Management Review, October 26, 2021

by Michael Schrage



Digitalization driven by COVID-19 has accelerated and transformed management’s ability to track what and how workers are doing. This growth in networked visibility significantly increases the risk of institutional and interpersonal conflict, as well as challenges to cultural norms.

Many workers rationally fear that enhanced monitoring empowers management — and micromanagement — at their expense. When experienced as corporate surveillance, monitoring implies a lack of trust and an invasion of privacy, especially when people are working from home. That’s not sustainable; no one wants to feel spied on. Consequently, if not ironically, leaders are being pushed to make visibility far more visible.

While greater transparency around visibility can allay employee fears, it may also expose and provoke clashes in core values. If the interactions on a distributed work team, for example, are appropriately inclusive, but that negatively affects productivity, what happens next? Workers in general — and remote workers in particular — want credible narratives explaining visibility’s benefits, costs, and trade-offs. Opacity around visibility invites credible accusations of hypocrisy.

Visibility, like capital, compensation, and digital transformation, requires explicit purpose and policies. Leaders, not just HR and IT administrators, should explicitly manage visibility as an enterprise asset. Read the rest here.

A transactional approach to power

strategy+business, October 13, 2021

by Theodore Kinni


Photograph by Metamorworks

Transactional has become something of a dirty word in the business world. It suggests a short-term, one-off mindset and a commoditized approach to value. Nobody wants transactional relationships with employees, suppliers, or customers. But when it comes to exercising power, understanding power as a transaction may be a leader’s best bet.

That’s because power is something leaders are commonly thought to possess, either by force of personality or by dint of positional authority. The mistaken idea that you are inherently powerful can be extraordinarily seductive—and comes with a variety of leadership pitfalls. Hubris (an exaggerated sense of self-confidence) is one of them. Arrogance (the belief that you are smarter than everyone else) is another. Worst of all is omnipotence—the conviction that you are above the rules. From there, it’s only a short hop to becoming living proof of Lord Acton’s famous line, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

There are lots of worthy prescriptions for avoiding the pitfalls of power, including servant, humble, and empathic leadership. But they depend on a level of self-awareness and mindfulness that can be difficult to muster on a day-to-day basis. If you struggle with the siren call of power, it might be easier to rethink your view of power than to remake yourself.

Organizational behavior professors Julie Battilana of Harvard Business School and Tiziana Casciaro of the Rotman School of Management offer leaders (and followers) such a reframing in their new book, Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It’s Everyone’s Business. They do it by tapping power dependence theory, a branch of social exchange theory that was developed starting in the 1960s by Richard Emerson, then a sociologist at the University of Cincinnati. Read the rest here.