“Adapt, or Else” is the title of a recent New York Times article about AT&T, but it could easily have been about any corporation in the country. Companies face shorter lifespans because they fail to adapt to the increasing complexity of the business environment. A guiding principle for survival shared by AT&T CEO, Randall Stephenson is that “there is a need to retool yourself and you should not expect to stop.” In recent conversations with HR leaders, I’ve observed the impact of today’s business environment on HR.
HR executives are increasingly supporting the reinvention of the business, while facing their own challenges in adapting to the new normal of constant change and the need for radically new solutions. Another way to think of this is “does the cobbler’s children have shoes?” HR is often busy facilitating the business through transformation and making them more agile, but have they been able to do this for themselves? This is “Cobbler’s Children Syndrome” –the proverbial children of the shoemaker who go without shoes.
In exploring this ground and developing my own perspective on HR agility, I came across the question –“Are you future agile?” It was posed twenty years ago by HR giants Bob Eichinger and David Ulrich in Human Resource Planning magazine. In that article they shared a list of the essential HR skills of the time. In the table below you can see their list compared to a current view provided through the lens of Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends Report. It’s interesting to assess if there are any potential skills gaps on your team. How is your HR organization keeping up?