#HR Leadership – A wake-up call – Towards Systemic HRM!
Yesterday, May 24, I was at the airport dropping off my cousins who were travelling abroad. They checked in and got their boarding passes. Within thirty minutes of leaving them, they called me that the flight was cancelled. I drove back to the airport, picked them up and drove back home. My cousins had a lot of plans that they had to adjust, postpone, and cancel due to the sudden unexpected flight cancellation. Does that sound familiar? I am sure you would agree with me that such level of unpredictability has become a daily occurrence not only in our personal lives but business operations too.
Similarly, this emerging disruptive business environment presents complex challenges to the prevailing practices around human resources management. Classical management sciences that provide the basis for traditional analytic mindsets do not address the increasing complexity that is affecting organizations, the formulation of their challenges, and the way they create operating business models in a highly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) context. Against complexity, using traditional HRM approaches and methodologies, copying and pasting frameworks, relying on best practices and applying a ‘one-size-fit- all’ approach to problem solving and decision making is unsustainable for HRM.
The disruptive environment is a wake-up call not only for HRM leaders, but all other leaders too, that against complexity, decision making and problem solving requires a different approach to avoid inevitable business closure. To this end, riding on more than 20 years’ experience leading HRM in diverse global organizations, and using my doctoral dissertation thesis, I paused as a problem HRM dependence on models suitable for simple and complicated contexts against a highly volatile and unpredictable operational environment, characterized by chaos and complexity. Resultantly, I formulated a new approach that I labelled Systemic Human Resources Management (Sys HRM) that views an organization as composed of interdependent, interrelated, and interconnected parts that form the holistic organization. Sys HRM provides an understanding that against complexity, leaders should desist from tackling problem solving and decision making based on cause and effect, this does not work in a complex context where there is no direct correlation between cause and effect. At the backdrop of complexity, piece-meal problem solving approaches provide temporary relief, hence the reason why most change programs fail to deliver the desired results.
While Sys HRM does not replace traditional methodologies, it complements prevailing HRM methodologies and approaches. My argument is that when the context and situation is stable and predictable, HRM can use prevailing approaches and tools. However, once the context and situation become chaotic or complex, HRM should resort to Sys HRM for sustainable business performance. #Systemic HRM.
Regina Tendayi (Dr)
Author, HRM Books, Executive Leadership.