We invited 40 CHROs to the World Port Center in Rotterdam for a dialogue amongst peers about the role of HR in strengthening business results. The report we made about the main – anonymised - findings of these sessions is now available to download (see below).
At ELP Network, our work is about helping businesses create value, today and tomorrow. How to achieve this sustainable value creation/value capturing (VC2) in today’s VUCA environment requires a significantly different mindset and set of capabilities. Ever accelerating technological advances, geo-political tensions, climate change, untenable national financial debt, terrorism, demographic evolutions etcetera create a world that impacts our businesses significantly.
Continuous value creation and value capturing in such an environment is extremely difficult, as testified by the fast decreasing lifetime of businesses across industries (remember Kodak, Nokia, Saab, Monsanto, Nutreco, C-1000, Wyeth, Organon, de Postbank...). But it is possible as proven by many others such as Microsoft, Unilever, Philips, Jumbo retail, IKEA, de Persgroep...
Critical expertise
We believe that today’s HR professionals (should) have critical skills and expertise for building resilient organisations and people that thrive in these super dynamic environments: expertise on e.g. human behaviour and motivation, learning, capability building, (team) performance, human resilience, behaviour change and organisation development (next to expertise in organisation effectiveness of course) Who else in the executive team (ET) holds this critical expertise?
It is no surprise for us that in companies that “swing”, there is a high performing ET with and/ or thanks to a well-functioning triad of CEO, CFO and CHRO. Still, in too many cases, HR is not (allowed to be) playing this role. As a consequence, these organisations are missing out on capabilities that are key in forging their success.
This is why we organised two roundtables for CHROs recently. With the HR initiative, we want to contribute in a very practical way to creating an HR community that strengthens business results. By organising (the VCI and) CHRO dialogues, we want to extract and share what (CEOs, ETs and) HR should be doing to have a value creating HR function from which the future of their business actually depends.