As an HR professional, I always have a curious mindset and learning aptitude and to learn from the best. It is always pleasing to speak with Dr. Dave Ulrich on topics of leadership, HR Transformation, HR Analytics, Learning and Development, and recent HR trends. I interviewed Dr. Ulrich 3 times now on my YouTube Channel. During the beginning of this pandemic time, I interviewed Dr. Ulrich at the end of March 2020, and below are some of the answers he provided me, the rest you can find it on my YouTube Channel.
More About Dr. Dave Ulrich
Dr. Ulrich ranked as the #1 management guru by Business Week, profiled by Fast Company as one of the world’s top 10 creative people in business, a top 5 coach in Forbes, and recognized on Thinkers50 as one of the world’s leading business thinkers: Dave Ulrich has a passion for ideas with IMPACT! His bestselling books and popular speeches have inspired the corporate and academic agenda. Dave has co-authored over 30 books and 200 articles.
He and his colleagues have shaped the HR profession and he has been called the “Father of Modern HR” and “HR Thought Leader of the Decade” by focusing on HR outcomes, governance, competencies, and practices.
What tips can you give to people to be productive while working from home?
I was teaching a course at the University on Wednesday night, two weeks ago, I turned to my wife, who had sent me a text stating that the Utah Jazz Basketball Team which I follow. One of their players had been detected with coronavirus, so they canceled the game. The next day, the entire season was canceled and then things snowballed. It has been two weeks; in just 17 days, our world turned completely upside down.
Most companies have done what they have needed to do. They are in a moment of changing work as social distancing forces us to be apart. This may mean working at home or working virtually. For instance, I do not want to repeat what everybody already knows: finding a space, managing time, managing work-life, managing your kids, letting the phone ring, letting the dog bark.
What I am interested in is this: How does the work that employees perform from varying locations create value for our customers? We want our customers to see our firm as innovative. What am I doing in my remote work that is innovative? If we want our customers to say, “I’m doing business with this firm because they collaborate with me,” I have got a model that creates collaboration. My interest is less about all those administrative things. I want to do the graduate work of making sure no matter where, when, or how we work, that the work we do creates the right culture to our key customers.
What can HR leaders do to help their employees that are now spread all over and are zooming into meetings?
I posted a piece on this topic on LinkedIn a week or so ago and I said we love to honor first responders. If there is a fire, the firemen who go in or firewomen as the first responder. I think there is an emotional first response in this kind of crisis, there are multiple responders, and business leaders are first responders. But I think in HR, we are also the first responders on the emotional side, that is our strength, that is our passion. We become partners with business leaders to be the first responders around the emotional trauma that we face.
I think the real challenge in this kind of situation is, to do what I call navigate paradox. On one hand, I want to be the emotional caregiver; it means I give care emotionally to those employees. On the other hand, I have got to create a competitive organization.
I see some people posting and say, “In this time of crisis, HR should not worry about business. We should just worry about people.” That is not going to work. The best thing you can give an employee is a company that wins in the marketplace. This challenge of navigating the paradox between caring for the individual and simultaneously creating a competitive organization, that’s where HR leaders can become very almost like artists because there is not a recipe.
Q: You posted your 100th article a while ago; how can job seekers use LinkedIn to find jobs?
Dr. Ulrich: I think we live in a world that is changing so quickly. I have written a lot of books. What happens with a book, it takes me about six to nine months to get the ideas, six to nine months to write it, and then six to nine months to get it published, that’s two years. By that time, the ideas already are gone.
Now, sometimes they involve big ideas such as leadership, capital, index, market-oriented ecosystems, as these are fundamentally ground-breaking ideas. The books that I have written deserve the time because they are going to have a long life. But I think a lot of times the shelf life today of an idea is getting shorter.
I have found LinkedIn is a great platform because you can put an idea together and up within 24 or 48 hours, and then you begin to build a brand.
My advice to those seeking a job is to use LinkedIn to create your brand. What is it I want to be known for? Can I do a post on LinkedIn in a regular way that helped me recognized for the brand I am trying to build? Am I trying to build a brand of thought leadership: ideas with action? I hope when people read my posts or my articles or my comments, they begin to get a sense of that brand. LinkedIn becomes a platform for establishing and creating a personal brand.
Based on that work and culling extensive research, I wanted to share insights to “discover opportunities in this present COVID-19 crisis.” I will provide 10 insights in days (one a day Monday through Friday) for two weeks. Each insight has a short video, inviting comments from others, and sharing resources for further information. (you can check the video’s on Dr. Dave Ulrich LinkedIn Page.)
I am also an HR expert and I follow your posts in terms of the trends you talk about every year. What HR trends for 2020 are you seeing?
I think the major theme that we laid out for 2020 will continue. HR must create value not inside, but outside. Value is not what employees do, but what employees do so that customers are happy.
When people come to the University of Michigan to take a course, we say “What are you here for?” “I want to learn how to change the culture. I want to learn how to manage compensation. I want to learn how to develop leaders.” We have them put behind those desires with the “so that” phrase. “I want to change the culture so that my business wins – that’s still inside the company. I want to change the culture so that my business wins so that we serve customers.” If you ask the “so that” that question you eventually get outside.
What has happened with the coronavirus? The time from outside the inside has been compressed. I have got to do what I am doing in an amazingly fast change model. The basic principles are the same and add value outside-in. Make sure that our employees feel connected through their experience, or sentiment, or whatever the current buzzword is. We build the right culture, not just any culture. We give our employees -and for me, this is the one of the Red Letter wins that I am really intrigued with – we give our employees guidance to the business.
In the HR field for decades, we have been descriptive. We have a process for everything, from hiring, paying, and developing. I want to now give guidance. What should I do to hire someone so that I win in the marketplace?
I have just been working on an organizational guidance system the last year. Check our website www.rbl.ai We are going live with the first beta test of that guidance system. We have identified four pathways. HR wants to give my business guidance about talent, leadership, organization, and HR services. We now have created a free, go-online, fill out a survey, [product] and you will get a free guidance direction of what you can do to be more effective. We are doing the beta test in the next two weeks, and then we will go live with that assessment.
Dr. Ulrich; you have published a lot of HR Books such as “HR From the Outside-In” and “Leadership Code” which I recommend every HR professional to read. In your latest book “Reinventing the Organization,” leaders know that as markets and strategies change, organizations must evolve. What is the new organization, and how does it work? Can you elaborate more?
We did a study, we had 1200 businesses, 30,000 people, here is what we found. The organization had four times the impact. What we are looking at in the world today is not just a war for talent, but a victory through the organization, and that’s the title of one of our book, how do you build an organization that wins? In this changing, uncertain world, an organization is not hierarchy. It is not the roles or rules. The books on my shelf talk about responsibility and job description. The organization must be beyond agile.
We did the book and we found a case study, that was powerful. A few years ago, a woman is on a beach happens to be in the United States, with her two sons, eight and 10, and her mother, the boys go in the water. They get caught in a Riptide here, the mother jumps in, she’s in the Riptide the grandmother jumps in four or five people from the beach, jump in, and now all of a sudden, you’ve got eight or nine people in a Riptide being pulled out in the ocean. within two minutes 80 people join arms. They form a human chain. On the sand, they are standing as they get into deeper water. They have surfboards and boogie boards. They save those eight people.
Michael Phelps, the greatest swimmer in history. He could not save those people to take a level up in abstraction. They created an organization by joining arms, the 80 people quickly agilely and formed an organization that won and then they disbanded.
Arthur Young, who is the real thought leader in this book and the co-author, wanted to address the question, can big organizations scale that same logic? We discovered some that did from China, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei. In the United States, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Supercell in Europe. We looked at those organizations and found what it took to create an organization at scale? The company with that incredible sense of movement and agility. The book lays out a set of ideas and tools.
What does that mean for an employee looking for a job? If you are going into a company looking for a job, make sure that you demonstrate the agility that the company must-have. The day whatever you hire for today, the standards for today those standards will change. Companies want to hire what is called “Learning agility”. Make sure Your employer potential employer recognizes your learning agility.
What three specific tips can you provide to job seekers to elevate their job search?
Every employee is going to have their own approach, but here are my tips to jobseekers:
Number one: KNOW WHAT YOU WANT. Know your strengths, your skills, your passions, your desires, know what I want. If I do not know what I want to go in for a job interview, somebody is going to define it for me, probably not in my interest. This is my passion, this is my skills, this is what I am looking for.
Number two: SHOW HOW WHAT YOU WANT WILL BENEFIT OTHERS. People do not want to hire a narcissist. We have enough of them in the world. You see them in places, and I will not name any people to want to hire those that make others better. Know what you want and know how what you want will help others get what they want.
Number three: BUILD AND ORGANIZATION. Success is multiplied when it is shared. A great philosopher and thought leader said, “cast your bread upon the waters and look at it magnifies.”
I think number four is to be CONSTANTLY LEARNING AND ADAPT.