Interview: Rosabeth Kanter Reflecting on Change

Harvard’s Rosabeth Kanter has for years been observing, helping and writing about corporations.Dave Crisp asked Dr. Kanter to reflect on change and the role of HR.

DC- From Frontiers of Management to your more recent works you have always been in favor of managers developing an ability to change. Do you think that has come to fruition, have a lot of companies developed change capability?

RK- Companies have developed a lot of change capabilities but not necessarily in the human resource function. Consciousness of the importance of people has started permeating the management ranks. In many companies the de facto chief people officer is the CEO. The senior management team may spend more and more of its time discussing people, thinking about how to groom people, how to measure people-so that is success for the idea of human resources.

There is more emphasis on leadership development and leadership skills and more discussion of the fact that managers have to be leaders, so the quality of leadership in many companies is stronger today then it was when I began my career. There is much more sensitivity to the needs of people. There is much more concern about an empowering and attractive work environment. Line managers are doing that.

Again that is a triumph of ideas about human resources but the leadership in implementing those things has been taken by business unit managers. It may seem ironic to talk about better leadership today given the number of scandals and crises facing companies but on average I see more sensitivity, more concern, more knowledge about these domains in the companies that I work with than I would have seen 20 years ago.

I think diversity in the workplace has helped a great deal. There are many more women and minorities in leadership positions and they bring in a certain sensitivity to people because they have had to think hard about how to succeed in a world that once was closed to them.

The human resource function faces many challenges today. Technology threatens to replace the administrative functions and the very success of certain ideas means that line managers do them, not human resource executives, so I think there is a question about the future of the profession.

DC- That is an interesting point of view. Do you think there are ways in which human resource executives are dropping the ball?

RK- There was a time when they definitely dropped the ball on quality. Twelve to 15 years ago human resources could have owned quality, but many companies appointed a “Czar of Quality” who came out of engineering or manufacturing. The human resources profession was not ahead of that issue even though a great deal of quality practice had to do with empowering people to solve problems, training people in new methods, and creating more teamwork. Similarly, knowledge management tended to be led by people from IT rather than HR.

Where the human resource function has sometimes played a significant role is in creating a culture of high performance. Some companies valued the HR executive enough to change the title to Vice-President for People. Southwest Airlines for example, is held up as a role model where the HR executives were really partners with a very entrepreneurial CEO in figuring out how to implement programs. So there have been examples where the culture-building functions of HR has meant that the function has played a leadership role, including questions of change and capabilities for change.

In several companies I work with, human resources is actually leading the change effort. However, in general the HR people feel they need to stay in the background because they say it is a kiss of death to call a program another human resource initiative. It is a funny position to be in; to have expertise and then to hide it, to be staff to the line executives, to be implementers or administrators of ideas rather than the originators, and to lose the opportunity to lead some of the new concepts.
DC- What should HR’s role be?

RK- The role of HR may be very different in future. I have worked with an unusual European firm that has won many awards because of a large-scale transformation over 10 years which dramatically reshaped the culture, professionalized management, created innovative products and provided better service to customers. The human resource executive was a partner with the CEO in carrying that out. HR decided that their field was so important it should be a business in and of itself. They set up a service centre and gave it a new name. Now all of the HR professionals offer themselves as a professional consulting firm selling their services on the market, and the business units tend to buy from them. That is one model for the function. It keeps it very professional. They have to be ahead of the business managers in thinking about what they need. They are taking on change management, knowledge management and other areas in which they can make contributions.

In other cases I am seeing that parts of the HR function, such as administration of compensation and benefits, are getting outsourced. I don’t want to sound naïve, but why should compensation and benefits administration be under the same executive as legal compliance, change management and building cultures? If you ask who the customer is you’ll see it really is different. The HR function has been schizophrenic. In some cases it is serving management trying to lower costs, while in others it is serving government compliance issues and in yet others it is serving the employees and trying to get great things for them.

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Interview: Rosabeth Kanter Reflecting on Change

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