In a recent article, Simon Parkin identified three major challenges facing today’s HR professionals: Leadership Effectiveness, Talent Acquisition and Management, and HR Capability and Capacity. I fully agree with Simon’s assessment: these are, indeed, the top challenges HR professionals must tackle to enable their organizations to compete and thrive in today’s environment.
We have moved into an era where traditional support services – HR, Finance, IT, Administration, Legal etc. – are under increasing daily pressure to produce a more direct impact on business results. The business rationale for this pressure is easy to understand. Organizations – both public and private – are being pushed by customers, boards of directors, analysts, and investors to do more with the resources they have or – in many cases – do more with less.
In 2011, the Queen's University Industrial Relations Centre (IRC) began a longitudinal, practitioner-focused research project that explores the state of the HR profession in Canada. Now, as part of this on-going project, we are following up with a second survey.
With thirty years of experience working in a unionized environment, I have observed a variety of collaborative relationships between employer and union. Much of my career has been spent helping to evolve the management-union relationship from confrontation to collaboration.
Driving mountain roads can be very tricky. With the exception of those who drive a super-powered something able to negotiate a significant vertical climb, mere mortals learn that reaching the top of the mountain requires learning the skill of turning switchback corners. Go too slowly around the curve, and you run the risk of the vehicle stalling in the climb. Go too fast, and it can be a kissing-the-guardrail moment, or over the edge you go.
Projects are often the means by which much change is instituted within organizations. As such, the literature and concern with project management are also increasing. There does not seem to be the attention in the literature that specifically looks at the impact when a change in project leadership occurs during the life-cycle of a project.