Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/94708
Thought Leader "hard" (strategy, structure, and systems) or "soft" (shared values, skills, style, and staff) elements. Working through key questions for each of these elements, change agents identify areas that need to be aligned to improve performance. The exercise ensures that people have the capability to make decisions based on data, rather than on hypotheses or commonly held beliefs. It is important, he says, that this exercise be short and engaging and that it provide data that is easy to understand. The goal is not to create a long and dense set of results that is difficult to process. Having identified what changes have to be made, Saul has adapted the Kotter model of transformation and introduced the thinking of Jean-Francois Manzoni to create a roadmap to guide the organisation as it moves forward. The seven-step roadmap begins by creating a sense of urgency for change and moves the business from creating a belief that change is possible through quick wins to a culture of continuous change. Combining Manzoni's and Kotter's approaches was necessary, says Niall, because people believed that each stage of the Kotter model was done sequentially. Manzoni showed that each stage is a lever and that sometimes it is necessary to pull more than one lever at a time. While HR is at the heart of the strategic planning, Saul will work with the leadership team to contextualise the need for change for people at all levels within the business. Leaders must convince people that the path they have chosen is the correct one, and they must bring people along that path with them. The biggest fear that most people have in a changing environment, says Saul, centers on whether they will be relevant in the new organisation. Saul's experience demonstrates that HR can move up the value chain and take a leading role in restructuring and change management situations. The risk of not doing so, he believes, is that the business can easily ignore an important resource and see the HR function as a mere commodity which can be disposed of. Early Days Saul began his career in Ireland in the early 1970s in a clerical role in the finance department of a semi state-owned company and became involved in union activities, quickly rising to be chairman of the union committee. After some early success in negotiations with the company, he became interested in HR because, as he put it, "the solutions seemed so obvious from my side of the table." He joined a hospital that was hiring an administrative assistant role focusing on HR and began his HR career there. Saul left to join the Irish Productivity Center, a state-funded organisation that had been set up through the Marshall Plan to sit between employers and trade unions. As a consultant, he conducted action research to discover which forms of employee participation were most effective in engaging workforces with business issues. He left the IPC to join a small but rapidly growing company working on the docks in Dublin where he developed a partnership between the management and the workforce by creating a culture of engagement on business issues which averted strikes. When the company was acquired by an English concern, Niall took over responsibility for contracting and management of business sites, where he gained general management experience. After a stint at the Irish Employers Federation, specialists in industrial relations support services, he moved into more traditional HR director roles. Saul holds a master's degree in change management from the joint Hautes Études Commerciales de Paris and INSEAD programme and is a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. He is a board member of Skillnets, a state-funded enterprise supporting training and upskilling as key elements in Ireland's national competitiveness, and of McLaw & Associates, a business consultancy firm. He has served as a board member of FÁS (the Irish national training and employment agency) and was chairman of the audit committee which was responsible for uncovering and pursuing major control irregularities in the organisation. As a recognised expert in the areas of strategic HR and organisational change, Saul is involved with a number of academic institutions. He is a trustee of the Industrial Relations Research Trust based at Trinity College in Dublin, an adjunct professor of the National College of Ireland, and he lectures on the topic of designing and leading organisational change and strategic HR in Ireland and at Syracuse University and the University of Colorado. He also coaches CEOs and senior executive teams enrolled in the Duke and Stanford business schools' year-long development programmes. In the end, Saul concludes that all that activity benefits a client list that includes operations as diverse Irish Life and Permanent, Dawn Farms, ITAlliance Group, and SLA Mobile. "I find that the spread between the exposure to leading-edge thinking on the academic side, coupled with my own experience in leadership roles in a variety of business settings over the years, greatly strengthens my capacity to offer business leaders and executives a tailored range of lenses, and approaches," he says. "That helps them identify and contextualise the actions they need to take to improve their own performance and that of their companies." FALL 2012 | www.hroglobal.com [37]