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Introducing the Paskpartnership People Leadership RADAR®
25 Plays6 months ago
PASKpartnership invited more than 100 senior HR professionals, including Michael Millward to contribute to research, conducted by occupational psychologists into what a competency framework solely dedicated to hr leaders would look like. The result is the Paskpartnership People Leadership RADAR®.
PPL RADAR® provides an opportunity for HR leaders to identify and track their development needs for today and the future.
In this episode, of The Independent Minds Andrew Thompson Director of Paskpartnership explains the history, development and applications of PPL RADAR®
For more information about the PaskPartnership People Leadership RADAR® please visit WPLC.co.uk
The Independent Minds is made on Zencastr.
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Travel to Cornwall
Paskpartnership is based in Cornwall.
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You can find out more about Michael Millward, Andrew Thompson and Paskpartnership at abeceder.co.uk.
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Transcript
00:00:05
Speaker
Made on Zencaster.
Introduction to 'The Independent Minds' Podcast
00:00:07
Speaker
Hello and welcome to The Independent Minds, a series of conversations between abecedah and people who think outside the box about how work works, with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone. The Independent Minds is the podcast where we don't tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think. I am your host, Michael Millward, the managing director of Abecedah. As the jingle at the start of this podcast says, the independent minds is made on Zencaster. Zencaster is the all-in-one podcasting platform on which you can create your podcast in one place and then distribute it to all the major platforms.
00:00:50
Speaker
It really does make creating content so easy.
Meet the Guest: Andrew Thompson
00:00:54
Speaker
If you would like to try podcasting using Zencaster, visit zencaster dot.com forward slash pricing and use my offer code ABACEDA. All the details are in the description. Now that I've told you how wonderful Zencaster is for creating podcasts, we should make one that will be well worth liking, downloading and subscribing to. My guest today is Andrew Thompson from Pasque partnership, which is based in Cornwall. So when I'm invited to visit, I will be booking my trample and accommodation with the ultimate travel club. It is where you will get trade prices on flights and hotels. You'll find a link and membership discount code in the description.
00:01:37
Speaker
Hello, Andrew.
What is PaaS Partnership?
00:01:38
Speaker
Hello afternoon, Michael. Could we please start by you explaining what the PaaS partnership is? Yeah. So PaaS partnership are a boutique executive search company by boutique. We mean not huge. HR has been as our core for all of our 15 years um from CPOs to their direct reports and functional leaders. Although we do now also work on other C-suite roles and consulting sector roles from CEO and partners down to director. Of course, I know all of that because I've known the people behind PASK partnership for, well, many years, about 30 actually, but who's counting? I have over the years built quite a lot of great HR teams as a result of working with PASK partnership.
Shifts in HR Expectations
00:02:26
Speaker
You and your team though have been working on something that's very special recently, haven't you? Yeah, we're very excited about it. I mean, over the years,
00:02:36
Speaker
we've been privileged to hear thousands of hours of insights from our clients, from our candidates about what clients want from HR, the people and workforce challenges they face, and how CPOs and their direct reports and their teams are responding to those. So, over the certainly over the last few years, particularly, we've noticed quite an increasing shift, a very rapid shift in what is being expected of HR. I mean, I think we would say actually the biggest shift we've seen in a generation in expectations on HR. And it's not just being driven by COVID and the pandemic. It's also being driven by generational challenges and other socioeconomic challenges as well. So what we set out to do at the beginning of this year, we thought, actually, let's not just take
00:03:31
Speaker
the insights we've been getting over the years. Let's do a fresh piece of research and let's interview but all of the top HR leaders that we know in our network about what those challenges are.
Research Insights: Major HR Leadership Changes
00:03:43
Speaker
And let's see what comes of that because we think and we suspect that sitting behind those challenges and those big shifts are some major shifts also in what's expected of HR leaders and their competencies and their capabilities. So what is the result of all that research? So as a result of the research, we first of all published a white paper, and and that's all about the future of HR leadership. That captures six of the big shifts that we noticed. There's more than that, but they were the top six that we wanted to identify. and Big shifts like the changing relationship with employees, how particularly over recent years with Gen Z, but it's not just restricted to Gen Z,
00:04:29
Speaker
Employees are wanting a more, what we call, individuated employee experience. And that's not just about being treated as individuals, that's also being about being able to bring the whole selves to work, ah big about being able to express themselves at work, their values, what's important to them, their hopes and ambitions for the world, being able to show their vulnerabilities with mental health health issues, et cetera. And it's such a huge change in the way we're having to shift from treating people as teams to individuals. Also issues around people leaders as business leaders, how particularly chief people officers are now being expected to walk into the boardroom with both a spreadsheet and a crystal ball. That's a nice analogy.
00:05:13
Speaker
Thank you, Michael. Yeah, it's it's actually one of the phrases which has resonated most with a lot of our network. And it kind of captures that data competent requirements of HR, the ability to interpret spreadsheets, interpret data, gather data from lots of different sources to support arguments. particularly because you've got very data-literate boards, but also the fear that was created through the recent big shifts around the pandemic and and Gen Z, et cetera.
00:05:46
Speaker
has resulted in board members wanting HR to tell them what's going to be the next big surprise. yes What's the next big people issue that they're going to have to grapple with? And there's and that's where the crystal ball comes in. So that's a five to 10 year horizon they're being expected to have
Introducing the PPL Radar Tool
00:06:04
Speaker
simultaneously. You've got all of this research, you've analyzed that and come up with a white paper, but you've also developed something of a tool as well that people can use. Yeah, once we realized that the shifts were quite significant and they'd been accelerating quite rapidly over recent years, the other thing that emerged from the research was just how much that had changed the most senior HR leaders and what was expected of them and how they'd been learning on the job.
00:06:36
Speaker
over the past few years, particularly through the pandemic. I think everyone's seen that. There have been no rule books and no best practice to follow um around hybrid working and dealing with the with the health challenges. But what that had done as a result, and many of our CPOs and the CEOs that we were interviewing also were saying, we're worried that there's now a gap between the CPOs and what they've been exposed to and their teams. And so where are those
00:07:08
Speaker
Where are those leaders of the future going to come from in HR? How are they being developed and identified? how are they going to How are we going to accelerate some of the exposure of the more junior members of the team to the very same issues that we've been challenging our chief people officers are in the boardroom? So what using the same research, and we worked with a firm of occupational psychologists called Sten10. we use all of that material that we'd gathered about the big shifts and the behaviors required to tackle them to produce a competency model for HR leadership.
00:07:48
Speaker
to our knowledge, one hasn't been produced before. um It's not actually that usual to produce a competency model for a specific function, but such has been the shift in the nature of HR leadership. Actually, but that's sit at the senior levels, away from technical to much more broader socie socioeconomic issues, that we felt it was worth testing if this was going to be useful to the HR community. And so we adopted the mindset that we would only do this
00:08:21
Speaker
with an attitude of designed by HR for HR. Because there's no point developing a tool like this if it's not needed or wanted. And so we've been using um most of this year to we've developed the competitive framework. We've developed some tools to go with it, such as an online self-assessment questionnaire. We've run a pilot now of 104 people. taking that online questionnaire. We've developed a report to go with it, like you would get, a report that you would get from other tools like Insights or strength or Strengths Finder, developmental in its focus, and testing with our pilot group um if it was A, useful, and B, how would they use it in the workplace.
00:09:10
Speaker
I should point out to our audience that I was one of those people, one of that those 104 people. I found the experience very interesting and very useful, even with my great many number of years in HR. So what is it called? Let's get the name. So its full name would be Passive Partnership People Leadership Radar. And we've shortened that to PPL Radar, People Radar. ah So it's easier to remember. Okay, so it's the PPL radar and there'll be some information about it and links to it in the description on and on the Abecedah website. Thank you. But what does the PPL radar tell HR professionals and the organizations that those ah HR ah professionals work in? We've got all the research, we've got a competency model and what does it deliver into those HR people and the organizations that they work for?
00:10:06
Speaker
It essentially gives them a picture based on it's a self-assessment, but we've obviously we've worked with experienced designers who develop these questionnaires. You you respond to a series of statements by saying how much you demonstrate that behavior or you don't demonstrate that behavior. And compared to the competency descriptions that we've developed, um you can either be showing an an affinity for the behaviors described in the competency, or we've created some negative statements which show an affinity for behaviors which are kind of the opposite of that within each competency.
00:10:46
Speaker
So when you take the questionnaire, when you get your results, it essentially is showing you to what extent you're saying your behaviours are aligned to the competency. and We can also then show you how those behaviours align to the norm group that we've created um from the 104 participants that have taken place so far, which for those who are interested in the British Psychological Society insists that 100 is the minimum requirement for a for a reliable norm group.
00:11:23
Speaker
and the norm group will increase as the more people take it so they it'll become more fine-tuned the more people that are involved in it yeah and we'll end up creating additional norm groups for different demographics at the moment i would say this is quite a senior high performing norm group it's a high scoring group which gives us two Insights, first of all, that it's probably the right set of competencies because there's from our high performing group of HR leaders, there's a lot of alignment. On the other hand, we need to be careful that people don't feel when they're being compared to this high performing group that, you know, that they've got lots of weaknesses. Actually, by and large, we found that people generally align more with the competencies than not aligned
00:12:14
Speaker
with the competencies. So actually, the results show you your relative strengths and areas for potential development compared to your peer group.
Who Benefits from PPL Radar?
00:12:22
Speaker
What type of organizations do you think would benefit most from using the PPL radar? Actually, any organization, private or public sector, who have got a team of HR people with decision makers and problem solvers in it. It's not a technical framework. It's not testing your ability to conduct salary negotiations or to do a restructuring exercise resulting in redundancies or people being displaced into suitable alternative roles, et cetera. It is about leadership issues. It's about how you engage with the business and how you engage with the most complex problems facing organizations in the future. So and any HR
00:13:08
Speaker
leadership role, whether it's got a title as such or not, it doesn't matter. It's if you're engaging with the business and having to interpret business problems, propose solutions, explain influence and negotiate with line managers and with frontline staff about um what you're doing about that. When I look think back about my involvement in the research project and completing the questionnaire, things that struck me was that this isn't so much about me as an HR professional, but about me as an ah HR professional within an organizational context.
00:13:47
Speaker
So it placed me and the work that I do within the contribution that I make as a result of that to the organisation and contributed to how effective I was able to contribute to the organisation. Yeah, that's actually, I mean, that's pretty insightful. um So I'm glad that came out for you because most of our participants have felt that they answered quite situationally. How are we behaving right now? not necessarily reflective of how they might behave in the next role with a very different set of challenges. If you think back to the white paper and the six big shifts we talked about there, not every organisation is going to be
00:14:29
Speaker
equally facing or rising to the challenge of those big shifts. Some organizations are very much dealing with the here and now firefighting around cost cutting and the fight for survival. Others, where they've got a very different demographic and a very different stage in their business life cycle, they may have all of those challenges um on their plate. What we want users to do is to reflect not just about judging themselves, oh, am I strong or am I weak? It's actually reflecting, what does this tell me about what my focus has been for the last year or two? What does it tell me about what my focus might need to be going forward? ah I'll give you an example. One of our participants, on reading the white paper, first thing he said was, you know, this makes me feel less lonely, because I'm reading here all of the challenges that my peers have been going through. and i
00:15:28
Speaker
was beginning to wonder if I was the only person going through these challenges. But then when I took people radar and I went through the report afterwards, I didn't like every outcome. You never do with a self-assessment questionnaire against a set of criteria. ah yeah I didn't like the results of every one of those ratings. But in the areas where i where it said I had room for development, Afterwards, I started thinking about how I could be more like that, how I could display that behavior more in the next business challenge that I faced. So when I was producing a paper for the board fairly recently, this this candidate said, I realized that I hadn't gone out and sought enough data from different sources. I just relied on the database. I hadn't gone out and spoken to people. I hadn't sought input from other stakeholders.
00:16:22
Speaker
And that was the area around analyzing and utilizing people information that I had scored lower than I was expecting to on. So I deliberately went out and sought those extra opinions, a wider set of data than I would have ordinarily. So that's exactly how we'd like people to engage with the tool and use it but for their own purposes, not as a judgment upon them. So it's a way of helping people to improve the service, the HR service that they provide to the organization as much as it is about themselves
PPL Radar vs. Other HR Tools
00:16:56
Speaker
as individuals. Yeah. And not just the service, but also the challenges that society, that the board, that CEOs are placing on the HR function, these are reflective of
00:17:09
Speaker
what HR has been expected to step up to, um to respond to, to lead the way on in at the C-suite and in the executive leadership team. Yes, I totally get on board with, with the comment that it can be very lonely when you're leading an HR function and, but quite a powerful experience to actually realize that the challenges that you are trying to address are also the same challenges that other people in other organizations are also trying to address.
00:17:43
Speaker
that knowing that you're not alone is, although you might not know who else those people are, because he's all confidential, but just knowing that your issues are not unique to you is a quiet confidence boost, I suppose. Yeah, and a number of our pilot participants have used the phrase with those cobbler's shoes, um you know the phrase that the cobbler's children don't yeah have shoes. HR, we traditionally, I've been a HR director myself, in the FTSE 100 and we're also busy developing other people, developing the rest of the organization that actually it takes, it's a rare HR leader who takes time also to develop their own teams, to develop themselves. That quote from that participant is a perfect example. In any leadership development program, we'd be encouraging our top leaders to bring the outside in, to seek out mentors externally,
00:18:39
Speaker
um attend networking events to do broader reading, etc. And, ah you know, the People Radar tool is a perfect example of us giving a tool to HR to help them do that. Yeah, it is quite wide ranging. But I think also we need to ask the question, well, at plastic partnership, you've created the PPL radar. There are other tools available as well, some from the CIPD, the professional code of conduct, the ah profession map, and of course the CIPD qualifications. When I participated in the research, I didn't feel as if anything that you'd done replaced anything that, for example, the CIPD had done. I saw everything very much complementing one another.
Evaluating HR Leadership Impact
00:19:29
Speaker
Yeah, there and I would say, ah if you like, there are three levels of leadership assessment tool that yeah that it's useful to compare against. And this sits in the middle, by the way, of those three. So yeah, you've got the technical frameworks, like the CIPD framework, and ah and and you might get in other professions as well. like in accounting. They're the technical ones which assess your technical abilities, um your ability to ah you know administer HR policies, your ability to resolve disputes, etc. Then you've got at the top end more generic leadership skills, which are regardless of your profession, regardless of your function. The leadership assessment tools you might find, such as Savile Wave, for example,
00:20:19
Speaker
you've got alongside that more quite also generic personality profiling tools like Insight. This one sits in the middle. yeah we're and It's both probably easier for me to give you some examples, some of our competencies. So one is redesigning work for the future. It's not the sole domain of HR leaders to redesign work for the future, but it is the one that they're expected to provide leadership on, that they're expected to be brilliant at. Creating an individuated employee experience.
00:20:51
Speaker
responding to the to the new wave of how employees you want a different relationship with the organization. Again, middle managers have a huge role to play in this one. But again, the leadership needs to be coming from the HR function ah about how to do that, how to shift from fixed group-wide policies to to playbooks where you need to help middle managers to be able to adapt policies to individual needs. And even an old staple, like commercial HR, that has moved on. So a few years ago, ah being commercial might have been viewed as about being hard-nosed, about being able to do the tough thing in the organization. Next, it would be about knowing the numbers of the organization, understanding
00:21:44
Speaker
the profit and loss sheet, being able to talk about numbers and be data literate with regards to people data. And still not every organization can claim that that they are confident in their people data. But the cutting edge now of being commercial in HR is actually understanding the value chain of the business and how HR policies, HR initiatives contribute to that value chain, how it's going to have an impact on the end user of their product or service. And we in our research, we were finding that mid-level HR leaders, people who've been tasked with rolling out and implementing a new initiative, not designing it, they were being challenged by line managers with those very same questions. How is this going contribute how is this contributing to the value chain? what's How is this going to help me deliver an improved
00:22:38
Speaker
service or user experience to to to our customer. Let's ask those questions about PPL radar then.
How to Implement PPL Radar
00:22:45
Speaker
How easy is it to implement? Very easy. The first stage is for individuals, whether either one individual or your whole team, to take a 30-minute online self-assessment questionnaire. So easy to access. ah We do produce a report with that, but one of the things we've learned from the pilot is the report is far better delivered alongside a debrief. For a trained assessor debriefing you for an hour or so ah to help you interpret and apply what you get from the report to your everyday experience and what this means for your own development needs. We have developed a
00:23:29
Speaker
22-page e-booklet with detailed development suggestions. There is some demand already from customers from our pilot group for more of that, and so if the you know the future may involve ah even more development opportunities and development experiences to go with that. But right now, the focus and the demand of our pilot group has been, ah let's use it with our teams. Let's issue this to our teams to take. um Let's get a compiled report of what the profile looks across the team so we can see to what extent as a team we're equipped to rise to these challenges and what the strengths and development areas are in the team. And where necessary, then let's have individual debriefs so people can understand what it means for them specifically.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:24:21
Speaker
That's great. Thank you very much, Andrew. It's been really interesting. I've really enjoyed finding out more about the PPL radar. We'll put some links in the description to where people can explore it in more detail. But for the moment, thank you very much for helping me make an interesting episode of The Independent Minds. Thank you. Thank you, Michael. And thank you to you for listening to The Independent Minds. I am Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abecedah, and I have been having a conversation with The Independent Mind, Andrew Thompson from PASC Partnership. You can find out more about both of us at abecedah.co.uk. There is a link in the description.
00:25:03
Speaker
If you've liked this episode of The Independent Minds, please give it a like. And to make sure you don't miss out on future episodes, please subscribe. Remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abisida is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think. Thank you.