The dangers of launching an HR initiative
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Do you really need to ‘launch’ your latest HR initiative? There is a real danger when launching a new approach that you shine a spotlight on your work and stake your reputation on success – at the very point that you’re most at risk of something going wrong! As such, it’s important – both for your own reputation and wider company moral – that you minimize the attention, pressure and risk associated with trying out something new.
What is the best way of getting your new ideas and approaches adopted? We favour two tactics –
1. The Infection Theory
This approach takes an infection approach to creating change; first infect one cell…the others will follow.
To take this approach, you first need to immerse yourself in the problem. Talk to a range of people in your target group (eg managers who will need to implement a new appraisal system, or hold career conversations with their staff). Find out all about the pain they experience in connection with the current situation. This allows you to get a strategic view of the overall picture of the problem you’re trying to solve. You’ll be able to test new ideas in terms of whether they’ll work for the whole group of people who will eventually need to get involved.
While you are doing this, you are also looking for fertile ground for your first go at solving the problem.
Fertile ground means an urgent, defined need where results can easily be measured, and an action-oriented manager who believes in the initiative you’re introducing. There are only a few ‘innovator’ managers who will buy into an untested concept. Find one, and focus your attention on developing something to solve their problem. That way, when parts of the approach fail (which they will) and you need to fix it or try a different approach, you have a true partner who will work alongside you and experiment until you get it right. Once you have a robust working prototype that is delivering results, you’ll find it attracts the attention of ‘early adopter’ managers who become infected with enthusiasm for the approach. This is the much larger group of people who love new approaches once they see them actually working and can hear anecdotes about real people’s experience. You’ll often find that this creates a surge of interest where other managers develop a ‘Why have they got this and we haven’t? We want one!’ attitude – which is a great way to gain quick and easy wide-spread adoption across the organisation. If you want to launch – THIS is the time to do it – after the initial spread of early adoption.
Note that this is different from doing a pilot study. Not all pilot studies are fertile ground with an innovator partner rooting for success. Often you are working in an area with several very busy managers who are waiting to be convinced. Plus they are far more visible, and often imply you have the answer and are setting out to prove it.
2. Light small fires
This approach takes the line of ‘We’re not sure what will work. Let’s test out many approaches and see which ones survive.’
In this approach, you don’t try to create a well-thought through overall strategy of beautifully dovetailed component parts right from the start. Instead, you go where the energy and ideas are. You allow different people to develop different, idiosyncratic ways of tackling the problem. Then you sit back and wait to see which fires take hold and create enthusiasm and results. The aim is to start 10 initiatives, and get 3 successes – then work out how to incorporate the key features of the successes into a master plan.
Take Away
Go where the energy is. Find innovators and fertile ground to start any new initiative – so that by the time you launch it, the opinion-shapers are already convinced.