Fantastic! My umpteenth Annual Conference but like finding a Twix you thought you'd already scoffed, the excitement's enough to blow your eyebrows off.
Imelda Walsh, until recently Group HRD at Sainsbury's, gave a Masterclass this afternoon on authentic leadership. Very engaging stuff - starting in those pre-Justin King days when the management team was just beginning to address turning the business round. There was a disconnect between Head Office and the people on the ground - a not unheard-of state of affairs in many businesses: "People in the shops absolutely knew what the problems were but no longer had any confidence that Head Office was listening, so they didn't tell them." This kind of disengagement meant that, in Imelda's view, "I didn't see enough people in Sainsbury's taking accountability."
This resonated with her new CEO, and together they embarked on a change programme - but delivered in a very different way: with "candour and honesty", and "giving colleagues a degree of choice as to what happened to them." From there on in, "engagement became the wraparound for all the things Management team did and discussed." More than that - "Colleague engagement became as important a metric as sales and profits."
The interesting thing here is of course you have a CEO who wants to hear about engagement, and an HRD who wants to talk to the Board about engagement; a kind of virtuous dialogue which will prod organisational growth forward (which is exactly what it did).
On that key relationship, Imelda added: "No CEO wants an HRD who isn't prepared to engage in robust and challenging dialogue - and done in the right way." Very much like the provocateur concept in CIPD's Next Generation HR research.
Insightful stuff from an HR Leader genuinely at the heart of business change. More from the seminar rooms later.
[Rejected Conference Speakers #2637: Wayne Rooney on 'Innovative Reward Strategies: A Personal Approach'.]
Richard Goff
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