CIPD CEO: "There’s never a more important or interesting time to be in HR"

Specialist on the future of work and chief executive of CIPD, Peter Cheese in an exclusive conversation with Aditi Sharma Kalra during his visit to Singapore - he talks about the ongoing revolution in L&D, giving up on forced distribution systems for performance, and much more.

- With inputs from Wani Azahar

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Q: You've been with CIPD for close to 4.5 years now, after a strong run in consulting and advisory, including your own venture, what inspired you to join the CIPD team?

With all the things that are going in the likes of big trends and the need to step up, one of the things I’ve been saying consistently is this - there’s never a more important or interesting time to be in HR.

To be leading one of the major organisations that is there to help grow the profession, it was an incredible opportunity. And I’m reminded almost this every single day about the things that are going on, pointing back to the importance of HR.

Besides that, the very need for HR to step up into this space into a more strategic perspective is another driving factor. When you hear senior leaders at governmental levels speak about the importance of HR - that again makes me more proud to do what I do and help build the profession to where it needs to be.

Q: Clearly Asia is a big market for CIPD's qualifications, what milestones have you been proud of attaining in this region? 

We’ve actually had presence in Asia for many years, so we’ve always had a significant membership base. About five years ago when my predecessor set up the Singapore office, and I had come up here shortly after I started, it became clear very quickly that this was the right place to be.

Partly because I was very quickly introduced to people in the Ministry of Manpower (MOM), so I could see it on a more strategic level to Singapore and how much of a potential for somebody like CIPD to help on some of these things.

With that as the first milestone and having recognised that we already have a big membership base here, it came to how can we support the membership better in the region, and how do we engage with this in more strategic agendas that are clearly emerging in countries like Singapore.

Personally, I know Asia well enough to know that it takes quite some time to establish the relationships, connections and build the trust - these are things that do not happen overnight. It took us about three to four years to get to where we are at now which is showing that not only are we willing to engage, we want to engage, support and share insights. It is not just about being here to create revenue streams.

So I think the milestones are really being about getting some recognition and acceptance from the likes of NTUC, and MOM, PSD; and that we can actually help them with these agendas.

Now, the next big milestone would be rolling out more of our digital capabilities. Talk about digital and online learning, there is an enormous applicability in this market.

Other than that, it’s also about finding the right people. It’s not a big team here, but we have to find the right people who could sustain in the growth of the market. Therefore, these MoUs are the next big step. Personally, the most important next step is about the progression of the profession in Asia. With big debates on organisations managing people effectively, it brings us back to our purpose.

Q: What are the next 2-3 big priorities?

To make the relationships we’ve developed to now start to work. And this can be measured objectively in terms of the number of students taking qualifications that are being delivered through SMU, NTUC and so on and so forth. It shows the value people get from professional accreditation and learning that we can bring.

Another huge agenda would be how we are working with both local and multinational businesses; helping them understand and build HR capabilities within their organisation.

It is also profoundly important how involved we are in supporting some of the bigger, national agendas - which is harder to measure. However, thanks to our ability to contribute through research, we are seen as a valued-partner in some of these debates such as NTUC’s future skills and training. In turn, CIPD demonstrated how we can work with emerging national standards in HR, even in a local context.

Q: What is challenging about the Asian market?

One of the challenges of the market in Asia is that it’s so huge and diverse. Of course, you can’t talk about the Asian market as a single thing at all. We have to keep focus so we do not stretch ourselves - which brings us back to the digital capabilities. This would allow us to touch the wider Asian market in ways which are efficient without us having to build lots of operations all over the place.

So as not to overextend too quickly, we said to ourselves: “The first thing is we are going to show is that we can make an impact in Singapore.”

Following that, Malaysia, as well as Hong Kong where a lot of interesting activities are happening for us. We’re also beginning to work with more MNCs, helping them look at their HR talent from different parts of Asia.

But as it is, sheer size and scale, complexity and diversity of the Asian market along with local laws and cultures, we have to be careful to take it step by step to keep our focus.

Q: How well are we doing in maturity of practices?

I think it’s fair to say HR has room for development. The reality is many people’s experience with HR is very transactional and administrative. What's more, many talk about the nature and culture in Asia to be very traditional, or hierarchy-controlled.

On one level I feel it’s very ironic, given that in Asia (as compared to say, Europe) has a stronger “human side of life” - with the importance of tradition, culture and religion - but it doesn’t quite reflect in the work. Whereas, when you look at Europe, it is all about facts and figures in the model of management.

So building on the essence of the Asian cultural mindset, how do you bring that into the workplace, and how do you grow managers and HR to understand their role in bringing about good culture and engaging people?

It’s very hard to find leaders, or good strategic HR talent across Asia as there’s less maturity for the development of these ideas. On the other side in Europe or US (though there are lots of developments there too), there is a bit more maturity in leadership understanding and strategic HR. And that’s where the gap that really needs to be focused on in countries like Singapore.

It’s about growing a more strategic HR capability, move beyond the transactional. At the same time, build leaders at all levels who are good people managers, have the soft skills, who can motivate, inspire, manage and engage the workforce. Though idealistic, it’s also very important. It’s not like these ideas are entirely foreign or deeply complex but it’s just not how the paradigm of work has been for the last over twenty years. Business leaders have not found the need to treat their people like human beings.

I suppose to some extent, Asian management culture has learnt those models from the West through business schools or with many Asian leaders going to Western business schools and universities to learn. I always say: “For heaven’s sake, teach (not just undergraduates but also leaders in executive education programmes) how to understand corporate culture, human behaviour and all these sorts of things because those are the things that count.”

It’s very fascinating being in business consulting for quite a long time, you see these paradigms of work - and wonder where it all comes from. With these mechanistic side of work, we’ve not thought hard enough about the human side of work. Now with the emergence of thinking that’s driven by the really young generation, we are in this paradigm shift. It is in essence, putting humanity back into work.

Q: What do you think is the one change you’d like to see in leaders?

The models I like talk about three traits in a leader: competence (i.e. do you know what you’re doing and understand the business?), integrity (i.e. are you being true to yourself and walk the talk?) and benevolence (i.e. do you listen or care about the opinions of people that work for you?).

When you ask young professionals what they most value at work - it’s the benevolence. So I do think the notion of compassion is the most growing attribute.

Benevolence is not only about being nice to people. It’s also about the honesty of feedback. There’s nothing worse than these environments we’ve created where we encourage managers not to give feedback. For example, when we tell managers they would need to give annual or bi-annual appraisals, what we’re actually telling them is that they don’t need to giveback any other time but only during these performance appraisals.

While it’s not the most comfortable conversation to give feedback when staff are not doing well, not giving feedback also means managers are not telling staff when they are doing well. You have to train managers to have realistic, honest conversation but on a much more continual basis. With the idea of listening, engaging and coaching, giving feedback is actually part of benevolence.

Q: Giving up on traditional performance management system, are you pleased with that trend?

Yes! It’s really interesting to me because I grew up in a forced distribution. There were companies that did forced rankings, with companies like Microsoft, as they literally handed down in tablets and stones. Nobody ever could tell you where the stuff came from, why it was a good idea and nobody ever challenged it.

When I got into a senior leadership position, we get the leaders of the firm together once a year to try figure out this kind of forced distribution - it’s unbelievably painful. We come out of the meeting knowing we have teethed off at least half of the organisation. We also know that we’ve disempowered the managers.

So what was it that make an organisation sit up in such a short space of time? I think it came from several recognitions. The first is how we have developed so many processes in businesses; which we just implement without properly understanding the outcome. When you talk about the outcome of performance management, it is (hopefully) to improve performance.

So I ask HR if we could honestly say that all these initiatives we’ve been doing has improved performance. The answer? Not really; and partly because we were never really good at measuring performance. But what we now recognise is that you want to encourage managers to have the continual feedback and conversations.

You’re chasing them up and getting them to document. Then they’ll get obsessed with documenting as opposed to talking to people. And the reason why we want to document these things is because if we ever need to let people go for poor performance, we have all the documentations to justify why.

It’s about going back to principles. It’s about what outcome we’re trying to accomplish. You question, “Is that process actually achieving the outcome?”

Then I suppose like everything in business, it needed a few people to stand up to do it - because businesses tend to follow trends. Nobody wants to step out of line.

It needed some of the big companies to break cover and have the courage to challenge the norm and change it. Of course, the first ones were the very big companies which had forced rankings.

The second point is how it isn't about the best practice anymore. It's about understanding your context, the nature of organisation and workforce, the kind of corporate culture you're trying to build - and there isn’t one way to do this.

There are some businesses - such as the public sector - where the culture is procedural. So it’s really about the context and creating whatever processes you need by first understanding the outcome you’re trying to accomplish, and using the evidence of behaviour and other things to drive it. Following that, you then put it into the context of the organisation.

I say let’s get away from this idea of “best practice” and move toward a “best fit practice” that makes most sense for the particular organisation.

Q: Having just announced your partnership with NTUC LHUB, tell us your thinking, i.e. the market knowledge, that went into devising this programme. What's the immediate agenda in getting the expected 250 HR professionals on board?

With NTUC, it’s about training their associates and giving them the capability to deliver the training programmes. We’ve got a sharing agreement, so you have to share the knowledge and content.

The other thing would be to figure out how jointly-promote. We would be talking about shared objectives, purpose and key objectives.

Q: How would you localise your content to the market?

The thing about HR is that while there are many things in common, there are also many things local to the market - such as employment law and labour market trends. CIPD will be building more local case studies, where these companies are developing the kinds of capabilities as well as the outcome it’s delivering.

Q: With both online and classroom courses in your portfolio, what are the 1-2 major trends you're seeing in the learning space in Asia?

L&D is going through a revolution, especially since there’s a huge amount of L&D that's still done in a traditional manner. Reality of learning is that the 70:20:10 model is not the best way to train. However, what is really exciting with technology is how it’s enabling a far more engaging way of learning.

In recent years, with better understanding of the psychology of learning, technology allows for a more active learning experience. With the likes of gamification, multi-channel, multi-modal platforms, you need to be able to mix it up. You also need the ability to support peer-to-peer learning by replicating it online.

You need to have some degree of facilitation as you have to help people in their learning journeys. Whilst early forms of digital learning could be very technical things, but now it’s grown even for soft skills development. What is really needed is a real transformation of L&D to enable these different forms of learning. Blended learning is still important, but we really need active engaging online learning. For L&D to grow, you need to develop new capabilities.

A lot of these are not easy to develop in-house so you probably have to partner with organisations that could do it. They’re not simple, but they’re possible. One thing to bear in mind is to recognise the younger generation and their way of learning, or what they would typically do when you have a question.

L&D is also about the ability to curate good content, and then enable it at the point of use in the most accessible form they can - people are not very patient.

L&D has to shift dramatically from controlled-learning to a world where it enables an organisation in different ways with smart content that’s accessible on any device at any given time. In a world where skills are changing so much, I really believe L&D has to get to become a more strategic capability.

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