ENHANCING BUSINESS PERFORMANCE In Pursuit Of High Performance Dr. Michael Beer (Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus, Harvard Business School) reveals how to achieve sustained high performance and earn high levels of commitment from stakeholders |
 “Commitment and trust cannot develop unless employees are given a voice. This means HR must support the development of extensive mechanisms that enable all employees to overcome the hierarchy’s barrier to voicing grievances and concerns to higher management.” A career dedicated to understanding and improving the way businesses enhance performance while building capability and commitment, and the Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus at Harvard Business School, Dr. Michael Beer packs 4 decades worth of insights into this exclusive interview with The Human Factor. Dr. Beer is also Chairman and co-founder of TruePoint, a research based consultancy, and has consulted with dozens of Fortune 500 companies, like Hewlett Packard, IBM, Merck, Honeywell, Agilent Technologies, etc. He has served on the editorial board of numerous professional journals, the board of governors of the Academy of Management and the board of directors of GTECH Corporation. He has authored various articles and books, among which ‘Managing Human Assets’ and ‘The Critical Path to Corporate Renewal’ received the Johnson, Smith & Knisely award for the best book in executive leadership in 1990. He is renowned in several business disciplines - including management, organisational design, strategic HR, organisational psychology and organisational development. Read on to find out more about this guru. Q. How did you get to where you are today? What lies next in store for Michael Beer? A. I have devoted my 40-year career to understanding and improving the way businesses enhance performance while building capability and commitment. This was what I researched as a graduate student, put into practice at Corning Inc., taught as a professor at Harvard Business School and continue to apply at TruePoint, a firm I founded that partners with leaders to transform their companies into high performing, people-centric businesses. Q. You have redefined business practices of some of the largest corporations in the world. Please share your experiences there. A. I teach companies that to achieve sustained high performance, earning high levels of commitment from stakeholders - from employees to customers to investors - is equally important as the pursuit of profit. The work that has really stood out is in those companies that transformed into this type of value-driven system from bureaucratic patterns of management. Companies such as Hewlett Packard, Southwest Airlines and Johnson & Johnson were “born right”. They were shaped by the vision and values of their founders. On the other hand, companies such as ASDA, Becton Dickinson, IBM, General Electric and Campbell Soup successfully transformed by breaking down organisational and managerial barriers through the guidance of leaders who made the conscious choice to choose a high commitment approach to management. |
 Q. What are the greatest people management lessons for you in the cross-cultural context?A. For leaders in any company, country or industry to get the buy-in of employees that is essential to transform into a resilient, high-performing organiSation, they must build a community of purpose. Change can only happen if everyone is committed to it and believes it is the only way to achieve sustained advantage in this new era of business. The key to securing this across-the-board commitment of employees at every level lies in building a common vision for the firm by making courageous and principled choices about purpose, values and strategy and how people will be led and managed. Doing so will allow leaders to go against conventional wisdom in critical business decisions and build a purpose-driven community. Q. How can HR ably manage the four generations of employees across workplaces today? A. Commitment and trust cannot develop unless employees are given a voice. This means HR must support the development of extensive mechanisms that enable all employees to overcome the hierarchy’s barrier to voicing grievances and concerns to higher management. Employee voice will enable continuous improvement in the quality of leadership and management. Senior HR leaders will learn exactly what each generation needs and be able to respond. Additionally, senior leaders - including HR leaders - must break the silence at the top. They must come out from behind closed doors and lead honest conversations that engage all employees in every generation. As a result, employees will understand why their needs are not always being met immediately and trust that management is doing its best to meet them as soon as possible. Q. How has the HR function changed during your career, considering that you have been a pioneer in this regard? A. HR policies and practices of the most progressive, resilient and high-performing companies bear remarkable similarities. This is because their management is always positive and optimistic about employees. They assume people are capable of learning, motivated intrinsically, want to contribute and make a difference, and prefer not to be controlled through monitoring and incentives. As a result, the best companies hire for the long-term - even for life. They insist on hiring talented people who fit the values and principles that underlie their culture, so they select on the basis of attitudes, values and potential to grow and develop. Then, they invest in various policies and practices that socialise people to fit the culture and develop employees’ skills to the greatest possible extent. Finally, they motivate through intrinsic rewards and recognise high performance through extrinsic rewards (promotion and money). |
