No doubt you’ve heard the buzzwords ‘psychological safety’ – but what do they mean exactly? The author Amy Edmondson, who’s the acknowledged authority on psychological safety, describes it as … “a belief that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.” But why does it matter and how can we help create it?

The benefits of creating psychological safety for our teams are numerous, such as:

These benefits are pretty much understood and accepted now – or rather, we get it intellectually, but many of the leaders I meet are still struggling to create them.

There are some techniques that leaders can put into practice – relatively simple changes they can make to their behaviour – that can make a huge difference. Here are some of them …

Help them show curiosity

Research shows that we often prefer to talk rather than to listen with curiosity. When 230 high-level leaders in executive education were asked what they would do if confronted with an organizational crisis most said they would take action. Only a few said they would ask questions rather than simply impose their ideas on others. Management books commonly encourage leaders assuming new positions to communicate their vision from the start rather than ask employees how they can be most helpful. It’s bad advice.

Leaders can encourage curiosity throughout their organizations by being inquisitive themselves.

At Ernst & Young, they have implemented the practice of ‘Leading with questions’. They realised that the leaders who were thriving at EY tended to ask better questions that helped generate creativity and fresh thinking.  They also created higher levels of trust through not just listening to fix but listening to learn. HR provided prompts and advice to their leaders to try leading with one question before getting into default conversation mode.

Help them show humility

Another way leaders can create psychological safety is to admit that they are not infallible – that they acknowledge their mistakes. For example, the ad agency Ogilvy had quite a different response to Black Lives Matter. Instead of diving into action planning, the senior team put out a public letter. In it they acknowledged that ‘after over a decade of diversity and inclusion efforts at Ogilvy we have not seen nearly enough progress in increasing representation and leadership of Black employees throughout the company. We have failed.’

It’s really rare to have senior leaders acknowledge failure – but by showing that humility they started to rebuild trust and contributed to a culture where owning up to mistakes is not just ok, but welcomed. Any future commitments to increasing inclusion were going to be much more impactful – and believable – as a result.

Share problems not just successes

Most senior team meetings I’ve attended have been a kind of ‘show and tell’ for grown-ups – where we all talked about how brilliantly everything was going in our department. But one leader I worked for helped to create greater psychological safety by establishing that our team meetings were the place where you brought your biggest problem instead. This helped to create an environment where problems are solved together as a team. At Spotify they use the Swedish term for coffee break a ‘fika’ and regularly hold gatherings called ‘fail fikas’ – a coffee break where people share their experiences in failure and what they learned from it, so they can celebrate their learnings. Their leaders act as role-models, sharing their failures as well – creating a culture where people dare to share.

Enable everyone to contribute

And finally, leaders can help create more psychological safety by enabling everyone in the team to contribute. There are a number of ways this can be done – for example:

So, psychological safety can be developed by role modelling curiosity, sharing problems not just successes, finding different ways to encourage a wider range of opinions and finally, admitting that they have made mistakes. Small changes that can have a big impact.

The HR Disrupted podcast reimagines traditional HR practices for a more agile, people-centric future. Each episode dives into innovative approaches for leaders and HR professionals, offering practical advice on leadership, employee engagement, and organisational culture.

The podcast is produced by Disruptive HR – the agency with a mission to change outdated people practices for good! Join your host, Lucy Adams (the CEO of Disruptive HR and a ‘recovering’ HR Director herself!) and her guests, who are all disrupting people practices in their own way.

Check it out here or wherever you get your podcasts

We’ve all been there … we want to train our managers or employees in something that we feel is important – so we create a training programme. Then we worry that they might not attend voluntarily so we make attendance mandatory. The result? Resentful delegates who begrudge having to take time out of the day job to go to training that HR is making them do. Not great. Instead of the parental approach of making people attend, we need to sell our learning and development. We need to think like marketeers to generate interest and ensure that when they do attend that they are in the right head space to learn.

Here are six techniques you can use.

Why would they want to learn this?

The first technique and probably the most important is to think through ‘why would they want to learn about this?’ It’s not enough to simply schedule a course and assume that it will appeal. In his brilliant book, ‘How people learn’, Nick Shackleton-Jones talks about how people have to care about learning if it’s going to stick. So, we need to get inside their heads and work out what will turn them on – and what might turn them off.  One way of doing this that works really well is to create persona based on what might motivate different types of employee to want to invest their time in their development. The L&D team at Sky, for instance, found that they needed to appeal to two different types of people. There was the type that responded well to ‘staying ahead of their peers’ or ‘positioning themselves for promotion’. So, they used language like – ‘Don’t fall behind’ or make sure you get ahead’ to appeal to them. The second type was put off training if it meant time away from focusing on the operational side of their job. So, for this group, they focused on the promotion of micro-learning opportunities with straplines like ‘This will only take you five minutes!’

How do you position learning?

The second technique is all about how you position learning in your organisation. Do you present it as somehow separate to the real work? Or could you position it more as something that is just part and parcel of their working day? Something that everyone here does? This is what Schneider Electric does with their hashtag #whatdidyoulearntoday? And J&J’s mantra of ‘Growth isn’t optional’ positions personal development not as a nice to have extra – but something that we all do.

Watch your language!

And thirdly, what’s the language you used when describing L&D opportunities? Do you talk about training programmes – an immediate turn off – or are you more creative? Like at Telefonica where they talk about ‘learning shots’ instead of micro-learning or at Abercrombie & Fitch where they use Touch Base to promote their informal mentoring.

Think influencers

Fourthly, think like Instagram and use influencers. Find influencers in your organisation to recommend content, talk about their personal learning experiences, share their favourite resources and help spread the word. These will be the people who love learning, get excited about progressive approaches to developing their skills and others will listen to them.  These influencers play a vital role in driving engagement and will help win over those who might not otherwise be interested, and it doesn’t feel like HR/L&D are always the ones driving it.

Take the learning to them

The fifth technique is to take the learning to them and create opportunities to develop in the places where they spend their time – rather than sending them to a separate venue or platform. Set up dedicated channels on your normal comms hub (MS team, Slack etc,) like they do at Patreon where they created a Managers’ Slack Channel as a development space for managers to discuss different topics with each other and share recommendations and advice.

Marketing campaigns

And finally, why not think about your programme of development in terms of a Marketing campaign to get people engaged? For example At Getty images, the leadership development team started a custom of “WeLearn Wednesdays”. Every Wednesday, they get their leaders to share one recommended online course through Slack.    In your campaigns use polls or quizzes or ask questions to get people engaged and sharing their ideas or their favourite resources.

So, in summary, let’s get rid of our mandatory training – or at the very least, only use sparingly for the most critical of areas. Instead, think like a marketeer and sell your L&D through the use of persona to target your messaging, change its positioning so that it’s seen as something that we do everyday, use language that’s more human and appealing, take the learning to them, use influencers and invest in marketing campaigns.

How do you and your team use data and insights currently? When we meet with HR teams, they will often tell us how hard it is to get good data. They tell us that they waste countless hours trying to get anything useful out of their antiquated systems and often have to resort to pulling together manual reports that rarely seem to get acknowledged let alone have any significant impact.

So how do we decide what data is relevant and impactful for us to put time and effort into collecting it? In our view, the data and insights you capture should help you answer these three questions which should form a part of your people strategy:

Can we recruit and retain the talent we need?

Your people strategy should clearly outline your approach to acquiring, developing, and retaining your talent. Here are some examples of data sets that can support this goal:

Are we enabling people to do their best work?

When we look at our traditional HR processes, we are rarely trying to solve this challenge. To enable our people to do their best work, we need to identify how we are creating the conditions where our people will be:

We’re not talking about introducing multiple, time-consuming projects to help you accomplish this. Here are a few examples of how you can use data and insights to help:

How do we want people to feel?

Most importantly, we need to answer this question to help us identify which interactions define the experience for your people and help bring your culture to life. So instead of asking ‘What should the new process be?’, we should try and answer the question ‘How do we want our people to feel?’.

And while this may seem like fluffy stuff that is hard to gauge or measure, you can continuously monitor this with pulse surveys targeted at different areas of concern:

General engagement: Do I feel like my work is meaningful and contributes to the company’s success?

Leadership: Do I feel comfortable approaching my manager with questions or concerns?

Work environment: Do I feel comfortable taking risks and innovating in my work?

Work-life balance: Do I feel comfortable taking time off when needed?

With the right focus, your data becomes a tool to not only inform decisions but also to create a workplace where people thrive, feel valued, and do their best work. The effort is worth it because impactful data doesn’t just measure your strategy – it powers it.

Get the tools and insights in the Disruptive HR Club. A global HR training platform built to inspire your team, enhance their skills, and connect them with a community.

HR has been through a number of stages since its humble beginnings in the 1950’s and 60’s. For those of you who are as old as me, you’ll remember our early days as ‘personnel officers’. We were seen as the place for employees to go if they needed support. Our main skill set was employee relations, and we were focused on sorting out problems – usually with a significant amount of admin! Our influence of the business and our leaders was minimal and the idea that we could be on the board or exec team would have been laughable.

Strategic Business Partners

Our second evolution came in the late 90’s when we were introduced to the concept of ‘strategic business partners’. Overnight we were told that our role was not to provide tea and sympathy to our employees, and instead we should be a key member of the senior team, influencing our leaders to manage people properly. I think that many of the issues we have today in HR stem from this period. The transformation from ‘Personnel’ to ‘Strategic HR’ was often made without changing or upskilling the people in those roles. They had been trained in administration, process and policy and they brought this mindset to their new positions. Over the course of the 90’s and into the new millennium, HR became awash with processes as the way to change behaviour or improve people performance. Whilst we occasionally did get that seat at the executive table, it’s debatable whether we built up any real influence with our leaders. And sadly, we often lost our reputation as the function that really cared about employees. Our numbers were reduced. We outsourced many of our functions. We invested in cumbersome HR systems that only worked if you applied one-size-fits-all processes in order to streamline. Our alignment to our leaders meant that we were often seen more as the ‘lackey’ of our leaders. Doing their bidding at the expense of the interests of employees.

Thankfully, those first and second evolutions are drawing to a close and we are now in the third evolution of HR.

Not just a change of title

Of course, a new title is part and parcel of our next iteration, and we are now known as the Chief People Officer, Head of Employee Experience, or the People and Culture Team. Whilst these new titles are welcome – what’s more exciting is how we are changing our approach. Our primary purpose is no longer just to serve employees or support managers. Our purpose now is to enable people to their best work. To create the conditions where our people can be more agile, more productive or more innovative. Our key skillset is no longer employee relations or process implementation. Instead our key skills are around the development of tailored solutions based on insights into what our people need and want, supported by the intelligent application of human-centred products.

Let’s take the example of say, onboarding through these three evolutions and see how our approach has changed.

In our first evolution – the personnel phase – we would have delivered onboarding sessions for every employee. In our second as strategic business partners, we would have created an onboarding process, a mandatory onboarding training programme for managers and then monitored compliance. In our third evolution, our starting point is – ‘how do we want our people to feel during onboarding?’ – to shape our thinking. We create a range of onboarding options designed around the different types of people who are joining us. We provide ‘nudges’ to hiring managers to help them think about the key things they need to do on day one or in the first week, such as get the new hire a buddy. We ask new hires to help us create the onboarding approach for the next cohort. We focus on the outcomes we’d like to see from onboarding and then provide digital tools to enable our people to do it for themselves. We focus less on telling people stuff and more on helping them feel welcomed and confident. We see onboarding as an opportunity to find out more about them.

Finally, this third evolution of HR is transforming the influence we have in the business. It now matters less whether we have a seat at the top table or not, because our credibility comes through our understanding of the business and providing solutions that are based around actual human beings, not compliance with our processes.

So let’s welcome this third evolution of HR; focused on enabling people to do their best work through insight-driven and tailored solutions.

The Head of Customer Service of London Underground once told me about the nightmare of delays at rush hour. Each tube train carries around a thousand passengers and run every two to three minutes. So, even a slight delay means that, very quickly, you are looking at a backlog of thousands of unhappy passengers. I’ve always felt that there are parallels with trying to take time out of our HR day job to invest in ourselves!

Front-line HR roles often feature endless, back-to-back, operational meetings and numerous daily requests for help from managers or employees. If we are ‘selfish’ enough to carve out any ‘me-time’, to network or enhance our skills, then the backlog we face on returning to the day job will often dissuade us from even thinking about doing it. But there are some real downsides to only putting our energies and talents into the stuff that’s getting thrown at us every day.

We lose our ‘strategic muscles’

Whilst being able to juggle numerous demands and responding quickly to the issues of the day is of course valuable, if that’s all we’re doing, we’ll start to lose our ability to think strategically. The HRDs amongst us will often worry about how our teams are insufficiently ‘future-focused’. But what are we doing to create the space for them to exercise and build those strategic muscles? As with any activity, we need to practice if we’re to be any good at it. We can’t keep our teams continually working on their ‘reaction shots’ and then expect them to be brilliant at thinking strategically at our annual HR conference.

I would often get back to my desk after back-to-back meetings all day and think, ‘Now I need to have some BIG thoughts about the future’. But would end up choosing to go home and eat chocolate in front of the TV instead. We need to create not just the space for creative and strategic thinking, but to encourage it at a time when we have the mental energy too. We can help to build these strategic, creative or future-focused muscles by:

Of course, it’s always preferable to have someone else to blame for a lack of investment in ourselves. ‘I would love to be more strategic, but there’s just no time.’ And it might be true that we don’t have the time (or budget) to go on lengthy training programmes. But there are so many ways for us to invest in ourselves – without incurring lots of cost – or having the face the backlog on our return.

Make it bitesize

Arguably, going on a long training programme is the least effective way of equipping us with the skills and mindsets we’ll need in HR. Aside from the expense, we’ll forget around 75% of what we’ve learned within a week – not because we’re stupid, but because that’s just how the human brain works. If we’re not using it immediately, we’ll filter out the stuff that’s not useful. That’s one of the key reasons that bite-size or micro-learning is so popular. We can all find five minutes to watch a video or read an article. And if we do this regularly, we’ll develop a habit of learning that will build that strategic muscle.

Make it social

Many of us learn best through social interaction. Finding a few colleagues (either within or outside of your organisation) who are interested in learning together can be a really effective – and more enjoyable way of building your expertise. HR teams are setting up peer-to-peer learning sessions regularly for their managers and leaders. But what about doing it for ourselves? Choose a topic and simply ask your colleagues to come with their ideas and maybe one piece of external insight – to help the discussion. Again, keep it short, but make it frequent.

Make it happen

I sometimes wonder whether our disinclination to invest in ourselves is actually nothing to do with lack of time or expense and is more to do with a sense that it’s an indulgence that we don’t deserve. All of the highly influential leaders and managers I have worked with over the years were really comfortable with making time to develop themselves. Senior execs who always carved out time to go that networking lunch or who were comfortable delegating so they could attend that development programme. They seemed to have no problem with either creating the time or demanding the budget to invest in their own development. Because they believed they were worth it, and they knew that they would be able to contribute even greater value if they were curious and could bring outside intelligence back into the organisation. No-one is going to care about our development – or our career – as much as we should. Let’s have the confidence to make it happen. Let’s believe we are important enough to deserve it.

At Disruptive HR, we understand that every HR professional’s journey is unique. That’s why we offer a range of training options designed to support your growth. Ready to take the next step? Explore what we offer.

Dress codes, return to work interviews, mandatory training, appraisal forms, emergency time off approvals, and back to the office mandates .. just a few of the ways we let our people know that we don’t trust them and that we need to treat them like naughty children. Of course, it’s only really a few bad apples, but we often design our approach to HR around the lowest common denominator, creating frustration and a poor experience for the majority who have no intention of behaving badly. Fortunately, we are seeing a shift towards treating people like grown-ups; starting from a position of trust and encouraging managers to use their judgement. But how do you go about making this shift?

Go low risk

Moving to an adult culture involves giving away power and this can be scary. So, it makes sense to always try stuff out first in an area where, if it goes wrong, it isn’t going to cause a lot of damage. For example, don’t start with health and safety! But maybe you could try a policy area such as bereavement leave that (hopefully) won’t impact too many people. Priskjat, the price comparison site has moved away from listing the number of days you get for grieving based on your relationship to the deceased – you know the sort of thing – three days for a parent, one day for a cousin – to one that says simply ‘Sometimes we need help. We’ve got your back. Take the time you need’. This is a low-risk area to start experimenting with. The numbers are low and managers should be able to differentiate between the person who genuinely needs more time and the one who has lost his grandad for the third time that year! To help you decide whether an area is low risk or not, have a look back at the number of people who abused it, to get a scale of the risk you might run if the process was taken away. Virgin Atlantic, for example, found that out of 10,000 staff, an average of only two people a year failed their probationary period, giving them the confidence to make changes.

Take a fresh look at your policies

It’s rare for companies to take a step back and look at the experience they’re creating through their suite of policies. Typically, we just keep adding to them and don’t appreciate the impact of them holistically. Standard Chartered sat down and went through every one of theirs, with a fresh lens of ‘does this create an experience of feeling included and does it encourage innovation?’ This exercise highlighted those policies that were out of step with the experience they had pledged to create. It might be worth doing the same thing. Ask yourself, ‘do these policies create an environment where people feel trusted?’ If not, you know where to start.

Ask your people

We’re often reluctant to ask our people which policies they don’t like because we might not like the answer. But that reluctance to engage is precisely the kind of the parent-child behaviour that we’re trying to tackle! It’s all about how you frame the question. TD Bank ask their people ‘which policies or processes get in the way of you doing your best work?’ Just asking the question is a great way of re-setting the relationship to one where you treat them like grown-ups, but you also get a wealth of data that will show you where to start making changes.

Build your managers’ capabilities and confidence

As much as it can make us feel great having a manager coming to us for all the answers, ultimately, if we are going to raise our game in HR, we need to stop doing the basics for them. We need to help build their capabilities and confidence so they can make decisions and have conversations themselves. This can take time, but it’s so worth it. You can use the technique called ‘scaffolding’ where you break it down into stages’ letting them experiment in a safe space before letting them loose on real people! A big media company did this with encouraging managers to own pay and bonus decisions. First step was to give them a theoretical budget and a pretend team. They had to allocate the money and HR then challenged them about different outcomes such as ‘this person is very unhappy about your decision. How will you handle that?’ They then progressed with small budgets and a few team members until they had the capability and the confidence to own it like the grown-ups they were!

So why not try some of these steps out with a few of your more open managers? Moving to adult to adult from a very parental culture is not going to be quick. But you’ll be creating an environment and experience that will make you more innovative, more productive and more engaging. So it’s worth playing the long game.

In our recent LinkedIn poll, we asked about the biggest challenge you have to face in HR. Perhaps unsurprisingly, almost half of you said ‘poor people managers’.

Almost everything we do as HR professionals is shaped by this problem, for example:

  1. We have to answer countless questions because they aren’t sure how to handle people issues
  2. We take responsibility for the conversations they should really be having
  3. We design rules, policies and processes to help them – or make them – get better at the people stuff
  4. We provide expensive line manager training
  5. We create competency frameworks and other measurement tools to hire or promote better ones
  6. We implement tech systems to enable them to self-serve – but often end up having to do it for them anyway!
  7. And of course, we have to manage the fall out from poor line management – hiring new people to replace the ones they’ve lost, grievances and sometimes, tribunals

We have created an industry that is designed to compensate for poor people managers. I don’t believe that we chose the HR profession to play nursemaid or compliance officer. But that’s where most of us have ended up. And whilst we’re trying desperately to prop up our managers, we’re not focusing our efforts and talents on the things that would actually make the difference. Instead of compensating for poor people managers, we should be creating the conditions where our people can be more agile, more innovative and more productive. We want to spend our time creating an amazing and differentiated employee experience – not collecting in appraisal forms or writing a policy for home working because our managers can’t cope with having a grown-up conversation with their team.

So, what’s the answer? Well, the simple and unhelpful one would be – don’t hire managers who don’t want to manage people! But we know that for years we have been promoting people into line manager roles who really only wanted the increase in pay or status, or who were the best technically or who saw line management as the only progression route available. So, whether we like it or not, we’re stuck with them. So, here are some options that you might want to consider.

Find out why they are bad at it

Not every poor manager has the same barrier to being better. So, we need a mix of tactics to cater for these differences. Our typical approach of designing around the lowest common denominator, risks missing what makes individual managers tick and what might help them get better. Yes, there will be those who just aren’t interested – more about them later. But there will also be those who are unclear about what they need to do, or those who lack confidence or those who want to do the right thing but who are highly introverted and struggle with the idea of conversations. Try using the ‘persona’ tactic that we can borrow from Marketing where you analyse your line manager population and identify a small number of line manager persona – or types – based on their motivations and challenges around people management. Then work out your approaches and support packages.

Focus on the outcomes you want from them – not the process

We are so keen to have them do the right thing by their people that we tend to provide them with detailed processes to follow – performance reviews, bonus allocation, 9 box grid completion and so on. But we end up providing one size fits all approaches and often overlook the actual quality of the outcomes. Consider identifying the outcomes you want from them instead. What would good people management look like for you? SAP identified three very simple outputs for their managers:

They didn’t say HOW they were to deliver these outcomes – they allowed managers to do it in ways that worked for them and their personality. But they also measured it through regular pulse surveys. Holding people managers accountable is often missing. We measure and publish their financial and operational results don’t we? So, why not their people results?

Support with stuff that works

I’m not saying we should eliminate our leadership development programmes entirely, but given the amount we spend on them, we really ought to have had seen better results by now? Consider alternative support resources that work with their busy schedules but that are also proven to have a bigger impact – such as using nudges or peer to peer support, or short and sweet interventions such as O2’s ‘learning shots’ – 3 minute videos that give managers something practical to try. You might want to check out our Conversations Toolkit which gives managers a simple set of tips and conversation starters to use.

Stop compensating

And finally – and this can be really hard for us – make a decision to stop compensating for poor people managers. I know that this might feel like giving up our life’s work – but trust me, once you make this shift, it can free you up to be much more impactful. In practice, this looks like:

I’m not sure who first thought of the idea of an HR function. But whoever it was, I’m sure they never imagined us spending our valuable talents and energies on propping up poor managers. If we focus instead on targeted strategies, holding them accountable for clear outcomes and a creative mix of support, we will create far more value for our organisations.

Whilst January is the official start of the year, September is the month that is all about new beginnings! The excitement of the new school uniform and the new pencil case, the new notebook with those clean pages and the promise of a fresh start. September always feels like a time of new energy and optimism. A time for making plans – with that bit of headspace we got from our summer holiday bringing fresh thinking and a resolve to do things differently.

Maybe you feel the same way – and you’re heading into your new term with a renewed vigour and a drive to make changes to the way you do HR. But where do you start? Here are three things we at Disruptive HR think could get you off to a great start …

We love sharing how our great Pro members of the Disruptive HR Club are disrupting HR in their organisations. Sharing challenges and learnings with each other is a powerful way to grow our HR and leadership capabilities. 

This month, we’re thrilled to spotlight Rob Peacock, Head of Talent and Development at The Very Group, and a valued Club member since 2021.

Rob shares his journey from banking to HR, his passion for continuous learning, and how he and his team are driving positive change in the workplace. Learn how they’re tackling the challenges of AI, hybrid work, and more to build a dynamic, future-ready workforce.

Tell us a little bit about yourself, your company and your role. 

I’m Rob, Head of Talent and Development at The Very Group.  I’m a dad to 3 wonderful young children, married to the amazing Sarah (a children’s author and illustrator) and I have a passion for personal growth, people, good food (and wine…), wellness and Aston Villa! The Very Group is a family of digital retail brands and consists of a team of 4,000 people who are passionate about helping families get more out of life. 

Our People mission is to make Very a place where brilliant people belong, grow and are inspired and empowered to make a difference.  My team and I are responsible for bringing this mission to life by developing a high-performing, dynamic and future-ready workforce.  We look at everything from leadership and manager development, early careers, group capability, the talent infrastructure, and performance process to anything else that helps people learn, grow, love what they do and have the skills to succeed.

What do you love about what you do? 

I work with brilliant people who I enjoy spending time with. Every single day I feel I am learning, being challenged and utilising my natural passions and talents. I started my career in banking, then external recruitment before moving into HR at Tesco’s HQ in Welwyn. As soon as  I moved into Talent and Development, I knew it was the right fit for me. I get inspired by watching people learn, grow and develop skills and often my work feels more like a hobby; albeit perhaps with more pressured deadlines!

What frustrates you most about working in Talent and Development?

Nothing frustrates me as such, but in the 10 years I have worked in T&D I have often found myself making the case for learning and development as an investment and not a time stealer. I’m lucky to have worked for brilliant, forward-thinking, people-centric businesses (Lloyds TSB, Tesco, Virgin Media, Samsung and Very) who are all wonderful and different in their own way. Like most businesses, the consistency between them is there will always be far more to do than time to do it. So everyday people are making choices and it’s about making sure that investing time in skills development, leadership and personal growth and that it’s seen as an important AND urgent daily choice.

Our skills-based economy has meant businesses really get this, but the rub comes at the individual level, where people can feel they simply don’t have time and priories for what’s in-front of them every day.  Both making the case and changing the behaviours around continual learning in role is a daily challenge we in T&D must step up to if we are going to make a difference.  

How are you and your team disrupting HR?

A former HR Director I worked for (Jane Storm, who is now the Group People Director at EasyJet) used to encourage her HRBPs to be agitators for the better.  Early in my HR career, this gave me the confidence to challenge people, processes and cultural norms in my quest for better and it stuck with me as I moved into T&D and started to lead teams. I truly believe this is the best starting point for disrupting HR. My team and I pride ourselves on being agitators for positive change, it helps us create solutions to real problems and make a tangible difference to what matters most to our customers and the business.

Recent work we have done as a part of changes to our operating model is an example of this.  We’ve been working lockstep with business leaders and technical experts to build structured and focused skills and leadership development which enables our operating model and drives the business strategy. One output of this work was a recent group-wide capability initiative on Digital and AI skills, to help our people and our business adapt to and take advantage of AI and automation. This kicked off with a whole-day festival held on-site dedicated to delving into the power of AI, learning from internal and industry experts, including our partners at Amazon, Microsoft and others, so they could understand the impact of AI firsthand.

Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable by growing operational knowledge of deeply technical subject matter to enable you to converse with and influence expert stakeholders is a great way for HR teams to drive value and impact for their business and this is where the magic happens in terms of disruption.

What challenges are you facing currently with changing Talent and Development practices?

I’m finding that changing T&D practises (for example, including ever more innovative tech solutions) are incredibly helpful in supporting businesses where they most need us. Namely, in understanding how to identify, navigate and grow the critical and ever-changing skills (what teams need, what they have and what they don’t have), adapting to the rise of AI and the disruptive impact on the way we work, embedding a more settled and sustained approach to supporting work/life harmony and getting the balance of hybrid right.  

A greater focus on driving and embedding cultural and social changes, such as providing purposeful work and cultivating an inclusive, vibrant and diverse organisational culture, all serve to raise the importance of all HR functions.  T&D practices are increasingly adapting to these extra demands and the problem is finding where to focus your attention when you have so many competing priorities; we’ve come a long way since I started in T&D in 2014! 

How does the Disruptive HR Club help you with challenges/frustrations/what you are trying to achieve? 

I love the 5 Minute Mondays (5 minute videos that Pro Club members get every Monday).  It helps to get me firing on all cylinders on a Monday morning and always provides thought-provoking challenges. I also enjoy the focus and sharing of “next-best practice” areas, especially about Talent processes like the 9-box grid. It’s so important to meet your business where they are at and nudge them in the right direction, rather than try out an array of innovative new approaches for the fun of it. But knowing what the best practice looks like is a great starting place from which to decide which approach to take. Whenever I face a big strategic challenge, the Disruptive HR site and podcasts are the first places I go to spark my thinking.