Front-line employees crucial to innovation

CONFERENCE: "Command and control" approaches to management have gone, and successful companies now recognise that the best ideas don't necessarily come from the top, a leading human resource expert told a conference in Galway yesterday.

Mr Don Beattie, president of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development in Ireland (CIPD), told his annual conference competitive businesses acknowledged that everyone on the payroll could contribute to innovation. The "old paradigms" of management no longer applied, he emphasised.

Competitive advantage had moved from efficiency and "product" to innovation and nimbleness, but these two latter characteristics had to run together, he said.

In the information technology (IT) sector, for instance, companies had to be fast and nimble to transfer innovation to the final product on the marketplace.

"In other words, companies need to be like shoals of fish which, at an imperceptible signal, turn and swim in another direction," Mr Beattie said.

Too many businesses paid only "lip service" to human resources (HR), he said.

Such businesses needed to analyse their own attitude to risk taking, to mistakes, to innovation and to learning - and they needed to ask themselves if their management team recognised the importance of these qualities.

"Making change happen in a company is a learnable and repeatable experience," Mr Beattie added. The "right product" was not enough.

Everyone was in the "service business", whether they wished to acknowledge this or not, he said. "Front-line employees" were crucial to performance, and an enlightened management supported such employees and created the environment that helped them to succeed.

Leadership should also be encouraged, and emphasis should be on its development - rather than on development of "management" per se.

Companies should also recognise the potential of their human capital, Mr Beattie continued. "We can't all have the best people, but we can create an environment that makes the best of the human capital we have," he said.

Significantly, ownership of the firm's human resource strategy should be reviewed periodically by everyone on the top team - not just the HR division, he added.

Mr Beattie identified five "Cs" for the successful HR strategist. These were "confidence, competence, courage, conviction and commitment".

Earlier yesterday, Prof Joyce O'Connor, president of the National College of Ireland, said the Irish economy was becoming more and more "knowledge-based", and was therefore about "people and about developing their potential".

Education and training were critical to this development, she said.

Social partnership was fundamental to the economy's success, and this was why it was so important, she said. "It is not just about pay and rewards, but about the kind of society we want to have,Prof O'Connor said.

Today's keynote debate at the conference addresses social partnership and competitiveness and will be addressed by Mr David Begg, general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, Mr Brian Patterson, chairman of the National Competitiveness Council and The Irish Times Ltd, and Mr Jim Power, chief economist of Friends First Holdings.