An interview with Richard Whittington

Citation

(2007), "An interview with Richard Whittington", Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 21 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/dlo.2007.08121aaf.001

An interview with Richard Whittington

An interview with Richard Whittington

Richard Whittington is Professor of Strategic Management, Saïd Business School.

Communication throughout the organization is one of the key components of successful change. But too frequently it is too little too late, with serious implications for the success of a change initiative. Clear and consistent messages should flow through the organization during uncertain times, but often communication channels are blocked and there is no coherent strategy for talking to, and involving, employees.

The CIPD’s major research project “Organizing for Success’ addresses the crucial role that HR plays in ensuring the fluidity of communication and the tools, techniques and strategies that have been used to inspire genuinely effective change.

One member of this research group, Professor Richard Whittington, talks to DLO about the findings of this study.

How did you get involved with this research project?

I have been carrying out work on organizational change from a strategy point of view for a while and about three and a half years ago I was contracted by the CIPD, along with colleagues at Reading, Edinburgh and the Open University, to look into this area of change.

How did your non-HR background contribute to the research project? Was there anything you discovered that was particularly surprising?

I think one of the reasons that the CIPD was interested in having me and the others in the team was because we were not HR specialists. Therefore we were not biased simply to HR issues – we could see the larger picture.

This has been particularly helpful because one of the messages of this research is that HR needs to be able to understand organizational change from a strategic, holistic perspective so that they can participate in shaping this change. Not having an HR background also meant that we automatically talked to a lot of people who were not HR specialists. For example, our various surveys have particularly targeted CEOs (rather than HR managers or directors) and that has generated some interesting outcomes.

Those are the two most useful things that a strategy perspective has brought to the project. But, in reverse, we have learned that HR does play a very important role in organizational change and the CEO really does value that. If you look at re-organizations, it may well be the CEO, divisional general manager or finance director who is actually leading the change program but if you ask the CEO who they consider to be the most influential person behind the scenes, the power is often with HR.

How was this research carried out?

It was both qualitative and quantitative. We carried out two surveys (from which we discovered how HR holds much power and influence during change initiatives) and we also performed 11 case studies from large private multinationals like Cadbury Schweppes to small charities. The fact that we deliberately targeted a wide range has brought out a number of interesting issues.

Of these organizations, how many had HR executives sitting on the board of directors?

A few. One of the really interesting findings was that a number of people introduced themselves as HR people and followed this up with the words “but we’re not really HR”. In fact, the more senior people became, the less willing they were to identify themselves as solely HR executives. These people would agree that they were HR professional but would not define themselves as “just HR”.

Do you think that HR has lost some of its importance over recent years?

Almost every professional or semi-professional group I talk to (and I have worked with many) make the same complaint. There is a competition between the professions for influence and no one thinks they have enough. I do not think HR has particularly lost influence. However, I do believe that if HR people define themselves as purely human resource specialists then they are likely to box themselves into a corner. They might easily become the people who simply say “you can’t do that” about employees.

If people see themselves as HR-skilled but with a wider strategic perspective – in other words, if they see themselves as not just HR but more than HR, then these interests and skills can have a real influence.

The people I mentioned earlier wanted to avoid a label which would paint them into a corner. They did not want to deprecate or diminish their HR professionalism and skills but to take a more inter-disciplinary approach.

Do you think this inter-disciplinary approach would benefit all functions?

I am sure that this is the case and we are going to have to see more zig-zag career curves. It is really important for an HR professional to have had some sort of line responsibility in their past roles as it gives an awful lot of credibility.

What was the most common reason for the failure of communication during organizational change?

One of the most common things we would see was that many leaders of the organization are involved in incredibly complicated, very resource-expensive change that may take two years or more.

And because they are often initiating a change when the very basis itself is changing, good intentions at the beginning of the project in terms of communication would soon become either overwhelmed or overtaken by events. In fact, failure to sustain good employee communications would really de-motivate employees. It is not necessarily worse than doing no communication but it certainly had many damaging effects.

Although HR must not delegate its communications during this time, I do not think that HR and corporate communications roles should be merged. However, there are a couple of skills that HR people (in their zigzag careers) need to take on specifically in relation to re-organization. First is the ability to carry out project management. A lot of HR traditionally has been quite administrative and HR professionals have increasingly realized that more activity is moving towards project-based work and therefore project management skills are absolutely critical. In fact, we found that in re-organizations, the most important success factor was good project management. The second skill is communication.

Are there any organizations that stood out as success stories?

Certainly Cadbury Schweppes and Ordinance Survey have done very imaginative things but we have also seen a wide range of practices. What struck us particularly is how creative and imaginative communications could be. One of the organizations had an art display; another decorated its project room in a way that symbolized the new organization. They would carry out role-plays, pieces of theatre to embody the change and the new ways of working in a physical, symbolic way that was much more effective than simply words, spoken or written.

And do you think that people moving into the HR profession would ever be put off by the need to be both strategic and creative at the same time?

It sounds demanding does not it! I think every person we spoke to beginning an HR career had that in mind. The people we worked with particularly closely already seemed to possess strategic skills. The very fact that these people were saying “I’m not HR” is an indication of the stigma associated with this role. One of the big challenges for the HR profession is not to see itself as just HR.

In your time at Oxford or previous institutions have you undergone major organizational restructures and, if so, how was that managed?

We certainly have. There has been plenty of re-organization in the University of Oxford. As you could imagine with such an old institution, Oxford is extremely hard to change. I do not know any easy prescriptions for Oxford or anywhere else.

What three pieces of advice would you give an HR manager who was about to take part in a radical change program?

1. 1.

   Communicate. To use words of one of the managers that spoke to us (and a bit of a Blairism), you must “communicate, communicate, communicate”.

2. 2.

   Develop rigorous project management skills. Project management means being able to take a holistic view and to manage that in a disciplined way over a sustained period of time.

3. 3.

   Strategize. See the bigger picture and understand where the change program fits within the strategy of the organization.