#john kelleher

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Harley Weir & John Kelleher

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Harley Weir & John Kelleher

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Ardmore Studios sign agreement on Limerick facility

Ardmore Studios sign agreement on Limerick facility

A formal agreement was signed yesterday to open a state-of-the-art film and tv studio in Limerick. Limerick City and County Council signed the agreement with Troy Studios which was established by Ardmore Studio’s Chief Executive Siún Ní Raghallaigh along with Ardmore joint-owner Ossie Kilkenny and producer John Kelleher. The formal agreement will see the former Dell factory in Castletroy, Co…

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A CEO’s thoughts on innovation in the HR department (and all support functions)

Kira Talent is proud to have an accomplished and dedicated group of leading business experts who will join our blog conversation. Please welcome Kira Talent Chairman John Kelleher to share his thoughts on innovation in the HR Department.

Most corporate leaders tend to think of their organizations in terms of "line" and "staff" functions. The line functions are all the primary activities of the company that directly and obviously impact the customer - manufacturing, operations, the sales force, the post-sales service department and so on. The staff functions are all of the "supporting" or "enabling" roles like IT, HR, Finance, and so on. 

As a general rule, there is a discipline of innovation within a firm’s primary functions. CEOs expect and demand change and improvement quarter by quarter. Primary function managers think of constant improvement as a part of their job - not only are they serving the customer today but they are figuring out how to better serve the customer next month and so on. This might be akin to steering the ship while at the same time figuring out how to upgrade both the engine and the navigation system. Both must happen at once. Since these functions are closer to the customer, they also benefit from the "heat" that daily customer interaction provides for change. Customers are usually the first to demand more for less, with a “why can't this be done that way?” attitude. So primary functions tend to change and improve as a matter of normal course. 

Secondary functions, in general, aren't so lucky. Some CEOs (wrongly) see them as less important and therefore tend to demand less of them. Take the HR department for example. If the department is delivering on all of its core duties – making sure people are hired on time, sticking to its budgets, and evaluating staff…most leaders will leave it at that. Ask yourself: how many CEOs demand a strategic plan from the head of HR? Not many. How many HR departments conduct surveys of their internal and external “customers”?  How many recruiting departments regularly get time with their CEO to discuss “megatrends” in the HR space and how technology is changing the landscape and how their departments can stay ahead? Not many. How many HR departments have an “innovation” capital budget? Not many. The same tends to be true of other “support functions”. When was the last time you remember a CEO asking the head of finance to present a strategic plan for his department driven by a robust competitive analysis of what the best finance departments in the world are doing? Pretty rare.

All of this is a shame and ultimately dead wrong thinking. Great leaders and great corporations know that there is no such thing as “primary and secondary” functions with one being more or less important. Great companies design a business so that every function is vital and reinforces and delivers the company’s key value propositions. Firms like Google, Oracle, Microsoft, and Facebook but also General Electric and great hospitals like the Mayo Clinic see, for example, HR as a vital and critical function that is a “leading edge” indicator on the future health of their whole business. If HR is sick today, the enterprise will be sick tomorrow. If HR lacks innovation today, the enterprise will lack innovation tomorrow.

My central argument therefore is: It’s time for a new wave of innovation and strategic thinking and planning in our “support functions”. And I’d like to focus, if I might, on one support function which has an enormous opportunity for change and that is the HR department, and specifically recruiting.

HR leaders have a great opportunity to step forward and design a strategic plan for their departments and to ask for real time with the CEO to review and seek approval on it. The centerpiece of these plans should be a goal of tripling effectiveness and service in the next two years (for the same or marginally-higher cost) by leveraging technology and breaking away from many of the ineffective and out-dated paper-based processes that dominate nearly all but the most sophisticated HR groups today. These strategic plans should identify and review all core HR and recruiting processes (screening, hiring, testing, qualification, onboarding, performance management, feedback, and so on) and ask: how can each be done faster, better, and cheaper?

  For recruiting and screening, Kira Talent is just this kind of a tool. Kira Talent was designed specifically for medium sized businesses – it is all about allowing these corporations and institutions to find dramatically better talent in a dramatically more efficiently way. Kira Talent’s customers are finding that video screening is simply a far better way to identify great talent – and what’s more is that we save these organizations significant money by reducing the need for redundant paper processes and hours and hours of in person interviews for individuals who obviously weren’t a good fit in the first place. We think that Kira should earn a place in the strategic innovation plan of every small and medium sized business in North America.

  But that’s not all. In the last five years, there has been an explosion of amazing technologies and start-ups in the HR space. Interestingly, many of these are Canadian-born businesses, a fact we should be proud of. As an example, Toronto-born Rypple was created to make the process of giving feedback inside one’s organization dramatically faster and more effective. It quickly morphed into an online performance management system (killing the silly old paper-based, slow processes that everyone hated). Following its very successful acquisition by Salesforce.com, it is now pivoting again into Work.com, a broad line online performance management social network for your enterprise that addresses multiple problems in the HR department. And there are dozens of other examples of start-ups in the HR space that are rapidly killing paper-based HR processes that are now more than 70 years out-of-date with smarter, better, and faster approaches. If you are an HR leader of a company with more than 30 employees, all of these tools can save your company money and (even more importantly) dramatically enhance the quality and output of your department. Every HR department should take the time to review these developments and to figure out how to leverage them within their organizations.   

When the Head of HR proactively approaches the CEO with a strategic plan to improve all of its core processes, that’s an exciting development. And CEOs need to be open-minded and progressive enough to recognize that these kinds of strategic thinking and innovation are every bit as important (if not more so) than the innovation and strategic planning for, say, the product development business unit.

The line versus staff definition is ultimately a false distinction. Every department needs to support the company’s core value proposition and add value through strategic planning, change, and annual improvement.

For leaders that believe this, it is an exciting time because technology to fundamentally upgrade and enhance the work of departments like HR has never been better, cheaper, and more accessible. 

Let’s begin by developing HR leaders that create real strategic plans for their departments. And let’s push CEOs to be wise enough to listen and support innovation in the HR department as much as on the manufacturing floor. This will drive the next great wave of progress that our businesses need.

Please share your thoughts on how innovation can be championed in the HR department by leaving a comment below. 

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JOHN KELLEHER is an experienced principal investor and private equity CEO. He has run two large corporate transformations as President & CEO – Black’s Photography and RHB Group LP. Earlier, John worked at McKinsey & Co. in Toronto and Goldman, Sachs & Co. in New York. He is a graduate of the Harvard Business School and a frequent guest lecturer at the Richard Ivey School of Business and the Rotman School of Management. John serves as Chairman of the Board for Kira Talent and is a Director of the Next 36, Canada’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Development Program.