Idea in Brief
The Challenge
HR leaders tend to reach for the shiny objects of their trade—cool new research and insights about talent management and leadership. How can they choose the best of these and then integrate them into coherent systems?
The Exemplar
Juniper Networks’ resolve to be “different by design” has four basic elements. Its HR team works to understand the big picture of the business, seize on the most valuable ideas, apply them in context, and manage their impact.
The Lesson
Any business that competes on innovation knows the value of talent—and should have an HR function that can keep its edge.
Many of us have had the experience of listening to a talk and suddenly making a connection between the speaker’s big idea and a challenge we face at work. To listen to David Rock, of the NeuroLeadership Institute, for example, is to have one’s eyes opened to recent neuroscience research. One discovery Rock shares is that when people realize they are being compared with others, a “threat response” in their brains sends cortisol levels skyrocketing and makes it hard for them to take in other information. If you oversee your company’s annual performance review process and it centers on the delivery of a single number derived from a stack-ranking exercise, this insight could be a lightbulb going on.
