Interview with Dave Ulrich

Citation

by Juliet Norton, I. (2010), "Interview with Dave Ulrich", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 18 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/hrmid.2010.04418aaf.001

Interview with Dave Ulrich

Article Type:Interview From: Human Resource Management International Digest, Volume 18, Issue 1

Interview by Juliet Norton

Dave Ulrich is a Professor of Business at the University of Michigan and a partner at the RBL Group, a consulting firm focused on helping organizations and leaders deliver value. He studies how organizations build capabilities of speed, learning, collaboration, accountability, talent, and leadership through leveraging human resources. He has helped generate award winning data bases that assess alignment between strategies, human resource practices and HR competencies.

Could you tell me a little bit about the types of organizations with which you work?

I am privileged to work with public and private sector organizations around the world. Mostly, they are large companies who have complex customers, and diverse employee relationships and systems. Most have a history of success and are led by men and women of distinction.

What attracted you to working in this field?

I had a remarkable professor (Bonner Ritchie) at law school, who taught me to reflect on organizations where I lived and worked. He helped me see that organizations have the capacity to create collective action and leverage the power of individuals. I realized that my mother and father in their church and personal service were gifted managers in organizational settings. Their endless patience with me, and wise mentoring encouraged and taught me to endlessly examine how organizations work so that they can serve both customers outside and employees inside. My PhD honed my analytical skills, but did not lessen my passion to understand and use organizations to move forward.

What do you think the trends in HR will be over the next five to ten years?

Some old issues will continue to endure. HR must deliver value. What is becoming clear is that value must be derived by those both inside and outside the organization. Increasingly, organizations who have the capabilities of speed, execution, learning, change and talent will win in rapidly changing markets. HR practices have to create organization capabilities to be successful. HR will need to connect to external customers, investors, communities and legislators to create more value.

What do you think will be the main challenges for organizational leaders in the future?

Leaders have many challenges ahead. They have to build leadership, or the next generation, so that they are replaced by those gifted for the future. They have to anticipate external environmental changes so that they can respond quickly. They have to build employee competence, commitment and contribution so that employees have not only the ability to do their work, but the ability to create meaning. They have to have personal authenticity so that they can build trust from those who follow them.

There is a lot of talk currently about the recession and the global credit crunch; do you think that these types of conditions affect HR strategy?

Good HR is good in good and bad economies. If one builds a house only for summer when it is hot or winter when it is cold, the house will not be inhabitable. If HR practices are not designed for good and bad markets, they are not sustainable. While the same practices may differ (e.g., more compensation in up markets and less compensation in down markets), the basic practices are the same. One of my greatest fears is that as companies go forward, they need to be very aware of employees. In down markets, some organizations experience a gratitude attitude and get false positives on employee engagement scores. In the short term, these scores are high because employees are grateful for the job and might compare themselves with their less fortunate colleagues or friends. But, memories last longer than recessions and employees who felt mistreated and taken advantage of during the down markets remember, and when the up markets follow, these employees will choose to leave. Companies who retain talented employees in good markets and treat people well in bad markets will be more successful over time.

In your recent book: HR Transformation, you talk about HR as being center stage as organizations’ challenges become more complex. Why do you think HR is such an integral part of a company strategy?

HR practices touch all employees on a monthly basis. They affect who is hired, how people are paid, how they are treated, how they are developed, how they are informed about the company and how they fit in with the company. HR work touches everyone.

HR work is the infrastructure of the company. People may come and go, but the HR practices are the infrastructure that defines a company’s identity. In a house, the lighting, plumbing, heating, and other infrastructures makes a huge difference to what it is like to live in the house. HR makes organizations work.

HR enables or inhibits change. A strategy is easier to talk about than to do. For strategies to move from aspirations to actions, the internal systems need to be changed for sustainable success.

You mention some of the common pitfalls of HR, discussing HR in isolation; HR in increments, etc. What do you think is the most common pitfall of the HR function within an organization?

The most common downfall of HR is that HR people do not link their work to the business. When I ask people, what is your biggest work challenge today; the most common set of answers are about hiring, training, or paying people, or about how to handle the personal demands of the job (building relationships with general managers). These are good answers, but not complete. The biggest work challenge for HR leaders is to make sure that their work helps leaders reach their goals. This means linking HR with strategy. We ask people to add “so that” to their traditional answer: ‘staffing, so that the company has talent for the future”.