Interview with Dr Anne Marie McEwan

Citation

by Ruth Young, I. (2009), "Interview with Dr Anne Marie McEwan", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 17 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/hrmid.2009.04417eaf.001

Interview with Dr Anne Marie McEwan

Article Type: Interview with Dr Anne Marie McEwan From: Human Resource Management International Digest, Volume 17, Issue 5

Interview by Ruth Young

Dr Anne Marie McEwan is the founder and CEO of the recently launched Smart Work Company ltd, which aims to change management practice in the twenty-first century. The new company focuses on learning and development for senior executives. It will help enterprises to transform performance, changing management cultures, systems and processes through blending work-based learning and reflective thinking.

Anne Marie has an international track record in helping senior executives in a range of sectors and company sizes, in the UK and most recently in Russia, to embrace new approaches to management. She helped to develop the International Senior Executive Strategic (ISES) Master’s at the Academy of National Economy in Moscow. This work-based learning program for senior executives was developed and delivered in partnership with Kingston University, UK, where Anne Marie is a visiting fellow.

Further details of the Global Mobility Network, mentioned in the interview, can be found at: www.TinyURL.com/33e5a4

Why is the old style of management no longer working within modern organizations?

Management practices that were a hangover from when people worked in only one place, when machines and production lines dictated the pace of behavior and management’s role was largely policing people’s behavior are no longer appropriate or fit for purpose. How organizations put together structures, processes and management practices will determine how people work together and how successful they are in staying ahead of the game in a highly connected world where competition from clever and cost-effective talent is here to stay.

The challenges facing organizations and managers today are huge and include a mobile and fragmented workplace in which managers have to develop the capabilities and skills to manage people across multiple boundaries which may be organizational, professional, cultural and geographic. A new breed of workers has arrived in the form of Generation Y, who are energetic and sociable, yet challenging to manage and are themselves setting off a new wave of social and business transformation. The emergence of social networking technologies and the virtual workplace means that national borders are increasingly meaningless and enterprise and job roles go wherever people happen to be. This has enormous implications for managers and the need to fully understand the implications of cultural diversity. And finally, the physical workplace is now becoming a crucial tool in supporting knowledge-intense work. Workplace design needs to support learning collaborating, socializing and focusing. These changes are on many fronts, they are economic, technological, demographic and organizational and they all mean that the ways of managing that we have been used to are no longer appropriate.

There is currently a huge buzz around Web 2.0 and its role within organizations. What real benefits can Web 2.0 bring, particularly with relation to the HR and learning and development function?

The benefits are potentially many and they are all related to employee engagement, retention of key personnel and the creation of business-wide learning architectures. These tools are being used by organizations internally to shrink the social distance experienced by distributed workforces, to build informal and formal networks across organizational boundaries and across functions, to encourage innovation through incidental conversation, to enable more formal collaborative problem-solving and to enable people to connect to sources of information and expertise.

I think these tools are giving us the potential for a second wave of what I call “smart working” and a way of mobilizing collective knowledge and skills in the face of significant global turbulence. Web 2.0 tools provide us with the opportunity to make informal networks, which have always been powerful within organizations, much more visible. They are stimulating a collective intelligence both within and beyond our organizational boundaries and they allow us to see who the high performers are, where the value is created and by whom and to understand the key roles that people play in sourcing and acting on value-creating knowledge.

Organizations are currently facing extremely difficult times. What opportunities does the current business climate offer in terms of management and culture change?

In previous recessions, and I have been through several, the immediate response by organizations was to reduce headcount. This time I get the sense that this is not necessarily the first line of action and companies are much more concerned with holding onto people. Cost-cutting in this situation is a given, but now is a golden opportunity to consider the knowledge and capabilities that may have been previously overlooked within the organization and to ask employees and get them engaged in the survival plan, and how to proceed in the future. Rather than going outside to consultants, the opportunity exists to ask employees, because they know your customers, they know what people are saying about the business, they know your processes inside out. And this is where Web 2.0 tools can have a very important role to play in creating conversations around the business. In summary, in these difficult times tapping into previously underutilized workforce knowledge and talent gives you ammunition for survival and sets you up for doing business in a different way to how you worked previously which in itself equips you to survive in a turbulent future.

We have talked about how much the workplace has changed already, but what changes will the next ten years see?

I think what we are going to see is glacial change, it is going to happen but it is going to be imperceptible, like a glacier that shifts along you can hardly see it moving but as it does it carves out deep, deep change and I think that is what we will see in ten years’ time. One of the main causes of this change will be Generation Y entering the workforce, if they continue with their highly collaborative and highly social approach then in ten years they are going to be stepping into management positions and bringing with them, not only a facility and ease with using technologies but also a new approach, through networked sociability. And I keep saying “if” because who knows what will happen once these young people get into positions of management, will they revert to some of the management behaviors that we are currently familiar with? Or will they retain that collegiate way of working? In ten years’ time I think we will see many more ecosystems within organizations and a move away from the idea of a big company. We will see ecosystems of innovation beginning to emerge and in that sense a more collaborative, networked and connected workforce.

How can we prepare management for the challenges these changes will bring?

I think we need to create informal learning networks, both online and offline. For the last four years I have been co-facilitating a learning network called the Global Mobility Network, in conjunction with Johnson Controls. I work with their Director of Global Workplace Innovation and we have been bringing together senior IT, HR and Facilities Managers to talk about these challenges in a very informal setting. About three times a year, we get together to have a conversation on a particular topic and we laugh a lot and we enjoy each other’s company but in the process of doing that we are also raising issues, increasing awareness of current trends and encouraging people to talk about what this means for their situation. I think the key to preparing management for these changes is in these types of informal conversations, through informal learning networks and also providing the opportunity for mutual peer-support, mentoring, coaching but also emotional support.

What do you think are currently the biggest obstacles to learning and development within organizations?

First of all, I think that the training mentality is very limited, because work is learning it is not a separate activity. This is very linked to my focus not only on process innovation and process integration but also on work-based learning which is really my capability. People really need to be thinking in terms of process, collaboration, problem-solving, and continuous improvement as being integral to everyone’s roles. The current training mentality feels to me like an add-on and I think that is a large obstacle, because for me learning and development is so much a part of the DNA of the organization. Related to that is functional silo thinking, IT, HR and Facilities Managers all need to talk to each other in order to understand what the strategic business objectives are, and their shared role within that structure. I am listening to a lot of conversations online currently about HR versus frontline management which makes me very concerned because the conversation should not be about that, it is about the business, what the customers want, competitor activity and how these three functions communicate. As far as I can see these functional walls are as solid as they ever were which is another big obstacle to integrated learning and development. And finally the drag of the status quo, there is understandably so much attention on day-to-day pressures that it is not easy to step back and think about whether your current ways of working are appropriate or how things might be improved.