Art, surely "a learning HR" is a redundancy. (If not, it must be an
oxymoron.)
I don't know what *has to* happen but a couple of scenarios follow.
One is that a truly competent HR person - someone who is a master in
the field or at least in serious pursuit of mastery - might arrive at
a company, engage a CEO or exec team in the necessary integration of
HR with the corporate intentions and win an authentic accountability
to produce a result which demonstrably benefits the business in the
business' own measures. Most such masters are already occupied and
get their next job from references and having completed a
transformation wherever they currently are.
Another way is that a CEO or executive team realises that the
intellect, knowledge, wisdom, intelligence of the people in the
company and, beyond that the larger intelligence of the organisation,
is the source of the future. These will hire competent people who
are engaged in good things already (like serious Deming, or IM, or
??) and provide a transformative experience so these people see a
larger picture of knowledge and integration, get out of their more
narrow (and righteous perspectives) and see people, organisation and
HR in a new light.
The former I have seen at a few companies but there are few of these
people and, if you don't know one, you probably can't get one. The
latter can be seen at Unipart, at Connor Peripherals and a variety of
other companies. The clue to finding them is to find a company that
is demonstrating remarkable improvement in quality, marketshare,
production gains, etc. They will either have great HR people or have
managed to develop a management aproach (and managers to go with it)
that are their own HR source.
I have so far found none of these who refer to themselves as Learning
Organisation nor have I found any in my excursions into what
identifies itself as the Learning Organisation community. Why is
this?
-- Michael McMaster Michael@kbddean.demon.co.uk