Last week we hosted a webinar featuring speaker John Foster, Chief People Officer at TrueCar. The webinar delved into topics on agile transformation, skills fluency, and a customer-centered business model. Foster, who also served as CHRO at Hulu and IDEO, discussed the complexities of navigating fluctuating markets and the ever-changing ecosystems of today’s business landscape.
Are You Ready to Transform?
For more information on how Hitch, a SaaS-based internal talent platform, can help transform your organization, contact us. If you would like to read a case study outlining the benefits of enterprise transformations, click here.
VUCA
That’s not a typo, it’s an acronym for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. While not a new concept, VUCA actually originated with students at the U.S. Army War College as a way to describe the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity of the world after the Cold War. Foster’s discussed VUCA as a way to navigate the constant change that occurs every day. Winning and thriving in a VUCA environment is challenging, and he argued, it requires agility, the ability to pivot quickly, and iterate often.
Customer-centered businesses are able to pivot quickly and collaborate across channels to achieve success and manage VUCA conditions. A change model and organizational behavior expert, Foster made a case that agility has become a global movement aimed at mastering continuous change in a volatile uncertain world.
Investments vs Costs
Foster discussed the value of investing in your workforce and viewing skills in a supply and demand context, all of these are values that Hitch, a SaaS-based internal talent platform, delivers. Looking at investing in cloud and software applications that bolster your workforce and develop greater skills visibility are just that, investments, not costs. Other recommended shifts in thinking that Foster recommended would help companies transform included changing your hierarchy to a structure of reciprocity, directing to navigating, jobs to projects, and responsibilities to skills.
Changes from a people manager to a people investor or people developer were also discussed. A fundamentally different way of thinking about talent and people and business challenges were a strong focus of the Hitch-sponsored webinar.
First Steps to Transform your Organization
Skills visibility is a good place to start. Foster charted the evolution of skill defining and believes it’s central to becoming more agile and adaptable in a VUCA world. Agile organizations drive collaboration, iterate quickly, and unlike traditional organizational models, are based on skills, not jobs. Skill visibility allows an organization to build quickly, iterate often, and test back with your customers.
Operational shifts, from product to customer-centered, provide key opportunities to build an aligned organization.
Next Steps
If you’re interested in transforming your organization contact us at Hitch or check out our webinar. Look for more webinars coming soon. If you want advanced notice about our webinars and resources, follow us on LinkedIn. At Hitch, we’re always looking to partner with companies of all sizes to redefine the talent operating model and increase organizational capacity.
About Hitch
Hitch is a Talent Opportunity & Mobility Platform that matches the skills and passions of your workforce with organizational needs so that business opportunities — whether project-based or full-time — can be resourced from within. This internal marketplace creates a culture of learning, growth, and engagement where people feel valued and the organization achieves greater productivity and performance while retaining its most valuable talent.