By Garry Priam

By their very nature, special projects play a key role in igniting the innovative potential within any organization.  As temporary endeavours undertaken to achieve unique goals and results, projects serve as both a catalyst and an end unto themselves. Inevitably, they also call upon the unique skill set of today’s HR professional.

Without question, HR professionals play a pivotal role in projects succeeding in today’s organizations, as every project is driven by human capital—people—at its core. While they also have requisite deadlines and supply needs, a big part of any project manager’s responsibilities includes acquiring, developing, managing and coordinating a project’s human resources.

As such, an organization’s internal HR professionals are driven to develop innovative systems and solutions to answer a project’s needs.  From building core teams to sourcing additional talent to resolving disputes among project shareholders, HR’s role is dynamic and ongoing; as both a pipeline of talent and internal facilitator, HR enables the desired results.

HR Provides Critical Insight
While the types of projects undertaken can range from implementing a new HRIS to overhauling a company’s learning management system, their goal is fairly singular. Projects are done because a change (read, innovation) is deemed necessary to make the company stronger.

“When individuals are put together to form a team, it’s a great idea to work with HR to ensure the right members are selected, similar to a really great recipe,” says Hootsuite’s talent manager, Agata Zasada, CHRP, MBA. “HR members typically are aware of who brings what to the table. Like a recipe, the outcome is greater, and tastier, than the ingredients in themselves, just like innovation.”

For most companies, the ability to innovate is the single most important predictor of future growth. Interestingly, investment decisions have a strong tendency to be correlated to how focused companies are on transformational innovation.  While technology plays a vital role in such transformations, it is neither the truest measure, or indeed, the most important. Instead, studies strongly show that the most successful corporate innovation strategies are the ones that primarily focus on human capital.

Culture Champion, Change Catalyst
Culture has become the key to the new economy, and HR has become the linchpin to sustainable innovation. Herein, HR helps to develop and sustain the kind of positive culture required for organizations to step into their innovative potential, as well as successfully navigate the demands and opportunities of project-driven work.

As a project manager who has stepped into a range of work environments, those that truly thrive benefit from dynamic HR leadership, and the fact that HR alone has access to more of those ‘transformational levers’ or talent touch points, than any other department.

In short, regardless of industry or size of business, no one knows people quite like HR—and people, in all their complexity, are key to the innovation equation in any workplace.

When looking at human capital and people in today’s organizations, it is essential to acknowledge the different generations working side-by-side and how to effectively utilize their skills and mindsets on projects.

This is both an opportunity and a challenge: the opportunity to involve a mix of people with unique experiences and skills and the challenge of dealing with the generational differences.  It is also par for the course for a project manager; for example, project teams can have 22-year-old Millennials and 57-year-old Baby Boomers reporting to a 45-year-old GenXer—or vice versa in any order depending on the goal.

Generational Work Styles: Struggles & Solutions
As a project manager, you are challenged with four different—and most often conflicting approaches to working with the four generations in the workplace.  While people are people, everybody carries with their “generational ideals” with them wherever they go, including to work. These differing viewpoints, grounded in varied life experiences, can impact the ability for team members to work well with one another.

For example, when a Traditionalist’s respect for authority and directive management meets a Gen Xer’s relaxed attitude toward authority and informal work style, conflicts can occur. When generational approaches to work clash, the outcomes are reduced team engagement and diminished project results and possibly increased turnover.

On the flip side, the generational mix adds depth and due diligence to any project while revealing the very real benefits of diversity, be they demographic or cultural. It is here that smart HR goes to work to everyone’s benefit, by ensuring employees understand the strategic relevance of a project and building a blend of talent that will surpass what frictions emerge.

Understanding how each generation works, while leaving room for those moulds to be broken daily, can make project team selection and leading a multi-generational team easier. Again, it is HR which holds this knowledge closest to heart within an organization, which provides a tremendous assist to any project manager being dropped in to generate specific results.

HR Serving Organizations
HR’s role on projects provides immense potential for enabling innovation. HR has a unique opportunity to be a key driver of the innovation agenda, delivering sustainable competitive advantage, and becoming a true strategic partner.

?Garry Priam is a professional speaker, corporate trainer, project manager, Italian author and owner of Mossa International Incorporated a business consulting company.

(PeopleTalk Spring 2015)