Enterprise platforms perform more and more of what HR’s role used to be. AI and robotics re-define what we used to call work. The very definition of ‘employment’ is in play. As are most agreements between employees and their employers.
Will anything about the workplace five years from now look like it does today? Probably not. That’s what we call an opportunity. An opportunity for HR, and other builders and keepers of organizational cultures to define a new role for themselves.
Call it the Chief Performance Officer. It’s already a thing. Google it. We think it’ll be a bigger thing in the years to come. As machines and their algorithms take over operations, humanness will become a valuable trait for companies to maintain. And what is more human than a story?
The CPO will see and analyze the organization as living theater, and its employees and stakeholders as performers in its story.
This means analyzing data in new ways . It means rooting out dysfunctions and their hidden costs, and offering creative strategies for how to convert cost savings (by eliminating dysfunctions) into revenue-producing activities.
In this role, you’ll go from dealing with grievances to working with ideas. Your organization will be more responsive to opportunities than to plans. Diversity will not be a matter of compliance, it will be an imperative for sustainable growth.
If it sounds like a dream, that’s because it is, mostly. But dreams are for the following. As Tina Fey would say, we want to go to there.
If the Chief Performance Officer role sounds like a direction you’d like to explore, join us this summer in L.A. Half a day, four hours, could change the rest of your professional life.