When you think of innovating HR or your department how well do you leave your biases at the door? What traditional assumptions do you succumb to as you attempt to innovate? Does the technology come before people?

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To be honest we tend to like people who are most like us. Those who share our opinions and values. Hiring and recruiting isn't any different replacing politically correctness with unconscious bias. In a time where everyone contributes to moon thinking in order to compete to win, how does HR handle real-world out-of-the-box thinkers? Let's assume you were approached, without the benefit of history, da Vinci, Steve Jobs and Einstein. Yet, let’s be honest shall we. You use Apple products. You quote Einstein and Jobs, however, you would have never hired either. And had Jobs worked for your firm he most certainly would not have fared well in the "sandbox."  Without sufficiently innovating your hr and leadership think of the countless Jobs and Einsteins you might have missed out on. Merely, because they didn't fit. They are out there.

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Steve Jobs would certainly tell you to take a flying leap. Forget a focus group. Do it better. He would really upset your meetings. The safe place in corporations where nothing gets done. And we haven’t mentioned government.

To turn your organization around, and you should always be in such a state, requires innovating management more consistently than you attempt to innovate products and services. Innovating HR and your leadership is where you must start.

If one were capable of sufficiently innovating hr in the same tried and true ways that would have worked by now. After all it has been done the same way by the same firms benchmarking the same processes for say, gazillion years.

Some of us in HR tend to be very narrow.  Perhaps, because an organizations leadership often does not quite comprehend the innovation engine human resources can be. No other department has the ability to help acheive business outcomes more than HR. Tips:

• Hire renegades. They don’t break rules by cheating or undeserving. However, they excel at over promising and over delivering on time.
• They create silos of excellence instead of protective fiefdoms of mediocrity.
• Avoid groupthink. In fact abhor groupthink.
• People who are forward thinkers, backward thinkers. People who don't think but want to. 
• Mix it up with introverts and extroverts
• Hire people with aberrations on their resume

Seriously, as HR goes so goes the innovation of your firm. Rather than using HR as a tool to process the flow of cost cutting measures designed to layoff rather than out innovate and out compete you will no longer view HR as a place to drop off those who could not perform elsewhere. HR will be the home of "Rock Stars."

About Jim Woods

Jim Woods is a successful trainer and President of Woods Kovalova Group, a leading management consultancy serving Board and C-level executives, managers, and individuals by helping them create a culture of leadership. He is an author, a former fifth grade and university teacher with an impressive resume. He is beloved by audiences. To schedule a speaking engagement with Jim please schedule an engagement here. Go>. Connect with him on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin.