Developing a Strategic Human Resources Approach: Four Key Steps to Speed Up the US Army's Workforce Evolution
The Army's Transformative HR Strategy: A Journey Towards Talent Management
The United States Army has embarked on a significant journey, transitioning from a transactional, compliance-focused approach to personnel management to a transformational, productivity-enhancing talent management strategy. This shift has proven consequential and successful, as the Army faces the challenges of the modern era.
The cornerstone of this transformation lies in the specific, differentiating, actionable, future-oriented, and capability-focused design criteria that underpin Army HR. Today's cutting-edge HR departments, including the Army's, possess a diverse range of expertise, encompassing strategic planning, organizational research, culture, talent management, learning and development, performance management, people analytics, labor economics, workforce planning, diversity and inclusion, total rewards, employee relations, risk management, and succession planning.
In 2010, the Army began to reimagine its people practices, acknowledging that its HR approach was misaligned with its organizational strategy and not delivering the goods. This realization led to the publication of the Army's first-ever People Strategy, which identifies strategic HR capabilities critical to achieving its goals.
However, the Army's HR community shares some responsibility for the past state of affairs. Its occupational culture remains deeply rooted in the past, focusing on processes rather than people and the future. The problem was that Army HR processes treated people as interchangeable parts rather than as uniquely talented individuals.
The Army's overarching culture has contributed to this state of affairs, featuring a top-down, control-oriented management style. These cultures also tend to believe that "unity, agreement, and consensus are signs of organizational health, whereas dissent and disagreement must be avoided."
To successfully continue its HR transformation, the Army can blend proven organization design and organization development principles. A positive, strengths-based approach to change, such as Appreciative Inquiry (AI), can make people and organizations more resilient, build greater connections between coworkers, and enhance creativity and innovation.
The Army's dedicated professionals are being asked to do different and more complex work in support of completely new organizational and human resource strategies. General James McConville, the US Army's chief of staff, served as its G-1 (chief of human resources) for several years, providing valuable insights into these challenges.
Organizational culture plays a vital role in mission accomplishment and must change constantly to remain in alignment with an organization's strategy. The Army's HR transformation is not a set of disparate change-management initiatives but an HR-wide organization development effort.
The Army faces persistent challenges such as sexual harassment and assault, as well as growing concerns over racism and domestic extremism in its ranks. Addressing these issues is crucial for the Army to maintain its mission readiness and uphold its values.
Dr. Mike Colarusso, working at the Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis at West Point, contributes to these efforts, although the specific details about his role are not provided in the available search results.
In the human capital era, no other resource drives or constrains productivity to the extent that an organization's people do. The Army is continuing a push to transform its human resource practices, recognizing that its people are its greatest asset.
