IBM recently issued a study after having gathered insights from more than 700 Chief Human resources officers, titled “Working Beyond Borders”.. I let  you peruse this long and interesting document but here’s in a few lines some of my takes from it.

Let’s start with te conclusion. As we could expect, it confirms what many people have been knowing for years : in today’s economic context and makets, HR’s main challenge is to develop work “beyond the borders”. What does it mean ?

• ability to work out of the enterprise silos and collaborate acrosse functions, departments, countries.
• ability to work out of the enterprise boundaries with partners, clients
• ability to work out of one’s own competence boundaries : mobilize expertises one don’t have and acquire new ones in a flexible and responsive way.
• ability to mobilize out of one’s comfort and authority zone what implies to develop new forms of leadership.

These are creativity, agility and flexibility challenges that CHROs want to address in many ways

• Develop creative leaders that will tackl challenges and opportunities in a new way that’s more adapted to our times. Kind of “intrapreneurs” able to react in an innovative way and engage people around them.
• Develop speed and flexibility by simplifying processes and making employees more responsive.
• Capitalize on collective intelligence by finding new ways to connect people

Even more interesting, one of the many illustrations of the study

It’s the evidence that while there are domains where CHROs find themselves efficient, some remain where about which they acknowledge not being effective although they will be critical in the future : fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing, developing leaders and developing workforce skills.

Now that that’s everybody know in what direction to head…the only thing to do is to work on that. The road seems very long but the amount of opportunities is more than worthy.

One more point to conclude :

I think there’s nothing to add. Just do it…