President of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management (CIPM), Nigeria, Mallam Ahmed Ladan Gobir has said the nation’s ever-evolving business landscape has made it imperative for organizations, desirous of success to treat with utmost priority, the strategic management of their workforce, since they remain their most valuable asset.
Speaking at the CEO/CHRO/HRD Forum, organised by the CIPM, tagged: “Strategic People Management: Leveraging Your Greatest for Business Success”, in Lagos, on Wednesday, the CIPM boss stated that success recorded by an organization, through strategic and effective management of its people, usually goes a long way in differentiating it from the rest.
He explained that the theme of the forum stemmed from the need to highlight the essential role that effective people management plays in driving organisational excellence and achieving sustainable success.
Using Peter Drucker’s “The best way to predict the future is to create it”, Mallam Gobir explained that the forum also provided the opportunity to explore how practitioners in the Human Resources space could, proactively, shape the future of their organisations through strategic people management.
On the impact of effective people management on business outcomes, Mallam Gobir, while citing recent studies by McKinsey & Company, stated that companies with highly engaged employees usually experience 21% higher profitability and 20% higher productivity than their counterparts.
The CIPM boss noted that leveraging the people, the organisation’s greatest assets, is not just a strategy, but a necessity; since talent is fast becoming the primary driver of competitive advantage, in today’s world.
Mallam Gobir believed the forum provided a crucial platform for knowledge-sharing, exchange of ideas and fostering collaborations that will pave the way for innovative solutions in people management.
He, therefore, called on practitioners to reflect on how strategic people management could be harnessed to unlock the full potential of their organisations.
Also speaking at the event, the Special Guest Speaker, Ziad Maalouf, also stressed the importance of the workforce to the survival and success of an organization.
The Managing Director of Seven-Up Bottling Company argued that instead of the usual emphasis on the CEO/CFO relationship, there is the need for an organization to also stress the importance of the CEO/ CHRO (Chief Human Resource Officer) bonding, the individual directly in charge of the engagement of the organisation’s workforce.
“I think this is very important because they are in charge of the workforce, they give the company and the CEO, the people that work for them. And no matter what we do, if we don’t get that area of people-management right, we may not achieve the desired result,” he stated.
Head of People and Culture at Stanbic IBTC, Carol Olayi, stressed the need for a CHRO to understand the business of their organization, since this would go a long way in helping such practitioner make significant contributions, in the area of people-management, to the organization.
In her contributions, the Group Chief Human Resource Officer of Dangote Cement Plc, Gloria Byamugisha also believed the CHRO must know the culture of their organization to enable them know the appropriate appointees that would fit into such corporate culture.
