About the author

Eugene Burke’s career to date includes roles as a military psychologist for the Royal Air Force, United States Air Force and NATO, establishing the first occupational psychology unit for the London Fire Brigade, establishing his own consultancy as well as more recent leadership roles in SHL and CEB for R&D, product development, product management, consulting services and, most recently, in developing and applying solutions in talent analytics.

His recent projects include the talents that drive innovation effectiveness, the future of the retail bank,

improving the success of high- potential programmes, how organisations can use analytics to drive more effective investment in graduate recruitment, how HR can play a key role in managing risk for organisations, addressing the challenges to global assessment programmes, as well as unpacking myths around gender differences in leadership potential and what the differences between the generations mean for effective talent management.

As well as scientific articles, book chapters and books, Eugene has published articles in Talent Management as well

as in T+D Magazine, People Matters and the Harvard Business Review, and featured in articles for The Times, Financial Times, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal.

Eugene has held leadership positions for professional bodies such as the Association of Test Publishers, the Association of Business Psychologists, the British Psychological Society, ISO and the International Test Commission. In 2014, Eugene was identified as one of the top 50 global influences in talent analytics in a LinkedIn poll.

People and the creation of value Why organisations need to up their game on understanding, measuring and leveraging human capital

Eugene Burke, Analytics Adviser to the CIPD

What marks the competent organisation is its capability to create value through its people. This is hardly a new insight. People, whether they are leaders defining strategy, managers responsible for executing that strategy or employees committed to delivering on an organisation’s goals, have been and always will be an essential driver of value-creation. They are also a critical factor in whether value can be and is destroyed.

What is new is the opportunity for organisations to marshal the wealth of data they hold on people, the tools now available to use that data to effect and the emergence of coherent ways of thinking about how the flow of value-creation is enabled, or not, through people investments.

This is more than just a call to action for HR functions and HR professionals. It is an essential competency for leaders and managers in organisations because it speaks to the quality of decision-making in this information age. To build

that organisational competency, decision-makers, whatever function they may sit in – including those in finance and HR – need to understand how the notion of value has changed and is changing. They need to understand how an investment in people links to value and be able to track and measure whether those people investments are delivering value today and can be expected to deliver value tomorrow.

They need to be able to do that in two ways. First, they need to be able to answer the question of whether those investments are building the people capabilities the organisation needs – that is, is the organisation creating human capital today that will sustain it into the future? Second, they need to be able to demonstrate how people investments are delivering value, whether that is in the form of more-tangible financials or the more-intangible forms of value that are increasing in importance as current thinking about how to define value matures.

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The changing nature of leadership quality

While the pressures on organisations and their leaders have increased, so have our expectations about the quality of decisions that leaders make. Those pressures and our expectations for decision qualityi are framed by powerful forces in this information age (Table 1).

Organisations are now more exposed than ever before. Social media, a 24/7/365 online news media as well as the arrival of companies that publish employee perceptions of their employers and their leaders1 may not have

i Decision quality, or DQ, refers to the choices made under dynamic circumstances and the actions that follow from those choices. The quality of a decision can be judged by six characteristics: setting the right frame, considering alternatives, gathering meaningful data, clarifying values and trade-offs, the logic underpinning the evaluation of data and alternatives, and whether a decision results in a commitment to action.

rendered organisations fully trans