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Cornelius "Connie" Colao, chief people officer at Taco Bell, outlines the steps taken at Yum! Inc to transform its HR function on a global scale so that it was placed at the heart of the business.
Not long ago, the HR profession had a dramatic choice to make: stay the same and risk drifting into irrelevancy, or change and become one of the most critical roles in any organization. Since it was sink or swim, the answer was clear - change. How to make this happen, however, was a much harder call.
This was the quandary facing HR at Yum! Inc, the world's largest restaurant company. The corporation is made up of several major restaurant brands, including A&W, KFC, Long John Silvers, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, and has over 34,000 restaurants in 100 countries. The HR functions among them had a loose reporting relationship. Although they were intellectually aligned regarding HR roles, the roles varied significantly across entities. HR's question for corporate was: "What role do you want us to play?"
Asking the right questions
Cornelius "Connie" Colao, chief people officer at Taco Bell, is a longtime veteran of HR. He has a powerful network of HR colleagues from other industries, and at a meeting held near the end of 2005 he and his colleagues discussed the transforming role of HR in their businesses. The questions this group had were different from those Colao heard at Taco Bell and Yum!: "What does our company need from us, and how do we have to change to fulfill those needs?" Colao brought these questions back to his HR colleagues at Yum!. By doing so, he hoped to help people look for the root cause of issues, rather that just fix the symptoms, and to put into effect a change of mindset from being reactive to being proactive.
To help answer these questions, Colao turned to Root Learning, a strategic engagement company that helps companies of all sizes in matters of organizational change. HR wanted to get an assessment of its current state from the viewpoint of the HR practitioners and from HR...