HRMI 2019: Amy Edmondson tops list of influential thinkers

This article was published via HR Magazine on 17 September 2019. A link to the original article can be found here.

Last night HR magazine unveiled its Most Influential rankings for 2019 at Claridge’s hotel

The HR Most Influential (HRMI) rankings, in partnership with LifeSight, recognise the HR practitioners and thinkers pushing people strategy forward. HR Most Influential is now in its 14th year.

Amy Edmondson, Novartis professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School, took the coveted place of HR’s Most Influential thinker.

Edmondson was commended for her work which “arrives at a time when many organisations and HR professionals are engaged in seeking to make their organisations more effective, inclusive, and empowered”, according to editor of HR magazine Jenny Roper, speaking at the event.

Commenting on her work on psychological safety, which earned her the top spot, Edmondson said: “People cannot flourish in a culture of fear… I stumbled into the concept of cultures of fear. It’s my oldest work, but it’s taken a long time to get it right. I found a stunning result, which was that high-performing teams in healthcare didn’t make less mistakes, they made more. I was able to demonstrate that maybe it’s not that they really make more mistakes; it’s that they are more willing and able to talk about them.”

Described as a “stalwart of our thinkers list” founder of Quality and Equality Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge came in at second place. Cheung-Judge remains in the top three having also been ranked 2018’s number one most influential thinker.

When collecting her award Cheung-Judge talked on her focus of organisational development, and stressed the importance of ‘self’ to HR practitioners’ work. “As a troubleshooter for so many organisations, yes policy is important, structure is important, but we need to think that the most important thing we can do is to enable that ‘self’ to blossom… When we can do that we are all on to a winning formula, so go for it,” she said.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic was announced as this year’s third most influential thinker. He said that it’s important for the HR profession to retain a critical inquisitive approach to what it does, and to regularly challenge itself: “This speaks to the right spirit and attitudes of HR magazine. Unless you want to go down the route in the US where HR had been co-opted by the self-help industry, it’s good to have self-criticism, which is what Britain has always been known to do well. Cynicism and the ability to not take yourself too seriously is at the heart of this. It’s an honour to accept this award.”

Having topped the HRMI thinkers list in 2017 and as a stalwart of the top five over recent years, professor of organisational psychology at Queen Mary University of London Rob Briner was recognised for his outstanding contribution to the profession as he was welcomed into the HRMI Hall of Fame.

Briner was praised for his tireless work ensuring practitioners understand evidence-based HR and how to embed it day to day, with the concept now included in the CIPD’s new Profession Map, launched in November 2018.

He said: “I’m not going to leave anyone alone until the idea [of evidence-based HR] gets a bit more traction. Over the next few years I’m planning to spend a little less time in the university and more time working with practitioners… It’s truly an honour, thank you.”The top 30 thinkers are as follows:

1	Amy Edmondson	Novartis professor of leadership and management	Harvard Business School
2	Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge	Founder	Quality and Equality
3	Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic	Professor of business psychology	University College London and Columbia University
4	Adam Grant	Saul P. Steinberg professor of management and professor of psychology	Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
5	Matthew Taylor	Chief executive	RSA
6	Herminia Ibarra	Charles Handy professor of organisational behaviour	London Business School
7	Simon Sinek	Speaker and consultant
8	Caroline Criado-Perez	Author and campaigner
9	Perry Timms	Founder and chief energy officer	PTHR
10	Nilofer Merchant	Author and speaker
11	Vlatka Hlupic	Professor of leadership and organisational transformation	Hult Ashridge
12	Gervase Bushe	Professor of leadership and organization development	Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University
13	Peter Cappelli	George W Taylor professor of management and director of the Center for Human Resources	Wharton University of Pennsylvania
14	Bruce Daisley	Author and VP EMEA	Twitter
15	Rob McCargow	Director of artificial intelligence	PwC UK
16	Peter Cheese	Chief executive	CIPD
17	Rachel Botsman	Author
18	Wendy Hirsh	Independent researcher and principal associate	Institute for Employment Studies
19	David D’Souza	Membership director	CIPD
20	Josh Bersin	Principal and founder	Bersin by Deloitte
21	Megan Reitz	Professor of leadership and dialogue	Ashridge Executive Education
22	Stephen Bevan	Head of HR research development	Institute for Employment Studies
23	Patrick Lencioni	Founder and president	The Table Group
24	Chris Roebuck	Organisational success advisor and visiting professor of transformational leadership	Cass Business School
25	Linda Holbeche	Adjunct professor	Imperial College London
26	Patrick Wright	Thomas C Vandiver bicentennial chair and professor	University of South Carolina
27	John Amaechi	Organisational psychologist and consultant	Amaechi Performance Systems
28	James Traeger Rob Warwick	Director Reader in management and organisational learning	Mayvin University of Chichester
29	Simon Fanshawe	Co-founder	Stonewall
30	Susan Vinnicombe	Professor of women and leadership	Cranfield School of Management

Visit the HR Most Influential website for all our listed individuals and their profiles.