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What? Who? When? Development

One of my favorite sayings is from Lily Tomlin, the actress and comedienne: “I’ve always wanted to be somebody, but now I see I should have been more specific.” HR leaders have been fighting to “be somebody” for as long as I can remember, but the specifics have been all over the place and somewhat out of balance. We talk about having a seat at the table, being business partners, and becoming more strategic and less transactional. At various points along the way, perspectives from “Why We Hate HR” in Fast Company magazine (Fast Company Staff, 2005) to “It’s Time to Split HR,” by Ram Charan in Harvard Business Review (Charan, 2014) have suggested why we should hate, eliminate, split, or otherwise restructure HR to somehow fix it.

Some people think it is fashionable to bash HR as a means of making the case that it can and should be better as a profession. We already know and accept that it can be better. But we don’t need to bash the function. We need to simultaneously love and improve it.

HR doesn’t need to be fixed any more than Finance or Marketing do. Just like most other professions, HR is an amalgamation of great people and practices, along with those we would just as soon forget. Are there areas where we can improve? Absolutely. Do we need to be apologetic for bringing humanity and sanity to organizations that are badly in need of both these days? Absolutely not. Don’t play second fiddle to anyone or feel sorry for yourself; you are better than that. Collectively, we are better than that. And HR leaders are better than Finance, Marketing, or others at making people and organizations more effective. That’s what we do.

You can also make sure you take responsibility for developing yourself to be ready and relevant for what organizations most need from HR leaders – strong business acumen, a broad base of experience, an ability to capitalize on relationships and networks that span organizational boundaries, and a keen awareness of how to take full advantage of your own developmental inflection points in the moment they are happening. Oh, and you need to be able to accomplish things and deliver results that have a profound impact on business performance. If you cannot or do not want to do these things, you may deserve the criticism that HR people sometimes receive. Or perhaps you should find another profession. If you are already doing them, thanks! Now, let’s work together to help others get better at them, too.

HR Competency Models

My biggest concern is not that HR people need to be fixed; it’s that the way we have been trying to fix them is out of balance. The vast majority of efforts to improve the capability of HR people have focused on competency models – a laundry list of what HR people need to know and do in order to be effective. These competency models come in all shapes and sizes, and there are some great ones out there. A couple of my favorites include ongoing work by my colleague Dave Ulrich as well as the Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM’s) HR competency model initiative.

These HR competency models all tell a valuable story about the knowledge base HR leaders need to have to be effective, so I do not mean to criticize them in any way. What I do criticize is that most companies devote virtually all of their HR development resources to teaching content, assessing capabilities, and hiring or promoting HR talent based almost exclusively on these kinds of competency models. They are an important piece of the puzzle, but they do not portray the entire picture.

Furthermore, many HR people in organizations large and small will never see or be affected by these competency models, because they are complex and can be expensive to implement. Hundreds of thousands of HR people are being skipped over, without any access to these models as developmental tools, because they don’t have the time or money to utilize them.

Having reviewed a fair number of HR competency models over the years, a couple of years ago I decided to create what I like to think of as the “poor person’s” version of the much more comprehensive competency models that are available. I call it the HR Leadership Development Checklist (Figure 2.1), and it represents a summary of the key things I see the very best HR leaders knowing and doing, with a very simple approach to asking whether each capability represents a strength or a gap, or a place where the HR person’s knowledge and experience base are solid. While this one-page approach is probably not as sexy and comprehensive as some others I have seen, it is faster, cheaper, and more accessible than most. So feel free to use it if you find it helpful, and if your budget does not afford you the opportunity to use something more sophisticated.

Figure 2.1 HR Leadership Development Checklist

As you think about your own capabilities and knowledge base, or those of your team, let’s dive a little more deeply into each dimension to ensure understanding. Before reading Chapter 1, you completed the THREE PulseCheck that helped you better understand and assess what parts of this book might be most relevant and useful for you. We are going to address each element in subsequent chapters of this book, but a short summary here will help set the stage.

What the Best HR Leaders Know and Do

Human Capital Strategy refers to the degree to which you and your team understand how to integrate business strategy and human capital strategy and how to focus on a few priorities that matter most to the business. You demonstrate that people priorities must be derived first and foremost from understanding the value chain by which your business makes money and how human capital challenges must be overcome, and actions taken, to maximize the value chain and drive business results.

Leadership and Talent Development refers to the extent to which you and your team know the best ways to identify, acquire, and develop leaders and other key talent in the organization and have the willingness and ability to segment pivotal roles and people to apply limited resources to the highest leverage talent.

Change Leadership refers to how well you and your team take an active leadership role in planning and orchestrating both routine and transformational change and have an understanding of the steps needed to make it happen and to overcome resistance along the way.

Advice and Partnership refers to the ability that you and your team members have to provide trusted coaching and counsel to the operating, line, and/or other functional leaders you support. It implies knowing and speaking the language of the business, but perhaps more importantly, it is heavily reliant on the ability to ask good questions first – the kinds of questions that cause others to make good decisions and tough choices about business and people issues.

Driving Performance refers to the comprehensive knowledge that you and your team have to utilize the full array of tools that influence business performance. These tools might include building a performance culture, ensuring appropriate incentives and consequences are in place to influence the right behaviors, maximizing the value of compensation and benefits-related costs, reducing headcount, increasing management spans of control, minimizing the number of organizational layers, and/or redesigning organizations to be more effective and less costly.

Board Relationships refers to how much you and your team understand and contribute to the HR matters that board members care about. Increasingly, boards are paying attention to executive compensation at the CEO and leadership team level; succession planning and talent management for the CEO role, leadership team roles, and high potential and other pivotal roles; diversity and inclusion initiatives and progress; workforce engagement scores and actions; employee safety and well-being; environmental sustainability efforts and their contribution to employment value propositions or brands; and human capital dashboards supported by people analytics. Depending on your role and level in the organization, you may find yourself spending more time with board members personally on these and related matters, or you may be working indirectly on projects and initiatives that are of increasing interest to board members – even if you are not personally spending time with the board.

HR Excellence refers to the degree to which you and your team are focusing on assessing whether the HR organization is up to the task of leading and addressing the human capital issues and challenges your organization is facing. It suggests a willingness and ability to look in the mirror and ask yourself: “Do we have the talent, processes, operating model, and credibility we need in HR to do what the company needs of us, and if not, what are we doing about it?”

Future of HR refers to the ability you and your team have to see around corners, to understand the changing nature of the workforce, workplace, and work itself – and the implications these trends have on how HR work, HR people, HR technology, and HR organizations will have to change to remain relevant and add value in the future.

The above HR capabilities are certainly not all-encompassing, nor are they intended to be. They are instead meant to highlight the things I see the very best HR people paying attention to and addressing. The other things you are doing, such as employee relations, high volume hiring, policy interpretation, shared services, and more, are all extremely important and foundational to high-quality HR work. Generally speaking, however, they are not going to differentiate you, except negatively. In other words, doing them well is table stakes. Doing them poorly generally means you won’t be around long enough to worry about the other stuff anyway.

HR Leader Development Triangle

With these capabilities and definitions as a foundation, I would like to encourage you to expand your perspective about HR leader development. Think of it as a triangle – a balancing act between three critical dimensions of development: What?, Who?, and When? (Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2 HR Leader Development Triangle

What? involves the areas of content knowledge and capabilities that we have already been discussing in this chapter, so I won’t belabor them other than to reinforce the importance of these dimensions as foundational elements of HR leader development. They are so important that we will address each one in more depth in subsequent chapters of the book. But they are simply not enough to ensure well-rounded and well-prepared HR leaders.

Who? includes a critically important and often under-emphasized element of HR leader development, the people with whom you spend time, and how that distribution of people and time should change substantially as you move along in your HR career.

As you think about who you spend time with now, and who you might need to spend time with in the future to be even more effective, consider the following five premises, and ask yourself: “Do any of these sound like me?”

1. Most HR people don’t spend enough time on HR-related public policy issues at the local, state, federal, and/or global levels, nor do they influence public policy in ways that would be beneficial to their employees, companies, industries, or to the HR profession.

2. Most HR people understand very little about what other companies do, both within and outside of their own industries.

3. Most HR people are so inwardly focused that they spend very little time with their peers in other companies to network, share best practices, learn new ways of doing things, and/or advance the HR profession.

4. Most HR people over-rely on spending time within the HR function to the detriment of working effectively up and across the rest of the organization outside HR.

5. Most HR people are spread too thin, try to be everywhere for everyone, and are uncomfortable differentiating their time to spend higher quality time with specific employees or talent segments that are in the highest priority pivotal roles.

If you see yourself in any or all of the above five premises, you may have some work to do to change the way you are spending your time, and with whom. Generally speaking, the most effective HR leaders I know are very good at balancing the internal demands of their day-to-day jobs with spending more time outside to gain a broader, more external perspective. That’s where the HR profession is heading, so if you want to distinguish yourself relative to others, here’s your chance.