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Tell a Credible HR Story
HR leaders seeking a more strategic role often find the first challenge is getting C-level executives to see the value of their input. At a recent gathering of HR leaders, a perhaps-unsurprising but nonetheless-effective solution was offered.
Every year now for the past five, the Wharton School has been running an executive education course on strategy at the Society for Human Resource Managment annual conference. This year, we began this program with a focus group technique to identify the questions that were on the minds of the participants and some of the answers that others in the group had to those questions. Although we initially came up with about 20 separate questions from the group, most of them came down, in one way or another, to the role of HR in their own organizations: How does the function and those who run it get taken more seriously? This is obviously not a new question. It has been on the minds of HR leaders for at least two decades, and it is the focus of interest in many other fields in addition to HR. When these participants talked about an important role for HR, they meant being able to have some influence on business strategy formation or execution. About 25 percent of those being interviewed reported that their HR groups were marginalized in their organizations. Whether that is a lot or a little depends on your perspective, but it is, if nothing else, interesting that even those inside a function were aware that there were more important tasks that HR should be handling, which means that they could see what those other tasks should be. Not surprisingly, those who were cut out of the action reported it was because they were concentrating on transactional business, the "must do" topics in the function. Many participants noted that when their groups were able to be involved in the strategic level, it was because the CEO was persuaded that HR should play a role in the process. But how did that come about? In most cases it was because the CEO believed in the importance of what HR could do. How one found such a CEO was not obvious, and it sounded like another example of luck. Respondents also noted that when they were involved in the serious matters of running the business, they also tended to be held accountable for performance metrics, and that HR dashboards were arguably the most important mechanisms for doing so. All these observations of factors associated with playing a role in the strategy of the business sounded circular, though. Once you had that influence, then all these supporting practices came into play. But how did that influence come about in the first place? The most intriguing question asked in that regard was how individual HR leaders got involved in the strategy process. What was revealing about the answers was that they suggested how it was possible to crack the seal of access to the strategy process, independent of what the function was achieving. It was not necessary that the HR group itself was demonstrating that it could influence the kind of outcomes that matter to the strategy formation process. It seemed to be enough for an individual leader to be able to understand the contribution of HR to business strategy, and explain it to the organization's leadership team. That is, a credible story about why leaders in the company should take HR seriously may be good enough. Anyone who has been a consultant -- or watched good ones work -- knows that a credible story about their potential contribution is about all they need to get hired and to gain influence. So perhaps this was no surprise. But for people engaged in the function of HR itself, it did seem to be a key insight. The reason is that it offered a way out of the "catch 22" situation with respect to gaining more influence: The best way to get access to the strategy process was to demonstrate that HR could add value to those outcomes that were of interest to top decision makers in the business. But, as many of the participants noted, to be able to engage in the tasks and projects that produce those outcomes, one has to get away from simply doing the transactional functions and tasks, and find the time and resources to do the more important roles. At least for me, a credible story about the role that HR can play in running the business has to go beyond goals traditionally associated with HR. It is fine to begin a story with the costs of turnover, the costs of absenteeism, etc., and how good practices can reduce those. But one does not need access to strategy-level decision makers in order to pursue those goals. The important part of the story has to be about goals that are the focus of those leaders: What will the culture of the company be, how will we get key players in the company to buy into our goals, how do we find and develop the type of talent that is of concern to the company leaders, etc. Just like a good consultant, an effective "pitch" has to relate to the issues of interest to the people who are buying. A final intriguing question asked by the group was how to find the time to pursue these strategic-level goals and still get the day-to-day work done. Here the answer again came back to having the persuasive story: Senior leaders in the business have to buy into a new set of priorities for the HR function so that they can be accountable to the new standards. There may be nothing especially radical about these answers. But for a group that seemed trapped in a losing proposition, it was refreshing to see a path out.
June 26, 2006 Copyright 2006© LRP Publications |
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