Why The Need For HR Leadership At The Top?

Your Corporate Strategy:  It Just Doesn’t Matter?       Part 24

“Today with declining loyal and greater job hopping it is critical that CEOs [or organization head] partner with HR.” – John Bell, Former CEO of Kraft

Whatever the top level HR person’s title is, they will, if empowered, act as the organizations moral, morale and ethical compass…. the window into the organization’s culture actuality.  Whether or not you have, or ever thought of having, a top C-level Talent or People Leader, the vital role played by every C-level person and key manager is their leadership example and how that culture of leadership is being translated, monitored and carried throughout the organization…. to EVERY employee.  If you have line, middle or top management creating an employment cesspool, those affected employees view this as the company and how top leadership leads.  Sadly…………………. it is.

According to a recent Success Factors white paper, these are the top 5 impacts highly effective CHROs deliver to business:

“1. Establish a foundation of talent data.

 2. Focus on strategic business issues, not tactical administration.

 3. Position your company to handle growth and manage change.

 4. Build for the future.

 5. Have strategic guidance ready for your executive partners

….many companies are now trying to remedy [not having HR Leadership at the table]. Between 2008 and 2010, the number of all companies with a dedicated talent executive increased from 21 percent to 30 percent.  Even with that growth, only 17 percent of companies with fewer than 1,000 employees have a chief HR officer (CHRO).”

http://www.workforce.com/article/20120629/ROADMAPS01/120629948/how-chros-deliver-business-impact

If cultural shifting doesn’t sound significant, as outlined in part 18, a recent poll by Success Factors of Fortune 500 companies found organizations with a Chief Human Resource Officer were 105% more profitable than their industry peers!  105%!!!! From my perspective this is a known.  I have promoted and experienced these results within my organizations.  

http://www.hrgrapevine.com/markets/hr/article/2013-10-08-companies-with-chros-outperforming-peers#!

Smaller organizations, on the other hand, need organizational strategies more suitable to their size. 

Next: One Size Fits All?

Why Are C-level Roles So Crucial To Culture? Part B

Your Corporate Strategy:  It Just Doesn’t Matter?       Part 23b

John Bell, said in a CEO.com contribution:  “Why CEOs And HR Should Be Joined At The Hip”:

“Ultimately, it is the CEO who determines the corporate culture, whether good or bad…. I’ll explain it this way: First, these cultural characteristics were monitored and measured. Second, we recruited for the right cultural attitude, followed by skills. Third, our superior financial results were a result of this modus operandi. Could I have done more if HR had been attached to that other hip? There’s no doubt.  Today, with declining loyalty and greater job hopping, it is critical that CEOs partner with HR.”

To be perfectly clear:   Whether a CEO, President, Owner, Founder, Executive Director, or whatever the top position is titled; regardless of private, publicly traded or non-profit; the organization is what the top leader leads is to be.  The organization represents the positives, negatives, strengths, weaknesses and blind spots of its leadership.  How those negatives, weaknesses and blind spots are balanced by the addition of leaders who eliminate negatives, bring strength to weakness and vision to blind spots rounds out a successful leadership equation and builds a great company and a great employer.

Or...a simpler quote from a Nordstrom CEO from years ago,"If it is to be, it begins with me."  So true, so true!

http://www.ceo.com/human_resource_management/why-ceos-and-hr-should-be-joined-at-the-hip/

Former Apple and JC Penney, CEO Ron Johnson and CTO Daniel Walker, obviously had that connection. Unfortunately, Ron Johnson’s path determined JCP was doomed to failure and was ”exacerbated by the fact that Johnson never relocated from California and more often than not was never in the trenches with the executives.”

 

As covered in part 4, “With the pace of change in today’s business and technology, it would be nearly impossible for top Leadership to be too strategic, unless it isolates leadership from what the organization actually does.   Leadership must know where they are, their base line, why and where they are going and its effects.  Providing it’s a good strategy, the execution plan must determine if it can be successfully implemented and how.  This is what top leadership is hired and paid to do!  Ron Johnson isolated himself from the brand and simply did none of this!

Next:  Why The Need For HR Leadership At The Top? 

Why Are C-level Roles So Crucial To Culture? Part A

Your Corporate Strategy:  It Just Doesn’t Matter?      Part 23a

First, I think John Cotter’s article in the Harvard Business Review clarifies much about the constantly misunderstood difference between Leadership and Management:

“….management is a set of well-known processes, like planning, budgeting, structuring jobs, staffing jobs, measuring performance and problem-solving, which help an organization to predictably do what it knows how to do well. Management helps you to produce products and services as you have promised, of consistent quality, on budget, day after day, week after week. In organizations of any size and complexity, this is an enormously difficult task. We constantly underestimate how complex this task really is, especially if we are not in senior management jobs. So, management is crucial — but it's not leadership.

Leadership is entirely different. It is associated with taking an organization into the future, finding opportunities that are coming at it faster and faster and successfully exploiting those opportunities. Leadership is about vision, about people buying in, about empowerment and, most of all, about producing useful change. Leadership is not about attributes, it's about behavior. And in an ever-faster-moving world, leadership is increasingly needed from more and more people, no matter where they are in a hierarchy. The notion that a few extraordinary people at the top can provide all the leadership needed today is ridiculous and it's a recipe for failure.”

http://blogs.hbr.org/kotter/2013/01/management-is-still-not-leadership.html

Next: Why Are C-level Roles So Crucial To Culture? Part B

Use the HR Matrix - to Balance and Align Your People Department.

Your Corporate Strategy:  It Just Doesn’t Matter?      Part 22

The HR Matrix gives you more information than an HR audit.

The HR Matrix suits most organizations better than “benchmarking.”

The HR Matrix helps you define what being a business partner really means.

If you are growing, your People Departments are going through known growth phases.  What you are experiencing is so normal it has distinct known phases!  Unfortunately, most leadership and/or HR are not trained and do not realize there are defined stages.  While you evolve from crawling or clawing your way along to walking and then jogging to running, wouldn’t it be nice to have a simple tool to help your People/Talent Management departments evaluate where it is and what it needs to do next?

Pricilla Claman, co-founder of Career Strategies in Boston, has a simple free tool, “The HR Matrix”.   USE IT! Designed by Lloyd Baird of Boston U and Ilam Meshoulam of Tel Aviv University, I have recommended and utilized it for years.  It may be the simplest and best HR departmental assessment tool you will ever have.  It is manual with no software to lease or buy and works with any budget.  With modification its works in and for other departments, but don’t tell Pricilla that.

Go to her site (link below) and then to free resources and download the 2-part tool (Transition Growth Phases and the Matrix), instructions and sample interpretations.  If there are problems, let me know and I will get  them to you (need email address) and let Priscilla know the link isn't working.

http://www.career-strategies.com/pages/hrPubs.html

Thanks for your knowledge, input, wisdom, kindness and willingness to help, Priscilla.

Next:  Why Are C-level Roles So Crucial To Culture?

Does Your People Department’s Structure Need Changing?

Your Corporate Strategy:  It Just Doesn’t Matter?       Part 21

For those who have helped build an organization from the ground up, or having come aboard during a growth or downsizing cycle, the greatest challenge is recognizing and meeting the demands they place on the company and the People Department’s resources.  Most newer and/or smaller organizations seldom have the luxury of forecasting and planning how to do this…. As a lifelong HR/People/Talent practitioner I have an exceptional amount of experience in reaction versus planned management.  J

I recognize the regular LinkedIn discussion pleas for assistance, agonizing over the newest problems and solutions from current HR workers and leaders….the endless questions regarding or recommendations on how to do this or that.  It is daunting to those doing this for the first time.   I have asked many of the same questions of myself, many times.   Having overseen major change both ways, forecasted and planned is the clear winner!  However, I have to admit, setting growth in motion and scrambling like hell to keep up is a thrilling experience not easily matched in one’s entire career.

I also think we need to reassess what the PHR or SPHR certifications teach HR/People Department practitioners.  These certifications are basically history lessons instead of practical Human Resources/People Services Department guidelines and training.  If these certifications were providing practical and reality based training maybe HR wouldn’t be failing to protect their people and employers from an employment law violation rate of 70-90%!!!  However, this is a discussion for another time.

During growth the difference between a one person HR/Personnel/People/Talent department and a two person department is an easy transition.  Growing from 1 or 2 people to 6, 8, 10 or many dozens is enormous.  The older simple processes no longer work, or at least without major modifications.  This growth means many more people and management now have to learn and be trained on more consistently interpreted company culture, policies, procedures, interactions, hiring, discipline, onboarding, systems, management hierarchy, dispute and people problem resolutions and on and on.  In fact every phase of company growth has unique demands and requirements for HR/People Departments as they mature

Next:  Use the HR Matrix  - to Balance and Align Your People Department.  

Rather Than Reinvent, Why Not Borrow and Use It?

Your Corporate Strategy:  It Just Doesn’t Matter?       Part 20

The previous discussion concerning the 24 hour commitment also appears to be a perfect example of “the more things change the more they echo the past”.   In a recent Forbes post, “Why Management Is Broken - And Why It Matters”, Gary Hamel, outlines what needs to happen with management and why.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=K3-_IY66tpI

Gary Hamel’s states 20th Century management required training agriculture workers as robotic factory workers.  Real robots may do some of that work today, but robot training psychology, teaching and performance is still being used and the norm.  Many companies use data/metrics as the sole criteria for grading an employee’s worth. This is the type of robot mentality people truly hate, especially when they aren’t told how it works.  The number of people unknowingly graded by data is hard to estimate but represents a huge check mark in the anti-people policies and culture column.

Secondly, other than the new industries mentioned in Gary Hamel’s presentation, the approach and solutions are not new!  He has updated them to make them more relatable to newer more globally dispersed, culturally diverse and technically advanced organizations.  Positive employment practices have disappeared along with the slow erosion of legal employment compliance.  However, they are the same tried and true positive employee culture practices great employers have utilized for decades.  The primary difference is very few HR practitioners today have personally learned or experienced them.

Gary Hamel is turning his silver (experience and wisdom) into gold (tried and true practical solutions to current catastrophic people policies and practices).  They work because people have changed very little. Every employment satisfaction survey has produced the same results for decades.  To those newer and less experienced HR/People practitioners and companies these solutions are new only because they have no experience or knowledge using them.  They disappeared as main stream somewhere along the way.

Ex-Apple and now former Penney’s CTO, Daniel Walker, has been practicing since 1974.  There are still many wise and very accomplished People/Talent leaders plying their skills in the HR/Talent/People world.  Their wisdom, experience and knowledge was once mainstream, but is now the fringe.  Their solutions to today’s people culture problems are practical, useful and proven common knowledge to them. You need to utilize their wisdom in your organization by borrowing it, using it and incorporating what works.

One final note concerns the police/cop role many companies place on their HR/People/Talent Department, especially by top leadership.  Without a trusted, open, neutral and safe place for employees to vent and get help, your people will go elsewhere.   This type of organizational culture becomes one of us (management and rule) versus them (the employee).  If the People Department becomes the enforcer, the company’s ability to have a neutral safe house, trusted by employees, enabling a secure pipeline and window into problems for what’s really going on slams shut.  This is where most organizations find themselves today – untrusted!

Next: Does Your People Department’s Structure Need Changing?

Why Not Begin With Simple Engagement Steps (solutions)?

Your Corporate Strategy:  It Just Doesn’t Matter?      Part 19

I believe major key factors are being overlooked or ignored in what is required of management. We are missing something in the rapidly changing competitive business world and the company to employee interaction dynamic.  It can’t simply be just poor culture, poor management and lack of training.   A far bigger change has taken place.  A new, positive and people engaged management culture is required.

One of the first changes I undertook in my first HR leadership role was how employee complaints, problems and questions were handled.  We implemented the 24 hour commitment.  ANY employee question, complaint or problem would be resolved to THEIR (the employee’s) satisfaction within 24 hours.  Even if a mutually agreeable solution wasn’t yet available, the person was personally contacted and told of the progress regarding their issue, with firm follow up dates(s).  If they were still unsatisfied, we personally moved the issue up if we couldn’t resolve it.

Why?? As the key company ambassador to our customers, we wanted a culture that valued and required employee input, thoughts and communications.  No manager or leader sitting in a cubical or office has a more intimate knowledge of the customer than those dealing with the customer directly. They deserved the opportunity to have their concerns listened to and addressed…quickly.  It didn’t matter what type of issue – paycheck, schedule, transportation, personality conflicts, personal issues, policies, etc.  If we didn’t know what the problems were, how could we address them?

Happily, we also found these open communications had greater than hoped for consequences.  The 24 hour commitment resulted in far more positive ideas, inquiries and problem solutions than actual issues by a 3 or 4 to 1 ratio!!!  Open communication brought trust, being a valued part of the organization, a safe place to vent or relate very personal issues including those related to legal and employment.

 

Today I recognize it as freely offering that thing most highly valued by most, our time and concern.  Today’s technology allows this same action to be a simple variation on the trouble ticket.  It is up to you to devote your time and concern to solving the issues.  This is only one relatively free/no cost example of developing and fostering an employee friendly culture.

The 24 hour commitment cost little.  It paid big returns!  We heard of issues quickly, including poor or ill-advised management, and they were solved quickly!  Leadership gained far more.  Our own people had many of the solutions to, or at least paved a path to solving, the challenges growing companies seek. 

Next: Rather Than Reinvent, Why Not Borrow and Use It?