Select a Next Level HR Leader
Human Resources (HR) teams are essential employees in any organization. They are often a (convenient) target for complaints, blame, and frustration. But HR is not always to blame for issues and failures around people leadership and management.
Top organizational leadership sets HR up for success or failure. This starts with hiring and staffing HR teams.
HR teams are expected to do much more today than ever. HR has soup-to-nuts responsibilities for employees. These expectations include posting job openings, orienting new hires, counseling employees in health crises, designing and conducting trainings, working with top leaders on people strategy, managing employee data, driving the payroll process, leading recognition programs, ensuring legal compliance, conducting investigations, and supporting managers in separations, to name a few.
This wide range of responsibilities demands a HR leader and team with a diverse skillset. Traditionally, HR leaders are career HR staff who have come up through the HR ranks. They likely served as a generalist, obtained an HR certification or advanced degree, served as an assistant or associate director, and then promoted to the top role over time. This is not wrong or bad, but the experience it provides to HR staff often focuses on functional expertise rather than strategic and adaptable business-based skills.
A 2015 Harvard Business Review article investigated the top attributes of successful HR leaders and found that the top attributes are the same as the weakness of struggling leaders.
What Separates Great HR Leaders from the Rest by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman
A successful HR leader must have strategic and business-related skills as well as traditional HR strengths in developing people, building relationships, modeling professional behavior, and functional expertise. These leaders are not unicorns. They are in most organizations already. But top leaders must be willing to consider nontraditional candidates to lead HR or intentionally develop existing HR staff in strategic and business skills. A next level HR leader may have a skillset that looks something like this:
A HR leader with this skillset will be able to lead, unite, and develop a team of HR generalists and tactical professionals while easily engaging top leadership in building strategy around people. Business experience gives the HR leader the ability to influence and be heard by top leadership. Common sense empowers the leader to balance the needs of employees with existing policies then make changes when needed rather than cling to policy. HR skills give the leader the ability to talk the HR team language and understand the priorities of traditional and true HR issues.
Business success, regardless of the industry, depends on people. Everything is about people.
You may ask, why bother with all this effort? In 2022 the priorities HR teams will face are diverse and will, maybe more than ever, require HR teams to think strategically, develop others effectively, serve as functional experts, and solve complex problems quickly.
A recent Gartner study found that the HR priorities in 2022 are, in rank order:
1. Building critical skills and competencies;
2. Organizational design and change management;
3. Succession planning;
4. Future of work (employment models, retention, etc.); and
5. Diversity, equity and inclusion.
HR priorities and demands are becoming more complex and less rule and compliance driven. This shift demands strategic and adaptable HR leadership that may look different than any HR leader you have hired before.