What do leaders require from HR?

Citation

Roebuck, C. (2010), "What do leaders require from HR?", Strategic HR Review, Vol. 9 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/shr.2010.37209dab.004

What do leaders require from HR?

Article Type: Q&A From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 9, Issue 4

Leading industry experts answer your strategic HR queries

It would be easy to fall into the trap of merely repeating the traditional list of the HR “best practice” activities that we in HR think leaders should implement in their organizations. The problem is that often this does not seem to get them implemented in practice, despite the clear benefits from our perspective. Obviously this is the leaders’ fault not ours … or is it? Many leaders know very little about what great HR can do for them and the alignment between what we can offer and what they need is often not clearly explained by us. All leaders should have to do is identify the risks that concern them and their plans to improve the performance of their organization and then it is down to HR to offer simple solutions that help them deliver.

Making sure transactional HR is working well

A number of surveys over the past year showed there was a consistent pattern of issues that concerned CEOs and many shared priorities – including finding cost efficiencies, improving customer service and managing human capital better. The latter focused on improving the development of high potential staff, better management and leadership development, attracting more talent and stopping their own talent leaving.

This is fertile ground for HR, but there are complications. Not only do leaders want all of this, they also want high quality transactional HR services that ensure the organization functions well. Figures from David Ulrich’s research suggest that transactional HR delivery adds only up to 18 percent impact on business performance value to the organization, whereas strategic transformational HR adds over 40 percent (Ulrich and Brockbank, 2005). But the transformational cannot happen until the transactional is working well. Leaders want both, but with the transactional working well first.

Moving on to transformational priorities

While business leaders talk in terms of achieving objectives and minimizing risks, HR often talks in terms of “HR best practice”. HR then presents a set of “products”, often without aligning to the specifics of current organizational objectives or the minimization of risk. The response of the business leader is justifiably – “very interesting but how does that help me?”

So what leaders really want is a set of initiatives that will help address the key challenges they face and help make the people in the organization perform better. Successful HR functions know this and they link specific HR initiatives to each of those priorities. They present these in a way that is not based on the delivery of “best practice” but as a specific solution to a specific business requirement that is understandable, adds value in a simple, practical and organizationally-friendly way and can be implemented across the organization. Even if HR can persuade the leadership to adopt HR “best practice” by providing a good explanation of the benefits, if it is not mirrored in a clear benefit to other users it will subsequently lie un-used by most of the organization.

To avoid this, HR functions must test out new proposals with both favorable stakeholders and the more skeptical. This avoids situations where HR is genuinely trying to add value to the organization but it is perceived by those running the organization day-to-day at operational levels as actually making things more difficult for them.

Helping organizations be the best

The specifics of what each CEO wants from HR will vary from organization to organization, geography to geography and industry to industry, but what is surprising is how easy it is to find out what the leaders want – by simply asking them. This starts an education process that has significant benefits for both sides, because the leaders learn more about HR and HR learns more about the organization. However, it is surprising the number of HR people who do not ask the leaders with whom they work – at all levels – what their key objectives are.

The other role that HR can take up, but which is often missed, is its ability to act as a coordinator to align effort onto key deliverables via the organization’s culture and systems. HR controls or influences many of the elements within an organization that make employees decide on the key areas where they should be focusing their effort and if they will give discretionary effort. This is a role that HR must take up in the future more effectively. Most CEOs have not even realized this potential exists and it is where a significant opportunity lies for forward thinking HR professionals.

Never forget that beauty is in the eye of the receiver, not the giver. HR must give the organization what it needs to deal with the present, in a way that it can implement quickly and which forms a springboard for the future to the next level of good practice. Each successful implementation adds to the credibility of HR allowing each subsequent step to be larger as the trust in HR’s ability to add value to the organization grows.

What leaders want from HR is to help them minimize risk and maximize performance, and to do it in a way that really works day-to-day and helps them make their organization the best. It really is that simple.

Chris RoebuckCass Business School in London

About the author

Chris Roebuck is Visiting Professor of Leadership at Cass Business School in London and has held senior HR roles in UBS, HSBC, KPMG and London Underground. He has lectured on leadership at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and been an officer in the British Army. Chris Roebuck can be contacted at: chris@chrisroebuck.net