CEO Confirmation

Last week I met with a good friend of mine to discuss his business and what I have been doing since I left the corporate world. This person is a CEO of a couple of Internet business all linked to the same type of information. Needless to say he is ultra successful and has capitalized on data streaming over the Internet.

Our discussion went from business strategy, to joint ventures, to new opportunities, and to HR. The discussion on HR really re-enforced what I have been saying since 1978. An HR professional needs to be head deep into the business, know all the ins and outs, products, development, and how to market. This person and I worked together for a couple of years after we bought his company. Since I had an opportunity to meet him early on doing the due diligence and acquisition of his $300+M company, he forged a great working relationship and respect for one another.

His comment to me said it all" you are a business person with great knowledge and understanding on how to run a successful business". This is what a CEO should say about his/her CHRO. Does your CEO say that about you and what have you done to fully understand your business and integrate yourself into the day to day operations? Oh, don't forget talent management, succession, and all the other CHRO duties!!

Developing a HRM Strategy

Faced with rapid change organizations need to develop a more focused and coherent approach to managing people. In just the same way a business requires a marketing or information technology strategy it also requires a human resource or people strategy.

In developing such a strategy two critical questions must be addressed. 

• What kinds of people do you need to manage and run your business to meet your strategic business objectives?
• What people programs and initiatives must be designed and implemented to attract, develop and retain staff to compete effectively?

In order to answer these questions four key dimensions of an organization must be addressed. These are:

• Culture: the beliefs, values, norms and management style of the organization
• Organization: the structure, job roles and reporting lines of the organization
• People: the skill levels, staff potential and management capability
• Human resources systems: the people focused mechanisms which deliver the strategy - employee selection, communications, training, rewards, career development, etc.

Frequently in managing the people element of their business senior managers will only focus on one or two dimensions and neglect to deal with the others. Typically, companies reorganize their structures to free managers from bureaucracy and drive for more entrepreneurial flair but then fail to adjust their training or reward systems.

When the desired entrepreneurial behavior does not emerge managers frequently look confused at the apparent failure of the changes to deliver results. The fact is that seldom can you focus on only one area. What is required is a strategic perspective aimed at identifying the relationship between all four dimensions.

If you require an organization which really values quality and service you not only have to retrain staff, you must also review the organization, reward, appraisal and communications systems.

The pay and reward system is a classic problem in this area. Frequently organizations have payment systems which are designed around the volume of output produced. If you then seek to develop a company which emphasizes the product's quality you must change the pay systems. Otherwise you have a contradiction between what the chief executive is saying about quality and what your payment system is encouraging staff to do.

There are seven steps to developing a human resource strategy and the active involvement of senior line managers should be sought throughout the approach:

• get the big picture
• develop a mission statement or statement of intent
• conduct a SWOT analysis of the organization
• conduct a thorough human resources analysis
• determine critical people issues
• develop consequences and solutions. To expand on this you need to:
• • employee training and development
  • management development
  • organization development
  • performance appraisal
  • employee reward
  • employee selection and recruitment
  • manpower planning
  • communication
• implementation and evaluation of the action plans.

Have you re-evaluated your strategy plans and taken into account this issues and approaches? 


©2010 Accel-Team

Executing in a Fast Changing Environment

This excerpt summary from Workforce Magazine (June 2010) caught my eye because of the ever changing environment HR people are in today. Not only is the business models changing but so is the economy and the drivers of competition.

Executives must be able to lead their companies to quickly adapt to new market forces in this unpredictable economic climate. Under these extreme conditions that face companies survival depends in part to sound strategy but even more so on effective strategy execution. HR executives or aspiring HR executives this is a key point for you in your HR execution.

Because execution plays such a critical role in success or failure, especially during a crisis, many companies are turning to new technology solutions to ensure they can deliver on strategies and emerge even stronger. Any company that fails to adapt quickly and efficiently to market changes can miss important opportunities ir risk their very survival.

With that prologue, here are some key barometers to attain or execute to going forward if you are not already doing this:

• A new strategy is not enough - executing under these extreme market conditions is not enough, meaning you need to make sure you touch every point of the strategy timeline and product offering.
• Align your workforce with what you want to accomplish - workforce alignment and performance is critical.
• Be prepared to change course or rethink your strategy monthly - it is difficult to get your strategy right the first time so review religiously. 
• Leverage performance and talent management solutions for business execution - this will help you attain the top and bottom line results. 

If you are an HR practitioner you need to make sure you are working directly with your CEO to accomplish these goals. If not then you better begin or you will be left out in the cold and people will question your value to the organization. 

Reinventing HR

I had a discussion with an esteemed colleague the other day at an HR meeting about reinventing HR in light of the current economic environment. I wonder if other HR practioners have given any thought to this since HR has for many companies taken a hugh hit both with personnel reductions and what their real value is to the business.

I think that if you are on top of your game you would be thinkning of this on a daily basis. Asking real questions about your departments' value and how the business preceives it. Think of these few things when you have that in-depth discussion with yourself, CEO, and department members:

• do they truly understand the economics of business?
• do you and they understand the new changes in healthcare and the impact on the business?
• do they really understand the business or just the basics?
• are they fully engaged with the managers they support?
• what profound improvement can they make that benefits the business?
• do you have a direct link to the CEO, I mean report to them?
• is the HR department disconnected from the daily operations?
• do you really understand talent development and process improvement?
• are they Six Sigma ceretified?
• have you off-loaded administration to a self service enviroment?

These are just a few questions you should be asking yourself and your staff. What are your thoughts on this very important subject, drop me a line at wgstevens2@gmail.com

Are You At the Table Yet?

Earlier this week I attended the HR Executive Roundtable Group meeting which I co-founded at ARRIS. The speaker was Joel Koblenz from the Koblenz Group in Atlanta who talked about what CEOs want from HR leaders and what they expect. Joel's discussion to the group was "a view from the top". The topic was timely and on target based on what we currently are seeing in the economy and industry. 


It reminded me of a post I put up last July so I thought I would repost it again since the points that Joel touched on were what I wrote about last year.  In addition, Joel mentioned 2 other key points that I failed to bring up in that previous post:

• meeting with your CEO weekly to calculate the HR strategy against the current business strategy
• making sure that you understand the business from the ground up, not just what you produce and who are your key competitors.

In addition, all successful corporations use HR strategically, not just to manage administration and other mundane HR tasks. CEOs are interested in growth, profits, innovation, and the ability to retain customers. HR is at a key position to help the CEO attain all of these objectives. To do this your time in the HR leadership role should consist of the following:

• discussing talent, retention, and talent development and pipeline candidates;
• compensation and competitive intersections of market and attaining the best talent;
• benefits, maintaining a competitive package and harnessing costs, especially health and 401K and pensions;
• identifying integration acquisitions quickly;
• anticipating critical business events and regulatory issues;
• guiding and maintaining a daily interaction with the CEO and key business leaders;
• understanding the dynamics of the economy and how they impact the business;
• and finally enabling growth drivers at the employee and business levels.

Are you doing these key functions on a daily basis? Let me know your thoughts.

Most Common Theme of HR Strategy

Human capital is increasingly being seen as an issue of strategic significance in the industry today. It is this aspect of competition that provides most decisive elements of business advantage for a company by way of market responsiveness, process and technology innovation or enhancing customer experience.



A company can maximize the benefits from its human assets, when it is able to align and achieve congruence between individual and organizational goals. The challenge for HR experts in the organization lies in bringing about high degree of alignment so that the contribution of people in each and every activity along the value chain becomes a key differentiator in the industry.

High levels of performance and competence of people definitely provide a company edge over its competitors, but the second part of challenge for a HR professional lies in making this advantage sustainable over a period of time. This in effect means that people contribute effectively to fulfill the organizational goals – both now and in future.



Putting the two challenges together takes us to the core of most generic HR strategy pursued across the industries. The HR professionals responsible for crafting HR strategy should focus on gaining highest levels of commitment from the people towards organizational goals and at the same time building loyalty among the people for the organization. This then is most common and yet the most challenging theme of HR strategy today.

What are your thoughts on this topic?

Are You Linking Strategy to Operations Effectively

There has been a lot of discussion surrounding a new management system so if you have not heard about it here is a summary. There is also a course in Orlando on March 8-9th that will provide you with all the information you need on this key HR practice.


If you want to succeed in your position and continue to be a leader in the eyes of your CEO, you should install this process to assist you in out performing your peer competition. Here is a summary of the five key stages you should begin to think about if you are not already in full process use:

1. Stage 1 - Develop a strategy using SWOT, PESTEL, vision, mission statements
2. Stage 2 - Translate the strategy into strategic objectives and themes as well as target and strategic initiatives
3. Stage 3 - Align your organizational units and businesses both horizontally and vertically to the strategy and cascade them through the organization
4. Stage 4 - Align your human capital and employees and fully communicate the strategy and alignment of the organization to achieve the goals. Make sure you align the employees capabilities and competencies to the strategic objectives
5. Stage 5 - Monitor, learn, and test the alignment to ensure adaption to the strategy.

I would encourage all senior level HR leaders to attend this forum in March. If you have not heard about it you can call 1-800-554-2111 or through www.thepalladiumgroup.com/masterclass by January 22, 2010.

Top HR challenges

For 2009 here are the top ranked list of the top HR challenges (in North American business)

1. Acquiring key talent/lack of available talent


2. Building leadership capability


3. Driving cultural and behavioral change in the organization


4. Retaining key talent


5. Increasing line manager capability to handle people-management responsibilities


6. Succession planning


7. Constraints on headcount (”making do with less”)


8. Increasing workforce productivity


9. Lack of consensus about the organization’s strategy/direction


10. Encouraging organizational innovation


11. Resourcing and managing HR issues in “new geographies” for the company


12. Managing human capital during and after an acquisition or merger


13. Implementing people changes resulting from changes due to operational performance


14. Workforce planning


15. Measuring the contribution of human capital to business performance


16. Reducing overall human capital costs


17. Coping with an aging workforce

Does your organization's issues compare with these, let me know at wgstevens2@gmail.com .

Base: Survey of 154 senior HR professionals in the U.S. and Canada

Source: “The State of HR Transformation,” North America, Mercer Human Resource Consulting, 2006

Discovered via Workforce Management (10 September 2007)

Unleveling the Playing Field

I read a great feature article in Fortune magazine this month about Marc Andreesen, the co-founder of Netscape and the social network Ning. I have to say it was inspirational in three(3) ways:

1. it motivated me to dig deeper into the innovation idea bank and move forward with the latest technology to use it as a starting point for the next generation;
2. that creative thinking is the lifeblood of business and entrepreneurship;
3. there are people like him that motivate people like me.

So with that in mind as a mid-level HR executive, a senior level executive or someone just starting out you need to unlevel the playing field so YOU stand out as a leader and innovative/creative thinker to solve business problems. Certainly as HR continue to be represented at the table and those that are just getting invited you need to really stand out and inspire and move those around you. How do you do that you say for those not yet there or in a company that views HR as an administrative function here are some important ways:

• you need negotiation and influencing skills that are strategy based;
• you need to take the lead on innovation and develop practices that drive growth - KNOW THE BUSINESS INSIDE AND OUT;
• have strong business acumen and a keen eye for identifying high-potential leaders before someone tells you;
• deliver value daily to your internal and external constituencies as well as building extraordinary personal leadership qualities that resonate throughout the life cycle of your business;
• develop frameworks for global exportation and strategies from a product and supply chain prospective;
• get involved with your investor relations program - evaluating it with a ad-hoc team;
• and finally, conventional is passe so exploit technology and social networking to manage talent, HR, and the business with intricate involvement with your CEO.

I hope that you will look at these thoughts and grow from them. If you agree, drop me an email, text, Twitter, or Linkedin message . Oh, BTW my former CEO & Executive HR were just like Marc. Thanks Greg, Iain, and Mike.

Web 2.0 as an HR Strategy

Companies have increased their reliance on Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking, blogs and webcasts to communicate with and engage their employees, especially as the economic downturn has shrunk funding for human resources, according to the 2009 HR Technology Trends report by consulting firm Watson Wyatt.

The survey, which gauged the opinions of leaders at 181 large companies, found that since the start of the economic downturn, 61 percent of companies have increased their use of e-mail to communicate with employees; 32 percent have increased their use of Webcasts; 13 percent have increased their use of social networking tools; and 12 percent have increased their use of blogs for communication.

The survey also found that companies are adopting role-based employee portals the most rapidly, with 42 percent deploying or piloting the portals and 24 percent planning to adopt them in the next 24 months. The survey also found that while 86 percent of companies currently have an intranet, only 2 percent plan to implement one in the next two years. Rather, companies are planning to deploy technologies that are more personalized, such as blogs (13 percent), wikis (13 percent) and podcasts (10 percent) in the next 24 months, Watson Wyatt found.

I've heard many stories about shrinking HR budgets at federal agencies for quite some time, long before the economic crisis began, so I'm curious to hear from you all about the types of technologies your agencies are using to communicate HR policies and improve employee engagement.

Is this in your plans?

Stop Your Best People From Walking When the Economy Recovers

Today, enough cannot be said about retaining your employees. When the economy turns around you will see people leaving and most of the time it is your star performers. The Hay Group article below identifies this trident issue (economy, money, advancement)

Increasing engagement means making greater use of non-monetary rewards. Providing better support for success involves looking for ways to remove those organizational hurdles that hinder employees during their working day. But it's crucial that organizations focus on two key concerns to retain and motivate their talent: increasing employee engagement and developing systems that provide better support for the success of their employees. Doing one without the other will not lead to effective employees who are ready to go the extra mile for the organization.


Retention of top talent is an important concern in both good times and bad. While a soft labor market may have depressed turnover rates in many organizations today, retention issues can be expected to surface once labor markets strengthen. Even in the present environment, options are still available to top performers. Savvy organizational leaders recognize that their best people work for their organizations because they want to, not because they have to, and treat them like 'volunteers' regardless of market conditions.


While compensation is often a factor for employees when they consider new employment, it is seldom the precipitating factor. Nonetheless, retention strategies commonly focus on compensation, for example, retention bonuses and stock options.


The downturn has made it more difficult to rely on pay to keep key people committed, so how should companies react?

To foster high levels of engagement, companies must make greater use of non-monetary rewards such as career growth opportunities, meaningful job designs, training, and recognition programs. For these measures to be effective, there must be a clear link between performance and rewards in the minds of employees. The best way to do this is to make sure there is clear differentiation in performance ratings between employees. Those differences in performance should be reflected in meaningful differences in pay and advancement prospects.

Our employee opinion research shows that high employee engagement alone does not guarantee an organization's effectiveness. What's missing is real employee enablement to position motivated employees to succeed. In fact, our findings suggest that while organizations in the top quartile on engagement demonstrate revenue growth 2.5 times that of organizations in the bottom quartile, companies in the top quartile on both engagement and enablement achieve revenue growth 4.5 times greater. But how do you ensure that you're doing the best possible job of enabling your employees? The first step is to make sure you're putting the right people in the right jobs, as employees in the wrong role can quickly become disillusioned and unproductive.

In deploying talent, leaders must consider both the requirements of the job and the employee's ability to meet them. They also have to think about the extent to which the job will draw upon the employee's distinctive competencies and make the most of them. It's also crucial to root out bad business practices, such as unnecessary or duplicated work, to ensure that work environments are supportive of high levels of productivity.

Create the right climate

Finally, organizations have to understand and manage the work climate. The benefit of a positive work climate is often underestimated, but our research shows that business results can vary by as much as 30 percent purely due to differences in the work climate created by a manager. We will provide further insights into how organizations can create positive work climates in one of our upcoming ‘rethinking reward’ articles.

Six steps to better engagement and motivation

In order to succeed in engaging and motivating employees, organizations should:

• ensure that there is a clearly communicated link between performance and rewards within the organization
  
• ensure that there is proper differentiation in performance ratings between employees


• root out bad business practices, such as unnecessary work and duplication, that can adversely affect employee enablement


• put the right people in the right jobs by focusing on job sizing and the kind of person that best fits the role


• monitor and improve the work climate within the organization by ensuring that leaders have the right competencies and management styles to motivate employees


• focus on non-monetary rewards such as career growth opportunities, development, and recognition programs
  

If you look back on the posts regarding retention (4/2/09, 3/5/09, 2/23/09, 12/15/08) you will see how important I think this issue is. Check it out.

Simple Strategy Review

Every month my team and I would review our HR strategy to see if it was still in line with the company's. Tweak here and there and we all were back on track. One thing that I am sure is not on most HR executives strategy is walking around the business and getting to understand from a grass roots what the issues are with employees. This was a big issue with me and I can tell you those daily walks around the business were valuable to HR and to the employees.

There has always been a stigma since I got into HR 25 years ago that when people saw HR walking around they thought of only one thing...TROUBLE. That has always been a stigma I have tried to eradicate from their lexicon. Sometimes successful, sometimes not so but at least I tried and employees saw that and embraced the effort and connection.

I would emphasize to all who read this blog that one of the most important items in your strategy is to make sure you and the other executives of your company walk around and be visible to your employees. It pays off on the stigma issue and also you have the ability to correct issues that are brewing in the business (on the floor, in the cafeteria, in IT, etc) before they become the brush fires we all have become accustom to dealing with on a daily basis.

Do you walk around your business and get to know your employees. Let me know at wgstevens2@gmail.com

Memo to CFOs: Don't Trust HR

A friend of mine sent me this article that I thought would be a good conversation piece with your HR staffs.

A professor says most human resources professionals are ill-equipped to carry out value-added workforce planning and transformation.

Addressing a crowd of about 300 financial executives this morning, a professor of human resources soundly denounced the corporate HR profession for being mostly unable to provide analytics that are useful in making workforce decisions that build economic value.

Most companies today spend too little effort on attracting and retaining top strategic talent and too much on satisfying the rest of the employee base, asserted Rutgers University's Richard Beatty, who spoke at a general session during the CFO Rising conference in Orlando. In fact, he claimed that typical human resources activities have no relevance to an organization's success. "HR people try to perpetuate the idea that job satisfaction is critical," Beatty said. "But there is no evidence that engaging employees impacts financial returns."

Beatty based this conclusion on employee surveys done at IBM and other companies that found little relationship between job satisfaction and performance ratings. Not only is employee engagement very expensive, but "how do you know you're not satisfying a lot of people you really wish weren't there?"

To buttress his argument, Beatty presented data from a Gallup survey on the performance of about 4,500 customer service employees at an unnamed major financial firm. The survey results, which were based on customer feedback, showed that the employees who scored in the top quartile had a positive effect on 61 percent of the people they talked to. The next two quartiles registered 40 percent and 27 percent positive responses, respectively, but there were enough neutral responses that the employees' net performance was positive. The lowest quartile, however, scored a net 2 percent negative impact.

"You'd be better off had you paid these people not to come to work," Beatty said. "You'd be a lot better off if you paid them to work for your competitor." The financial firm paid about $30 million in salaries and benefits to the employees in the lowest quartile, whose performance cost the firm as much as $50 million worth of business.

However, Beatty pointed out that this kind of performance variability means there is an opportunity to build a more valuable work force. Usually in such a situation, HR professionals try to figure out what the top performers are doing right, then train the others accordingly. That is faulty thinking, insisted Beatty, who asserted that selection is a more powerful predictor of performance than training. In addition, training may not be the problem - some employees may know what to do, but choose not to do it, opined the professor.

"HR wants to treat most employees the same way, and they spend considerable time trying to defend or fix poor performers, taking on the St. Bernard role," he said. "Low turnover isn't necessarily a good thing. Think about where you might want to disinvest."

Human resources is also behind what Beatty called the "silly" idea that a company should try to be the "employer of choice." If you are the employer of choice, he asked rhetorically, who's going to be applying for your jobs? "Everybody and their dog's brother," he said. "You want people who are excited, enthused, and understand how to contribute to what you do, as opposed to those who simply want to find a good place to hide out."

Beatty said that it is most important to think outside the HR department box when it comes to filling the strategic positions that create the bulk of a company's value. To that end, he suggested that companies might be better off appointing someone from outside the HR department to manage strategic talent. He pointed to Precision Castparts Corp., a $7 billion machine-parts manufacturer, as one company that has bypassed HR in several situations. For one, it reassigned an operations executive who ran a third of the company's 150 plants to take control of scouting for and retaining strategic talent.

Such tactics are warranted because while "the language of organizations is numbers, HR isn't very good at data analytics," Beatty said. "They don't think like business people. Many of them entered human resources because they wanted to help people, which I'm all for, but I'm also for building winning organizations."

It's the CFO's job to make sure that the work of analyzing and, as necessary, reconstituting the work force gets done by someone qualified to do the job, added Beatty, and there has never been more at stake than there is now.

"The labor market is in a position to provide you with better talent than you have ever had," said Beatty, co-author of the new book, The Differentiated Workforce. "If you don't emerge from this market with better talent in the roles that really make a difference, I don't think you're trying."

My experience in working with internal HR professionals all over the world, has been different than what was cited in the review.

1. First, I want to make clear that not every job within the HR function should be a strategic role that requires analytics. Some jobs within HR truly are transactional and serve the purpose of executing on a strategic HR plan. If every HR role was strategic, there would be no one left to do the tactical day-to-day work. Sure, we want people to think and to consider what they are doing, why they are doing it and look for efficiences, but that is true of every job in every functional department and is not what we are speaking of with regard to using analytics to make strategic workforce decisions.
2. Secondly, I have had the great pleasure of traveling to conferences all over the world, meeting with HR professionals from great and small (but still great) companies and find that HR professionals are bright, thoughtful and indeed using data and analytics such as ROI to measure the impact and return-on-investment of their human capital programs.

Measuring financial impact and ROI of human capital programs is not easy, but it can be done. HR Professionals all over the world are implementing the Phillips ROI Methodology in their organization and continue to sharpen their skills in this difficult, but doable methodology.

Check out the great work at the ROI Institute (www.ROIInstitute.Net).

What Will Human Resources Look Like in 2010

Earlier this month I indicated that I would identify 5 major changes to HR that will dramatically change how HR professionals do their work. Some are top of mind, some on the cusp of change, and some you have not seen yet. Here they are in no particular order:
Administrivia will reside fully with managers and employees through self service and HRIS systems will be a thing of the past for HR. There will be no such thing as an HR assistant or administrative assistant in HR.
HR as we know it will become a profit center and be measured on profit success.
Entire benefit packages will totally be outsourced to third party vendors and employees will have an a la carte menu. Health care providers will provide light workout equipment that is ergonomically designed to fit in the workplace so workers can get exercise and work simultaneously.
There will be at least 2 senior HR professionals today that will run companies in excess of $100M by 2010.
All data will flow through handhelds on the go rather than through desktops/laptops and the typical HR department as you know it today will not exist.
You will notice that I did not mention talent management or succession planning. Those topics will be dealt with early in 2009.
What do you think of these changes and do you agree or disagree? I would appreciate your opinions. Please send your comments to wgstevens2@gmail.com.

Have You Reassessed Your HR Teams Capabilities?

Over the past year I am sure you have seen reductions in the HR teams across many businesses. These reductions have been publicized in the media. Take a look at what has happened, 20% of HR staffs have been reduced in the past year. One could ask is this truly a cost reduction step or is it more deeply seeded in the ability of your staff to meet the business requirements of the day and/or have the capabilities to strategically solve managements business issues. Maybe you do not see the disconnect between what value your team adds or does not add but managers do.

So, as the head HR person for your group have you assessed your team lately and have you invested in their development of these very important things:

• strategic thinking and action from concept to execution to results
• strategic decision making
• managing conflict and creating universal consensus
• negotiating success and development of a learning laboratory for the business
• teamwork and collaboration, how to grow cross-functional teams
• becoming a strategic thinker with a CEO mind
• creating value for your internal and external customers

As you ask these questions, have you also invested time in your own development to stay ahead to this very fast moving curve we call business recessional action. If you have invested time have you used CCL, UVA, Stamford Learning, or HBS?

What are your thoughts on this development thought process and what have you done lately. Drop me an email at wgstevens2@gmail.com

HR Work Is No Longer HR’s Work - From an HR Strategy Perspective

I attended a dinner function in the last week with a couple of colleagues. During the evening we got onto discussing my favorite subject .... HR strategy, and were having a debate about the usefulness of HR departments. The chap I was chatting to was in a typical mid-management line function and was complaining about the lack of HR support he was receiving and how much “HR work” he was doing.

I immediately said to him that this was a good thing, which took him by surprise. I continued to put my argument forward that it is not HR’s role to be managing his staff, and that the concept of HR being the department that deals with “People matters” is old and not contributing to organisational growth.

His counter argument was that he is there to make sure his business unit achieves its output goals and all this other HR mambo-jumbo is wasting his time. I did concede that if HR is dumping a lot onto him that is not value adding then he may have a point and should push back on doing stuff that fails to help him achieve his outputs. But, achieving his goals involves people, and he could not abdicate this role to HR or anyone else. Management of a business includes effective management of people. I asked him about his HR department in some more detail and how they had got to this point.

There are a number of interesting take aways from this discussion that took place:

1. this is not a unique situation and its been an ongoing debate for many years. What it does tell me is that the role of HR in that organisation in not understood or positioned properly. Even though HR is trying to do the right thing by getting line management to take accountability for their staff in a holistic manner, they are fighting an uphill battle and will continue to do so until the executive reposition the HR department correctly.
2. the HR department does not realise the long term damage they are creating when they execute an approach without the proper backing and strategy. It backfires like we have seen with this line manager. His view of the HR department is not positive and he sees them working against him. Correcting this is now going to be a bigger problem than before.
3. this does highlight a major concern with the level of strategy knowledge within HR departments. HR folk tend to be good at designing and executing activities inside the “HR space”, but can do with some support in executing programmes into the larger strategic realm. It points typically to the lack of business understanding and how to position HR strategically.
4. the forth point is about line managers themselves - I personally think that most of the push back to managing all aspects of their staff is related to fear and uncomfortableness with dealing with difficult people situations. This highlights the need to select management correctly, and not just appointing the good salesman into the sales manager role. Not all people are good and dealing with people matters, but it must be a requirementfor management and supervisory positions, and training and development in this space is a necessity.
5. finally it is also senior managers responsibility to measure people correctly to achieve particular behavior changes. If this line manager is rated on how he achieves his output goals, then that’s what will drive his behavior, however, if he is also measured on how he effectively manages people and gets the best out of them then that will drive another set of behaviours - but its all part of a well thought out HR strategy.
   
   Some of you may be thinking whether there is a need at all for an HR department if line management become super proficient in managing people. The answer is not as simple as a Yes/No, but I do think that you can get rid of the HR department as we know it today. Concepts such as HR shared services and other components that are administrative and transactional in nature can be owned by an inclusive services division. But HR strategy and expertise groups would still need to exist, but could be intertwined into the organisation in other ways than a separate department. Sounds like a good topic for a later discussion.
   
   Tell me your thoughts.