07th June 2021
In Defence of HR
We truly believe that great HR people play an important role in generating value in their organisations through the levers of people performance. There are plenty of examples of HR making a huge impact on organisational performance. Especially since the world of work was turned upside down by Covid-19.
We’ll continue to call for HR to step up and be more visible in how they are creating value the business. There are still too many HR people who are all about HR and not about the business.
The problem is, even the most commercially oriented HR leaders can fail to break through on organisational performance for reasons other than their own skill and influence.
Holding HR Back from Maximising Performance
It isn’t all on HR if 60+% of people are less than fully engaged at work (according to The Gallup Organisation). The behaviours of some CEOs and organisational leaders make it difficult to get the people agenda moving forward consistently. It’s understood that People Performance is just as important as Financial Performance. Clearly some leaders haven’t got the memo yet.
People and Culture Manifests from The Top
There are CEOs and senior leaders who have behaviours and practices that make great people performance near impossible. We’ve picked four of the most common for this post.
How many apply to one or more leaders in your organisation?
1. Wanting to be Liked
In the words of Brené Brown “Feeding people half-truths or bullshit to make them feel better (which is almost always about making ourselves feel more comfortable) is unfair.” A senior leader not wanting to rock the boat is simply deflection for a lack of courage to deal with the situation. Whether its performance or behaviour, too many senior leaders don’t take responsibility and deal with their own people problems.
Sure, HR can provide counsel to make sure a performance situation is handled in a way that maintains dignity, is fair and meets the letter of the law. However, if every leader has the courage and accepts the responsibility of acting early and effectively the time of the HR Leader can be deployed towards work that creates more value.
2. Not a Team Player
Teams are the basic units of organisational life and the ultimate competitive advantage. Organisational performance is simply a reflection of the level of alignment within teams and between teams. Teams are the fastest, most effective way to operationalise culture and values. However, in most organisations “team” is simply a collective noun for a group of people with the same boss. Most teams aren’t teams. Most ‘exec teams’ are really a bunch of brains in a room running as a business review committee.
To be a Team there needs to be high levels of trust. A clear reason or purpose for the team to exist. And, members must put their responsibility for the team ahead of any individual, business unit or functional responsibility. The behaviours of high functioning teams are hard to learn and take time to embed. Few senior leaders are willing to make the time, emotional and financial investments to create real teamwork in their own team let alone across the organisation.
3. Paying Lip Service to Culture
Culture, it’s all the rage, and with good reason. It’s hard to find any senior leader who disagrees with Peter Drucker that, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” But, that’s just what they say. If you added up the collective hours spent on ‘strategy’ by senior leaders in your organisation, would it be more or less than the number of hours dedicated to working on culture?
Culture at its core is all about the collective habits and behaviours of employees. These are brought to life in how they treat each other and how they treat customers and suppliers. Culture is about relationships. Unfortunately for many leaders, that’s a quagmire of ‘soft stuff’ into which they are unequipped, uninterested or unwilling to invest time, resources and emotion.
4. Unwilling to Invest in People
It is an unfortunate fact of life that most organisations spend more money on hiring people than they do on developing they people they already have. It’s a rare thing to hear “keep that leadership program going, we will find savings in other places”. There’s never enough money to do development right, but there’s always enough money to run a Search for a vacant role.
It is a waste of time to run detailed succession planning processes identifying individuals and cohorts of people ripe for development to prepare them for future roles and then not follow through with serious investment (investment dollars that could offset money spent on external recruitment).
Summary
We’ve only listed four behaviours here, there are many more. The point is there are many great, commercially minded, HR leaders out there but even the best can struggle in organisations where CEOs and senior leaders neglect the fundamental drivers of people performance.
Are you a senior leader who identifies with any of these behaviours? Or, are you a CHRO who deals with these behaviours on a regular basis? If either of you answered ‘yes’ then, well, what are you going to do about it?
Justin Miles
Categories: Uncategorised
