What Does "Great HR" Look Like?

I was recently asked what a "great Human Resources function looks like."  I'm not a big fan of navel gazing and much prefer to focus on business challenges.  But I understand that getting one's house in order contributes to being an effective part of a team and helping to achieve business results.  So it's not an unfair question.

I'm not sure there is one profile, nor one perspective from which to judge that profile.  But I think I can offer "a profile" (as in "one plausible profile that does not preclude other equal or even better profiles") from one perspective.

We have to get “the dailies” right.  Yes, advanced coaching in the philosophy of leadership skills (for example) is great — but doing that alone is like offering a graduate program to kids who aren’t ready for college.  Starting with Management 101 is more aligned with getting the basics right.  Start with the building blocks and go up, from there.  Similarly, things like an HR service desk or high functioning call center are a brilliant beginning to making sure all of the process, policy, transactional, tactical work gets done well.  If HR cannot execute on that stuff, the rest won’t matter.  So continuously fine tuning such offerings is very important.

That said, if we ONLY do the basic blocking and tackling, we have probably missed a huge opportunity to be the voice of reason and independent advice — a neutral third party without a dog in the fight — that is going to become increasingly important as we grow more and more silos and political fiefdoms as the company becomes successful and grows.  HR has the opportunity to be one of the few people “at the table” who has a view towards the enterprise impact of the decisions being made, and is willing to “take one for the team” in order to argue for what the company as a whole will benefit from (versus the increasingly common decision making process that focuses on a specific BU and their own quarterly earnings, regardless of long term and company-wide impact).

Finally, we still have to present a great WIFM case. (What’s in it for me?)  So we need to appeal to those parochial  myopic, lizard brain hungers that each leader or manager or employee possesses.  But that is just 20% of the puzzle.  The other 80% should be org and enterprise benefits.  We won’t get traction without the 20%.  We aren’t doing our job without the 80%.

But don't let that WIFM define the scope of what we can offer.  If we need to, let's figure out the right things to do -- and generate a reasonable bit of WIFM as a way to make the medicine palatable.  Yes, we should continue to ask the business what they want from HR, we need to be mindful that it is sometimes like the doctor asking the patient what their ailment and cure is.  We need to be the experts — asking and listening, yes, but also bringing ideas, solutions, experiments, trial balloons, and new ideas to the business that they wouldn’t necessarily think to ask about -- as long as we can demonstrate these ideas have a likelihood of generating significant business value.

So, in addition to getting the dailies and transactional pieces “right”, and also helping to foster a sense of “wearing your company hat, not your BU or personal career hat”, we can make big inroads if we are associated with successes that business didn’t ask for, and perhaps didn't even anticipate.  For example, if a talent review actually results in a pipeline of opportunities and candidates across multiple business units that results in high potential employees who are burnt out in one org or role choosing to stay at the company, that’s a win — and encourages leaders to participate in future talent reviews.