It is time to employee executives with operative and strategic experience from management positions in Human Resources. It is crucial that the HR executives know how to build and develop organizations from a CEO perspective.
It is time to grow and build up HR functions by hire former CEOs with interest in developing the organizations intellectual capital so it can evolve to meet the real needs of the business.
HR executives need to take on a greater role then they do in many organizations. HR executives need to become the prerequisite competence centre for leadership, functional and operational decision making, and strategic planning. One need to accelerate the growth of this competency beyond the HR function to continue to drive its value. Only then one can establish and build a better business performance and stronger improvement across a range of human capital metrics, including employee engagement and productivity.
Finance is the language of most organizations and boardrooms. HR leaders need to master this language and be able to translate what they do to show how HR impacts organizational results. Therefore, one should hire former CEOs in the HR functions. Technology and analytics are needed to translate data, because deciding on human capital value is no different from deciding on capital investments in the business with an expected return on investment. HR is not always about cost but about actual people and the operational, strategic, financial, and nonfinancial risks inherent in having the wrong talent. Once HR masters the language of the organization, it will be able to measure the impact it has and prove its contribution was worth the investment. High-performing organizations speak in terms of metrics to measure return on invested talent, similar to the measure of return on invested capital, and utilize predictive analytics to model outcomes and behaviour’s for talent. This is a radical departure from the traditional view of talent as a cost as opposed to an earnings generator.
HR need to play a vital role by helping the overall organization’s leaders understand how to interact with a future workforce that has more generations in the workplace than any other previous workforce, a more diversified and inclusive workforce, a more global and flexible workforce, etc.
HR need to be embedded in key functions and business units as HR business partners, but more important, the competency of HR need to be reside in all good leaders. HR as a function will still outsource, share services, and centralize the tactical components of HR, but the greatest value in the HR of tomorrow need to accelerated talent development centre, ensuring that all leaders in the organization are effective people leaders who can understand, interact with, and enhance their organization’s talent more effectively in the future. To be able to managed this one need to have a HR executive from general management as a former CEO. The best HR executives I have met in whole my career is former CEO`s. They know how to speak with the CEO and how to get heard in the board rooms.
Since competence and qualified employees is becoming the primary source of competitive advantage in a rapid-cycle global economy, organizations NEED to redefining the role that the chief human resource officer should play in leading the people dimension of business strategy. Beyond flawless delivery of the transactional services such as payroll and benefits, CHROs need to work in new ways to identify strategic workforce challenges and to create talent supply chains that can support innovation and growth. Tomorrow`s executives within HR must frame and deliver strategic policies and processes while finding metrics and analytics that supply the boardroom with insights needed to gauge the effectiveness of the company’s talent investment and management.
Traditionally, the key strategic relationship in organizations has been that of the CEO and CFO. However, as talent has become a critical corporate challenge, CHROs need to start to enter the executive triangle with CEO and CFO`s. HR need to fuses with strategy, finance, and people issues into business strategy of an organizations.
HR leaders in the executive triangle needs to understand the financial implications of their ideas for the entire enterprise, not just their own function. The language of the boardroom is finance, and HR leaders have to be able to speak it, therefore its CHRO`s with former CEO experience has much more to give in this role.
The most important competency for HR success in the executive triangle is the ability to be well networked with other executives in the company. The CHROs need to be the truly exert in strategic influence do so outside of formal settings in conjunction with the organization’s movers and shakers.
In many organizations, talent acquisition and development efforts can easily work at cross purposes. Business units may be reluctant to encourage their employees to advance their careers by moving to other units even though such advancement opportunities increase the likelihood of people staying. By the same token, hiring managers may feel that there are too few good applicants for a position and will force HR to boost its recruiting activities and costs.
Supply chain logistics could provide a new lens on such challenges and reveal opportunities to manage talent sources and make logical trade-offs. Supply chains look at the entire process of creating something, from the raw material to a finished good. Supply chain managers ensure that the process meets quality and cost standards and delivers on time. When things aren’t working, they look at every point in the system that can be improved. Boudreau suggests that companies look at talent as a similar set of production steps.
Thus, when the talent supply is viewed in its entire breadth, new opportunities and interventions become clearer. If the applicant pool is sufficiently large, for example, HR leaders can examine whether hiring managers have sufficient negotiating skills. If quality of applicants is an issue, the company can turn to different sources at the front end of the process. For example, GE often recruits from the military to leverage the government’s investments in talent development. Finally, an enterprise view of the talent supply chain drives more sound promotion and transfer decisions by making them more objective through a transparent process that makes organizational needs clear and shows how all can benefit.
The challenge is that most companies see talent as cost and develop financial metrics to manage it accordingly. For example, they will report revenue and profit per employee and often focus on how to cut those costs below industry benchmarks. Talent, however, is a company resource like R&D, production capabilities, and strategic partnerships. Therefore, the question becomes how to make the resource more productive and to understand the return on the investments made with that aim.