Posts belonging to Category HR leadership

OK, first off, this is not a political post. Not in the least. I had simply heard about these rules for government, business and life that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had scripted and decided to take a look.

Which prompted me to share.

Not to mention the fact that HRE also just received a complimentary copy of his book, Rumsfeld’s Rules: Leadership Lessons in Business, Politics, War, and Life … more fodder for sharing (though I’ll let you go find it on Amazon.com if you’re prone to purchase).

Not sure I agree with absolutely every one of his rules, but there are enough in there under his “business” banner that seem to resonate with what we’ve been reading and writing about over the years to make it worth a scroll. Here are his top six for business leaders:

When you initiate new activities, find things you are currently doing that you can discontinue — whether reports, activities, etc. It works, but you must force yourself to do it. Always keep in mind your “teeth-to-tail ratio.”

Watch the growth of middle-level management. Don’t automatically fill vacant jobs. Leave some positions unfilled for six to eight months to see what happens. You will find you won’t need to fill some of them.

Reduce the layers of management. They put distance between the top of an organization and the customers.

Find ways to decentralize. Move decision-making authority down and out. Encourage a more entrepreneurial approach.

Prune — prune businesses, products, activities, people. Do it annually.

Know your customers!

In fact, if you go through all his tips, a.k.a. “rules,” for success, you can come away with some real gems to lead your HR organization simply by replacing the words “White House,” “government” and “secretary of defense” for “HR leadership” and “business leadership” in general.

Take his first five under “Serving in the White House” and tell me these aren’t great rules to operate by in a corporate setting (you’ll need to replace “president” with “CEO” and “administrations” with “CHRO positions”):

Don’t accept the post or stay unless you have an understanding with the president that you’re free to tell him what you think “with the bark off” and you have the courage to do it.

Visit with your predecessors from previous administrations. They know the ropes and can help you see around some corners. Try to make original mistakes, rather than needlessly repeating theirs.

Don’t begin to think you’re the president. You’re not. The Constitution [or, in your case, company bylaws] provides for only one.

In the execution of presidential decisions work to be true to his views, in fact and tone.

Know that the immediate staff and others in the administration [i.e., workforce] will assume that your manner, tone and tempo reflect the president’s.

I’m leaving a ton of good ones out.

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Josh Bersin, principal, CEO and founder at Bersin by Deloitte, delivered a content-rich, provoking opening keynote at Bersin’s Impact 2013 conference in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., Tuesday morning. The message was, in essence, that businesses and their HR functions need to do business and HR completely differently than even just a few short years ago if they’re going to compete in the global marketplace.

His vision, if you will, involves a more distributed network of HR expertise, localized for every state, country and culture. No more preaching HR from above.

Some of the top drivers of change, he said, are clear gaps in leadership, skills and education — borne out by research, Bersin’s and others’; an explosive role of technology; and disparities in economic growth and opportunity, country to country.

“Successful global interconnectedness,” he said, “means understanding what true localization really is.” He offered some examples of companies that have learned the importance of understanding what doing business in a different culture really means. Ford, for instance, before it introduced its highly successful Ford Figo in  India, knew its people had to learn what the road conditions were, what colors would sell, etc.

For HR leaders, embracing the challenges of doing business globally will mean understanding and transforming the learning culture, optimizing local talent acquisition and localizing the leadership pipeline. “High-performing leaders in certain cultures have characteristics specific only to those cultures,” Bersin told attendees.

From a business standpoint, he told me privately after the keynote, HR leaders need to embrace a more distributed HR, veering away from the old Centers of Excellence model toward one involving Networks of Expertise. The future of HR, competing in a global business world, he said, needs to “be a model where local HR specialists are trained enough to tweak [programs and initiatives] at a local level and HR leaders are creating standards based on integrating skills and information” throughout the corporation, not innovating and then passing it on down the chain.

In fact, he even went so far as to say that the concept of the HR business partner needs to be rethought and redefined. “Business partners need to be held more accountable,” he said. “They need to be more powerful and [need to be] experts locally,” much the same way houses aren’t built by generalists, but by specialists — each contributing the best of what he or she can do.

To help HR-leadership expertise along, his company introduced at the conference its Bersin by Deloitte Playbooks, step-by-step programs to help business leaders and their teams tackle current HR, talent and learning challenges — locally throughout the world — based on Bersin’s WhatWorks research.

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As attendees gathered into the general session room for the opening keynote at the Human Resource Executive Health & Benefits Leadership Conference^™, the energy in the room felt much different — more charged, more urgent, more focused — than any other that I’ve been in over the last few years.

Even before keynote speaker Dr. Ron Leopold started his remarks, people were in their chairs early, ready to go—pens and notepads out, smartphones charged. I assumed they were just anxious to hear Leopold answer the question he’d posed in his session title (which he even admitted was selected to get tongues wagging), “Are benefits forever?”

However, as the session progressed, I realized attendees weren’t seeking paydirt on Leopold’s query and they weren’t looking to sit in a drum circle for a “PPACA therapy session,” as one pro in the room tweeted.

Rather, as the clock ticks down to mere months before practitioners face the full force of health care reform the attendees this morning wanted solutions. They wanted strategies. And by the looks on their faces, they weren’t leaving until they got them.

I had a lightbulb moment. I realized that employers are no longer panicked about PPACA. They are purposeful.

Following the Supreme Court’s affirmation of the health care reform law and the re-election of President Obama, us benefits communicators have been waiting for that shift from employers for a while now. We’ve been waiting patiently—some of us more so than others—for you to turn flimsy ideas into firm plans. Mostly so that we could stop writing stories about how you’re all in “wait and see mode,” and start writing about strategies about how to work now that you’re in “decide and do” mode. That makes our jobs waaaay more exciting, and also more meaningful.

As Leopold noted, “Most employers—according to most survey and research data—have decided to ‘play’ [under PPACA’s employers mandate], but it’s a different playing field.” From my vantage point, what brought practitioners here to Las Vegas for HBLC is much more than to spend three days in 90-degree weather (although it’s a nice bonus). They’re here this week because they understand, as Leopold said, “The answer to PPACA isn’t in the health plan alone, [and] even if employers get out of the health care business, they’ll never get out of the productivity business.”

So, to succeed on that new playing field, employers know they need some new plays. For example, I ate lunch with a woman today who is at HBLC seeking new ideas for her organization’s wellness program. I asked her about the current offering, and it sounded like a rousing success—in five years, the plan has garnered more than 50 percent participation using a well-structured blend of incentives and challenges to keep employees engaged. It also features employee health fairs where employees and their families can receive biometric screenings, so employees’ engagement via the fun stuff still can lead to actionable health conversations with their physicians. Further, it’s a collegiate environment, so she and her team leverage the school’s kinesiology students to serve as personal trainers for employees.

I know employers that would love to have resources and participation levels like that, I told her. What exactly was she looking to change?

The impact of PPACA has the organization considering self-funding, she said. So, instead of just wellness carrots, “it may be time to bring in sticks, too.”

Like Leopold said, employers are playing, but on a whole different playing field. I, for one, am encouraged that here at HBLC, HR/benefits pros understand that and are prepping new and improved benefits playbooks for game time come January.

Kelley M. Butler is the Editorial Director at Benz Communications, a consulting firm specializing in benefits communications. Formerly the Editor-in-Chief of Employee Benefit News, Kelley has been covering news and trends in human resources and employee benefits for more than 12 years. Follow her updates from HBLC on twitter at @kelleytheeditor.

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Man, you gotta wonder sometimes what poor HR professionals ever did to deserve all the wrath and vitriol they get. Hard to name many other professions quite as hated — except maybe tax collectors in Biblical times or used car salesmen today.

The latest swipe at the profession I so happen to cover is this lovely piece posted last week on the Forbes website titled “It’s Time for Companies to Fire their Human Resource Departments.”

While, granted, the headline did get my attention, the rest left a lot to be taken seriously. Kyle Smith, the writer, starts out with a rather bizarre reference to a study from Ben-Gurion and Ariel universities suggesting female HR staffers who dominate the field are more intent on meeting handsome men than hiring solid HR recruits. Excuse me? I’m not even an HR staffer and I’m offended.

He also carefully picks pieces of other — in my estimation, much more substantial and credible — critiques of the profession to throw his punches: one, the now-famous 2005 piece published by Fast Company magazine, “Why We Hate HR,” and another 2010 piece posted on the Harvard Business Review blog, “Is HR Too Important to be Left to HR?” I will give him one point he makes, that there are significant discrepancies (backed by studies) between how happy HR thinks workers are and how happy they really are. We’ve reported on those discrepancies as well and they’re worth bearing in mind.

One piece I did not find in his litany of swipes and references was this commentary, written in 2010 by Fast Company co-founder William C. Taylor, titled “Why We (Shouldn’t) Hate HR.” Taylor, a published author and frequent speaker to business groups – including HR – made some great points:

The real problem, I’d submit, isn’t that HR executives aren’t financially savvy enough, or too focused on delivering programs rather than enhancing value, or unable to conduct themselves as the equals of the traditional power players in the organization–all points the original essay makes. The real problem is that too many organizations aren’t as demanding, as rigorous, as creative about the human element in business as they are about finance, marketing, and R&D. If companies and their CEOs aren’t serious about the people side of their organizations, how can we expect HR people in those organizations to play as a serious a role as we (and they) want them to play?

And this:

So the next time you, as an employee, get frustrated with HR, or you, as an HR executive, get frustrated with your role inside the company, stop sweating the small stuff and start asking the big questions: Why would great people want to be part of your organization in the first place? Do you know a great person when you see one? Are you great at teaching people how your organizations works and wins? Does your organization work as distinctively as it competes?

If your company and its leaders can answer those questions, then you’ll have an organization that is capable of winning–and an HR organization that everyone can love.

Interesting how a piece written close to three years ago hits far closer to home when it comes to the issues, concerns and realities of the HR profession today than a piece released just last week. Interesting, isn’t it, how the former is far more timely than the latter.

Looks like some media folks just seem to have it in for HR, and that tendency seems to be timeless.

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Agility was mentioned more than a few times during the opening day of i4cp’s 2013 Annual Conference in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Take yesterday morning’s session featuring Choice Hotels’ CEO Steve Joyce and CHRO Patrick Cimerola. (For fans of the TV show Undercover Boss, you may remember Joyce from the 2010 segment, in which he worked up a sweat changing bed sheets, and cleaning toilets and swimming pools.)

Joyce, who joined Choice five years ago just as the economy was about to tank, has led Choice’s transition into the “distribution” business. (Choice claims to be the first hotel chain to launch an iPhone app.)

“Change happens very fast,” Cimerola explained, “so we have to be agile” and “move quickly” as an organization. In light of that, hiring people who have that ability is a top priority at the company, a franchiser with more than 6,200 hotels around the globe.

At Choice, Cimerola said, everyone, from the top on down, is responsible for finding great talent.

“We hire people with a purpose,” he said. If employees are standing by the elevator at five o’clock, he explained, “I would tell them to get out of the way.”

Cimerola added that leaders at Choice are assessed for and held accountable for the people they hire.

Besides agility, Cimerola said the company also looks for people who embody two other core competencies: collaboration and accountability.

In speaking to potential talent, Joyce pointed out that management emphasizes the “kind of impact that they can have.”

This especially resonates with IT professionals, who are key to the company’s transformation into a distribution business, Joyce said. Those in IT want to work at a company with an eye to the future; a company doing “exciting things,” he said.

Among other things, Choice’s growth roadmap includes significant expansion into Europe, where it has already made some inroads.

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In case you thought women in HR have been conquering the “glass ceiling” more than in other departments just by their sheer numbers in the profession, think again.

At least that’s what rearchers at Los Angeles-based Korn/Ferry say, based on their latest data from the Korn/Ferry 500 CHRO database, which tracks the professional moves of about 500 chief human resource officers throughout the world.

The data — which is for internal purposes only and, therefore, not public — finds 58 percent of CHROs are male, according to the company’s emailed release.

“Forty years ago, HR was considered mostly an administrative function,” the release says. “For that reason, many women would often be promoted from secretaries to human resource professionals — supporting the myth that women dominate the top ranks of HR. An even bigger myth is that HR is a leader in gender diversity in the C-suite.”

Kim Shanahan, a senior client partner and managing director of the Human Resources Center of Expertise at Korn/Ferry, says that, while there are many exceptional females in the function, the facts do, indeed, show that Fortune 500 CHROs are actually primarily male. She goes on:

There is much written about the glass ceiling for CEOs and other executive leaders. For HR executives, the demands on leaders are the same as other executive functions – kids, family, intense work schedule, travel, etc. However, showing ambition like their functional counterparts sometimes goes against the nature of the function.

That said, many of the best HR executives are bold, business-oriented, and are able to connect with all levels of the organization and all types of people. They know when to sit back and when to step up. Females typically have incredible capabilities across these areas but can sometimes take too much of a back seat when a front seat may be required.

Boards and CEOs need to continuously require diverse slates of candidates — internal and/or external – for all leadership openings. This includes ensuring that females are included in all slates for succession opportunities.

There is intense pressure for CEOs to have diverse executive teams and most are working diligently to ensure they meet these requirements. At the same time, they are also facing intense complexity in terms of their businesses. They are putting a premium on those with strong change-management [skills and experience] and ideally a track record of working closely with a board of directors. Therefore, some of the dynamics in terms of the CHRO numbers are in direct conflict – the supply/demand curve is a little off.”

For further discussion’s sake, here’s our HRE cover story from March 2012, “The Feminization of HR,” that, while concurring women aren’t necessarily dominating HR’s top spots, makes a solid argument for that changing soon, based simply on the plethora of women in the HR-leadership pipeline.

And here is a recent Leader Board post by Senior Editor Andrew R. McIlvaine about Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg wanting to start what she calls “Lean In Circles” at workplaces throughout the country to help women fight the often-invisible, often-internal barriers impeding their ultimate top-leadership climbs.

She has this to say about women being their own worst enemies in her soon-to-be-released book, Lean In:

We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in. [The result is that] men still run the world.”

I guess, going by Korn/Ferry’s data, you can count HR as still part of that world … at least for now.

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A new report from the Economist Intelligence Unit confirms that most chief executive officers value HR’s counsel: 70 percent of the 135 CEOs surveyed said they want HR to be involved at the highest levels of planning. However, just over half of those CEOs (55 percent) actually consider the head of HR to be a key player in strategic planning. Many of the CEOs are also concerned about their HR chiefs’ lack of business acumen, with 37 percent reporting the head of HR doesn’t “understand the business well enough.”

The EIU report is based on two surveys, one of the CEOs and the other of 100 chief financial officers, along with a series of in-depth interviews with executives and outside experts from around the world. The report was sponsored by IBM and Oracle.

The CEO survey focused on how they view the contributions of HR leaders across organizational strategy, planning and executive team management. More than half of the CEOs (55 percent) said insufficient talent within the organization is a key challenge that might harm the company financially within the next 12 months.

The CFO survey revealed that although their desire for HR to be a strategic player in key planning is even stronger than among CEOs (75 percent, compared to 70 percent), far fewer of them consider their HR counterparts as such (30 percent) than do the CEOs (55 percent).

The report notes that HR leaders can strengthen their bond with the C-suite by fostering personal relationships with them, “cultivating the chemistry of the senior management team” and finding opportunities to demonstrate their understanding of the business. With respect to CFOs in particular, the report suggests HR share goals and results “in a qualitiative way through HR metrics” and help CFOs improve their internal finance team.

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Is your HR department world-class? Would you like it to be? It wouldn’t hurt to check out the latest Book of Numbers research from the Hackett Group, which has been putting out these reports for the past 17 years. Hackett defines “world class” as “companies that achieve top-quartile performance across a weighted array of efficiency and effectiveness metrics.” The findings are based on detailed benchmarks of Global 1000 companies over the past two years.

World-class HR departments make far greater use of self-service for payroll, training, total-rewards administration and staffing services than typical companies do. They also focus on keeping it simple: they use nearly 70 percent fewer job grades, 40 percent fewer health and welfare plans and 40 percent fewer compensation plans than typical companies of their size. They have 20 percent fewer managers but with greater spans of control, which leads to streamlined management, reduced costs and quicker decisionmaking, says Hackett. They’re also better at outsourcing than typical companies, retaining fewer internal staff associated with processes that have been outsourced, which helps them realize greater cost benefits from the arrangement than other companies, which tend to make few internal changes after outsourcing.

World-class HR departments are heavily focused on employee development, says Hackett. They dedicate 15 percent more in spending and allocate more staff than typical companies do to strategic workforce planning and tend to have more staff skilled in areas such as anlytics and modeling. They’re focused on identifying skills needed by their company today and in the future, and often take a “multi-year” perspective that lets them develop needed skills internally. They have nearly twice the number of internal placements than typical companies, and are able to recruit staff externally much more quickly when necessary. They also take a rigorous approach to employee engagement, measuring it regularly and equipping managers with the skills they need to guide people effectively.

In addition to being more tightly integrated with business strategy than their counterparts at typical companies, world-class HR departments are more engaged in managing and facilitating organizational change. And, while 20 percent of typical HR departments report metrics for HR-managed projects, world-class HR departments do this three times more often, and close to 80 percent report organizational metrics for change initiatives. Doing this, says Hackett, “helps HR leadership build credibility with executive management.”

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More bad news on the skills-shortage front since my last post on the subject. This time, the shocker comes in the form of a number, part of the McKinsey Global Institute’s recent World at Work report: By 2020, according to the report, the world could have 40 million too few college-educated workers.

Youch. That’s a huge shortage — as the late George Carlin might have said in his infamous oxymoron routine.

As Tracy McCarthy, senior vice president of human resources at Chicago-based SilkRoad technology, told the Society for Human Resource Management in it’s report (subscription required) on this matter,

This skills shortage, particularly for high-tech skills, has existed in the United States for some time now. If you look at the number of H-1B visa holders, you’ll find the majority are for high-tech skilled workers such as engineers.”

Yes, I’ve been aware of the skills shortage for some time now; I know about the scarcity of math-and-science-proficient engineers (something I keep telling my engineer son to bear in mind and use to his advantage as he plots his future); I just hadn’t seen a 40-million-shortage headcount by 2020 until now.

Ravin Jesuthasan, Chicago-based global-talent-management-practice leader for Towers Watson, says the future gap will come with some friction points too. As he puts it,

While there will be an overall shortage of college-educated talent, there will be dramatic differences across countries. Developed markets like the United States, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom will experience huge shortages, while countries like India and Indonesia will generate significant surpluses as the key drivers of education, demographics and immigration play out differentially. The challenge for employers will be how they tap into these surpluses; making the mobility of work essential.”

What the McKinsey report does not cover, Jesuthasan adds, are the specific skills that businesses will demand and the gaps relative to those within the current workforce. As noted in Towers Watson’s Global Talent 2021 report, he points out, employers expect to place increasing emphasis on four skill areas: digital skills, agile thinking, interpersonal and communication skills, and global operating skills.

I guess you can look at all this as more fodder for the battle cry to bring the best thinkers of the world together now – from employment, academic, even governmental sectors – to try and solve this thing before the global marketplace closes up shop.

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Not good news emanating from a recent report by Cornerstone OnDemand. The study, Cornerstone OnDemand 2013 U.S. Employee Report, shows more than 19 million Americans planning to change jobs in the next year, leaving U.S. employers looking at a price tag of $2 trillion in potential employee turnover.

Compounding that are three concerns that surfaced in the survey, according to the company’s release:

Increasing absence of ongoing training and development. In the past six months, only about a third (32 percent) of employed American adults has received training and development to better perform their job.

Misaligned goals and expectations between managers and employees. Only one in four respondents (25 percent) has established career goals with their manager/employer.

Lack of individual recognition and performance feedback. Two-thirds (66 percent) said they haven’t received useful feedback from their manager/employer.

Certainly doesn’t sound like companies are doing everything they can to shore up skills in-house. Nor does it sound like they’re gearing up to train the next wave of workers who’ll be happy to take those 19 million job-hoppers’ places.

“The worldwide skills shortage is quickly becoming a crisis across companies of all sizes and industries,” says Jason Corsello, Cornerstone OnDemand’s vice president of corporate strategy and marketing. ”Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet to address the global skills shortage, but companies can take action to build programs today and invest more in ongoing training and       continuous feedback for their employees.”

Yet another disturbing layer in this mounting skills crisis is something I focused on in my HREOnline^™ news analysis that went live today — an increasing shortage of soft skills (i.e., behavioral competencies, such as communicating, telling the truth, making ethical decisions, working well in a team and getting to work on time) in job applicants and new hires; not just the hard (job-specific) skills applicants seem to be lacking in droves today as well.

Luckily, Corsello and the sources in my analysis have suggestions for getting through this extremely troubling time. Good luck.

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