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News
| THE NEW ROLE OF HR |
| 04/12/2007 |
As Human Resource departments shift from being primarily service providers and administrative experts to becoming strategic partners, HR professionals need to upgrade their skills, develop new competencies and understand where and how to bring value to the organization.
HR leaders who want to lead their departments beyond the traditional functions and roles toward a new definition of HR need to focus on five competencies. A good resource to understand what will be require is Dave Ulrich and Wayne Brockbank’s recent book The HR Value Proposition.
1. Business Realities. HR professionals must have a good understanding of the current business realities. This includes being aware of economic trends, the changing demographics of the workforce and the impact of globalization. It also means understanding the organization’s business priorities and its competitive advantage. This is probably the most challenging of the new competencies for the long-time traditional HR professionals.
2. Customers. New HR professionals must focus on the needs and wants of their external customers as well understanding the needs of managers and employees within the organization. It is part of the job to create positive connections and relationships to these group as well as to understand their views.
3. HR Strategy. The HR department needs to develop an HR strategy which flows from the organization’s business goals. It is this strategy which will create priorities for the department and which will determine the desired organizational culture for the organization. It is part of the department’s job to implement changes which will shape the existing culture to resemble the desired culture.
4. Competencies. The new HR department must focus on the development of talent. The goal is not only to help each individual employee reach his or her full potential, but to be sure that the skill set of the current employees matches the needs of the organization moving forward. In many organizations, development mechanisms need to be modified and scaled up to achieve this goal.
5. New Roles. To adequately support these new directions, HR professionals must become competent practitioners of many roles, some of which will be new to them. Key roles include organizational development consultant, coach, business expert, change agent and developer of talent.
Most HR departments have individuals who are competent in these areas. But they have not educated their professionals in a systematic way so that these competencies are in the toolkit of them all. This is the today’s challenge.
By Katharine Esty, Co-founder Ibis Consulting Group, Inc.
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