Talent Wins by Ram Charan & Dominic Barton & Dennis Carey

Author:Ram Charan & Dominic Barton & Dennis Carey [Ram Charan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633691193
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2018-01-22T05:00:00+00:00

The New HR Career Path

Gleaning insights about talent from data is important. So is translating those insights into action. In today’s companies, that’s the job of the HR business partner, a liaison between business managers and HR. But as we’ve mentioned before, there is considerable evidence that HR, despite its best efforts, often falls short in this critical role.

To stock your HR department with people who can develop the skills and clout to truly add value to the business, you must reinvent the HR career track. The ideal HR partner displays intellectual curiosity, possesses a deep knowledge of the business and a feel for how it makes money, has insight when judging people, and shows a willingness to be engaged in the business and the courage to have a point of view. What can you do to attract this kind of talent to HR?

Many HR groups have tried and failed to source talent from elsewhere in the business or from different academic disciplines. The call for HR to get “closer to the business” has been a mantra for over twenty years, but has amounted to little practical change in many companies. Most HR business partners have grown up in HR roles, often starting from quite junior positions. Indeed, many of them have spent most, or all, of their professional careers in roles that are rewarded for great customer service—saying yes to requests and smoothing out wrinkles in the HR process.

You need to develop a new talent pipeline, one that delivers people with a greater diversity of experience and more exposure to the strategic levers of the business. The best way to get started is to steer HR leaders into stints in operations, and for business leaders to spend time in human resources.

Sharing of talent between HR and other parts of the business can’t simply be an HR initiative—it must be your initiative as CEO, announced by you with the full backing of the board and your top management. It’s an initiative that will take time, commitment, and follow-through on your part, because it will be greeted with skepticism—as we’ve said, your employees have heard about the “reinvention of HR” before. You and your CHRO must also make clear the personal rewards that will accompany this shift. Anyone who expects to have a senior HR position in your talent-driven company should gain experience in line jobs and in functions such as finance, to build better business-strategy capabilities. Line managers intent on becoming senior leaders should see stints in HR as a normal part of their career path.

Tim Huval, the CHRO of Humana, recognized the need for exactly this type of DNA shift in his HR organization. He wanted HR staffers to have a broader perspective, so they could clearly see the impact of their talent recommendations on the bottom line and on the future of the business. He wanted to create a culture where HR was not in conflict with where the business was headed. “I don’t think of HR as a support organization,” says Huval.

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