August 2011 – Paskpartnership

This is the last of six articles on how to identify HR candidates who are truly commercial. In these articles, I explore the difference between those who are just strong on delivery and those who really understand what difference they make to the company. Previous articles can be found on www.paskpartnership.com

This month, we look at the HR business partner.

As you can imagine, I’ve interviewed many HR business partners (HRBPs) and I’ve come to one simple conclusion about the difference between the truly commercial candidates and the rest. Being commercial is about choices. Choices about how you spend your time and what is going to have the biggest impact on the business. It’s not about the design of the role or the job title or it’s position in the hierarchy.

I’ve met candidates who call themselves HRBPs but in fact are HR generalists and trouble-shooters. There are HRBPs who report to the CEO or Divisional head but where the relationship is anything but a partnership one and more like a subservient one. The truly commercial HR business partner has earned the respect and status they have but their influence on the business may not be obvious from their position in the organisation. Instead, I look beyond this to the way they have conducted themselves.

Let’s start by exploring how HRBPs choose to spend their time.

The biggest choice I have observed the commercial candidate make in their career is over what work they get involved in. Are they an HR generalist, a jack-of-all-trades who can turn their hand to anything from handling disciplinary cases to facilitating team meetings? Or are they a business leader who focuses on how to create the conditions for high performance or on how to build the workforce of the future?

I’m deliberately describing this as a choice because those who try to do both, invariably have less impact on the business. The more time they spend doing the jack-of-all-trades work, the less time they have to add real commercial value.

Making this choice isn’t easy. There is a prevalent myth to contend with here – that HR needs to get the basics right before they earn the right to do the strategic stuff. This has more than a grain of truth in it – if the basic security and welfare needs of employees are not being met, then the organisation is failing in it’s duty of care and will ultimately lose the loyalty of its workforce. If these basics are missing, nothing could be more commercial, or strategic, than putting them in place.

But this doesn’t mean that the HRBP has to meet these needs personally. They do, however, need to ensure that the processes, services, systems and behaviours are in place to deal with these issues. The myth is thinking that, once these are in place, they have to “keep their hand in” and provide some of these services themselves to their senior colleagues.

So they first key factor I explore with candidates is what they choose to spend their time on.

The second is what impact they have had. The messages from my previous articles on how to measure commercial impact apply equally here:

how did this improve the revenue or profit margin of the company or reduce risk?
what commercially valuable behaviours resulted from this intervention and why was it the best way of achieving this?
what other options were available to you and why did you reject them?
what outcome where you trying to achieve and how did this directly relate to the business strategy?
how did you measure the impact and what was the level of improvement over time?
what was the relevance of using best practice or applying external benchmarks in this company and how did these drive the achievement of the business strategy?

Clearly, these two factors are interconnected. The more time spent on strategic issues, the more opportunity there is for having a commercial impact. The more time spent on service delivery, when there are other ways these needs could be met for less cost, the more missed opportunities there are for commercial impact. What differentiates the truly commercial HRBP is not whether they can demonstrate commercial impact – it is how they free themselves up to deliver more and more commercial impact.

If you need any advice on your search for your next truly commercial HRBP then please contact me on 07760 777 931 or via email debbie@paskpartnership.com

This is the fifth of six articles on how to identify HR candidates who are truly commercial. In these articles, I explore the difference between those who are just strong on delivery and those who really understand what difference they make to the company. Previous articles can be found on www.paskpartnership.com

This month, we look at the Head of OD.

The OD role is one of those few roles that are mysterious and misunderstood, mostly by those who have never had one in their organisation. In fact, your organisation is either one that is committed and passionate about OD or…… it doesn’t have such a role and probably never will. You tend to find these roles in European or very large and complex companies but if you are recruiting a Head of OD for the first time, it is most likely that you have used consultants to perform this role to date.

So what does a Head of OD do? What does OD actually stand for? Is it Organisation Development, Organisational Development or Organisation Design? And how does this differ from Organisation Effectiveness? One of the first challenges in appointing a commercial Head of OD is defining what you want the role to do. This may seem obvious but given the confusion about OD it is worth spending some time on being clear what they will deliver and how they will interact with other functions.

There are many definitions of organisational development and even the website www.ODportal.com admits there is no single definition. In my experience, the most common outcome of the OD function is a workforce that works more effectively and productively together in furtherance of the company strategy.

With this definition in mind, what makes a Head Of OD truly commercial?

Firstly, they must be able to articulate the company strategy in terms of the workforce design, culture, behaviors and working practices and processes that will drive the strategy. They should know how to analyse the gap between this desired state and the current state. They should be able to design, plan and cost the interventions that bring about the desired change and they should be able to place a financial value on the target state e.g. how it will affect sales, what costs it will save, what financial risks it will mitigate.

Finally, they must have actually implemented these interventions and produced the desired result, or something close to it, both in human terms and financial outcomes.

One of the key attributes that sets commercial Heads of OD apart is their ability to combine their belief in human potential with a focus on business outcomes. They understand how human endeavour and organisational purpose can be combined to create mutual benefit to the employee, the customer and investors. They won’t flinch about recommending tough actions that make the company more effective but neither will they lose sight of how the manner in which these actions are decided and implemented will impact on employee engagement.

Being a commercial Head of OD requires courage – the courage to challenge divisive and damaging decisions that pursue short-term or personal goals at the expense of the overall health of the organisation, the courage to recognise when an organisation has lost it’s way and to help steer it away from disaster, the courage to act in the company’s interest rather than any one person’s interest. Such courage is based on a desire to make the organisation great not just successful.

Every company fulfills a role in society, depending on the desirability and utility of its products and services. However, the one thing they all have in common is that they also provide a means of channeling the potential of its employees to produce meaningful and valuable work. The truly commercial OD leader knows how to bring these two purposes together to create mutual success resulting in specific and lasting performance outcomes for the company. This is what makes companies great – the ability to create a win-win for all involved and sustain it over time.

So, when you next interview an OD candidate, have the courage to ask them what difference they have really made to both the company and it’s employees; how they made that company greater than before. But don’t accept vague answers and assertions that they made a difference, ask them for evidence of this impact. As we all know, commercial success is not built on good intentions alone.

If you need any advice on your search for your next truly commercial Head of OD, please contact me on 07760 777 931 or via email debbie@paskpartnership.com

What Does A Truly Commercial HR Business Partner Do?

What Does A Head of OD Do? And What Makes Them Truly Commercial?