From a recent review that we completed for a global insurance group, there emerged an interesting discussion about how HR could better support the major change program that was occuring.
It was not that there were not good capable people in HR - quite the opposite in fact. It was more about which HR skills had been developed and which had not. We saw that there had been an almost exclusive focus on Operational HR issues for most of the last 8 years, to the exclusion of Strategic HR, capability building and change management. It is not an ususual situation and reflects the demands that the Senior leadership team had placed on their HR leaders to be process efficient, with little opportunity to get into bigger picture thinking.
The question for them now is how to break out of this cycle and become better placed to lead rather than observe the major changes that are occuring. It does require development and coaching of the HR incumbents, to learn how to have a different dialogue with their leaders. It also requires some intervention with the business leaders, in order to use their HR resource more effectively.
A recent article in People Management framed the issues and demands very well. The article, based on extensive research, talks about the need for insight driven HR - defined by the three savvys - Organisational, Contextual & Business.
Whilst we cannot expect the new breed of HR leaders to be super-human; business and indeed the petulant ecomonic times that we find ourselves in, do demand a different, more diverse and more far-reaching response from HR.
Organisations and indeed HR leaders need to be good at recognising how different times will call on different skills and know where to go to get the help and support to develop these.
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