Why the Need for an HR Transformation?

This book is about a major paradigm shift for the HR profession. Long a cost center or overhead department, HR fights for credibility, funding, and trust. There is a better way.

HR departments have been trained to think of themselves as cost centers, challenged at every budget cycle to cut, pare, and shrink expenses. We HR professionals brandish benchmarks and statistics to say how engagement affects business success, how our ratio of HR staff to employees is low, and how our turnover is too high. Executives roll their eyes and ask, "But what impact do you have on our bottom line?

Guess what, HR professionals. We have a tremendous impact on the bottom line, but we think like a cost center. One reason is because we do not have our own act together. We think in organizational silos, as professionals in compensation, recruiting, employee relations, and learning and development, rather than as business people whose purpose is to improve the bottom line of our organizations.

By breaking down organizational silos and using a process to generate and foster collective thinking, we can shift the paradigm from developing programs, policies, and processes to improving the performance and productivity of the workforce. The profession of human resources has grown exponentially specialized and complex, and our work often confounds our customers. We walk in a minefield of compliance and regulatory traps, which seem to monopolize our limited time and resources and pull us away from being the strategic partner that we want to be.

In this frantically busy world, sometimes it is necessary to stop, reflect, and reenergize, and that is what this book is about. Here we offer a RoadMap with intentional StopOvers that help us ask and answer good business questions about the people part of the organization.

And at each StopOver, the focus is on the customer — the end user of our products and services — the leaders and employees of the organization. These are the people who will actually make improvements to performance and productivity. By shifting the focus of HR work to the customer and by operating the discipline of human resources as a business, we can be that strategic partner our organizations desperately need.

Becoming a strategic partner is a paradigm shift, and it can substantially increase the value of HR because the organization will know what to expect and will be able to measure results, not just quantitative activities, but real impacts on the bottom line. And if we do it right, we probably will not have to tell our customers how we add value; they will tell us.

This refocus can be accomplished by following the process described in the RoadMap and by looking holistically at the business of people. It can be equally effective in large or small organizations, and it can be intentionally implemented as a transformation process. Though I hesitate to use the word "transformation" because I believe it is widely overused, there is no other fitting word for a deliberate and systematic change in behavior that generates better business results.

The field of human resources is at a crossroads, and the time to act is now. When the name of the discipline changed in 1985 from "personnel" to "human resources," there was a promise of being more than administrative. HR professionals wanted to be strategic, to be credible, and to add value to the organization.

Today, some HR teams are truly partners in the business, trusted and looked to for wise counsel about the investment of human capital. There are, however, an overwhelming number of HR teams that have not yet achieved the credibility or proverbial "seat at the table" that they believe will bring true business partnership.

Some HR teams may argue that they cannot break out of the roles that executive leaders place them into — the roles of administrative, cost centers, necessary evils. They claim that executives do not understand the role that human resources can play in leading the investment in human capital, so they are stuck. That may be a fair point, to say that executives may not see the potential in HR to be a strong business leader.

On the flip side, most executives are smart business people who know a business opportunity when they see one. The challenge before us is to educate executives on the value of HR and to show our potential by doing what they need us to do. This process introduces a structured and disciplined way to approach the work of HR that is a means of doing just that.

The purpose of this book is to set out a process, a RoadMap if you will, for senior HR leaders and their teams to shift from being a "necessary evil," a cost center, an overhead department to being a true business partner that is leading the investment in human capital as a key member of leadership — a business accelerator. It can also serve as a basis for which CEOs can set the standard for HR work by raising the bar for their HR teams.

This is not an HR competency model, although we will talk about the knowledge and skills necessary to journey through the RoadMap. There are excellent competency models already available to help HR practitioners develop as leaders and professionals. This model offers a way to apply the competencies that have been developed and modeled by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and others, to actually put the competencies to work, and to guide continuous learning and development for HR teams.

This is also not an organizational chart; the RoadMap is intended to be "organizational chart neutral." By this, I mean that it can be adopted by any HR team regardless of how the team is structured. As the HR teams begin thinking collectively, the RoadMap may cause them to question traditional HR roles, but that is an evolution that will happen over time.

This is also not a transformation, although it may lead to transforming the HR function to add greater value to the organization. As I said earlier, the word "transformation" is overused and rarely achieves what it purports to achieve. The process described in this book can be introduced on a project level, or to solve a particular problem to help achieve a result that works.

This process...