Being true to others involves providing a psychologically safe environment, facilitating upward communication, giving performance feedback, and helping people to grow through delegation and coaching.
Being true to your responsibilities involves having clearly thought about your organizational impact, your leadership brand, how you collaborate with others and build effective team working. It also includes constantly making sure you maintain and develop your knowledge and skills.
Be true to yourself means finding out about your blind spots and unknown areas of potential through feedback, validated psychometric tools, connecting with your values, and then challenging your habits to do something about it.
The very recent July /August edition of the highly influential Harvard Business Review has a cover title that reads “It’s time to Blow up HR and Build Something New - Here’s how.” The magazine then contains three detailed articles all based around the current role and challenges facing HR. While it may be interesting to debate the strategic value of HR and how best it should add value to the business the articles do not provide conclusive evidence that will be of practical value to HR professionals. We present our opinion on the debate and what HR should do.
Of course the fundamental concept of partnering is not that new to many finance professionals. It can be strongly argued that successful finance professionals have always operated as close business partners with the evidence being how many ultimately move into general management and corporate leadership roles. But equally it is true that many aspects of the traditional finance function have grown apart from the core business activities. They have become diverted from their central goal of adding business value. The distractions include:
Increasing the value added role of the Finance function
What role is HR expected to play in your organization? Do you have a clear understanding of what your key internal customers expect HR to deliver?
To answer these questions you need to know what your senior leadership and key internal clients expect from HR. You also need to have an eye to current HR leading edge practice so that you are helping your senior leadership and management gain full value from what HR con contribute.
As business is dominated by cash flows, costs and profitability the finance function has traditionally been immune to any form of corporate criticism. Money is the driver for many organisations and as finance retains full control of this role and very few have dared to criticize its brand as the most central and critical of all support functions. But times are a changing and today we are seeing the once revered finance function being subjected to review. Relentless cost pressures and global competition are forcing organisations to now look at how their finance functions operate. We have probably all heard the classic jibes of “the bean-counters or digit heads” but nowadays leading edge functions are instigating real change.
One of our clients asked me to join their Global HR meeting and facilitate a discussion of the broad trends in Human Resources so that they could benchmark their plans. This article provides you with information on what are the current trends impacting HR. Firstly we will look at some broad trends and then we will look at five main trends impacting HR directly.