Business Day (South Africa), May 19, 2009, Tuesday

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Business Day (South Africa)

May 19, 2009, Tuesday

HEADLINE: Resources are limited, HR must raise its game

BYLINE: Stefan Stern

BODY:
WHAT'S THE STORY?

Resources are limited, HR must raise its game

Speaking the truth to power ought to be part of any senior HR manager's job, writes

TO ADAPT that key question concerning the Romans posed by Reg, the not very heroic leader of the People's Front of Judea in Monty Python's Life of Brian: "What has HR ever done for us?"

We know the usual answer. It is delivered with a sneer and a derisive snort. HR managers are the "abominable 'No' men" (and women, too, of course). They get together to form "business prevention units". This relentless carping has undermined their self-confidence and surveys confirm that HR people worry that colleagues do not take them seriously. They struggle to influence the corporate agenda.

The financial crisis has only made things worse. HR is summoned to redundancy negotiations but may then be ig-nored. And now questions are being asked about what HR did or did not do to help avert this crisis in the first place.

At a private meeting in London last week, hosted by the Corporate Research Forum, a management think-tank, senior HR professionals discussed whether they should have spoken up sooner about corporate excess. One said some HR directors at the banks had expressed regret at their failure to stay the hands of their CEO - but added that another had admitted privately that, in his case, there would have been no point in trying.

Don't get the wrong idea. This gathering was pretty upbeat.

There was a refreshing lack of traditional HR self-flagellation.

Here was a group of people steeling themselves to make a much bigger impact on their organisations. But in addi-tion to Reg's initial question we must also ask: to what problem is HR the solution? HR's true believers reply: without us there can be no sustained high performance.

CRF presented the meeting with a report on the future of HR.

At its heart lay the question of governance. Some boards and senior management teams have failed to exercise proper control over their organisations in recent years. Those top-level discussions have been lacking something. Maybe a credible and influential HR director would be the best person to speak up.

Also attending the meeting was Patrick Wright, professor at Cornell university's school of industrial and labour relations, in the US. In his many discussions with business leaders he has found that there are concerns about the way ethical issues can get downplayed, or even completely ignored, because nobody else in a senior role will raise them. Guess who gets volunteered to do so? "The HR director is told: 'You need to get this on the table'," he says. Not easy - especially when you have little idea how much public support you will receive from your colleagues.

Perhaps, Prof Wright suggests, the HR director needs to become a kind of "chief integrity officer", who could avoid being penalised if the chief executive's appetite for integrity turns out to be limited.

CRF's report makes other suggestions. The HR director should be involved in the selection and assessment of board members. He or she could monitor how well the board operates, design a performance management system and write development plans for each board member. And have a say in what they get paid.

The ultimate goal for HR, though, is "organisational effectiveness" - helping to create a "high-performance envi-ronment as well as a capable workforce", the CRF report suggests. Talent management, skills and leadership develop-ment, dealing with change - these and other "people issues" are all on their agenda.

It seems plain that CEOs and other senior managers should focus more carefully on what they want the HR team to do for them. One HR director told last week's meeting that, on being appointed, the CEO had declared: "I know what I don't want from you. But I'm not sure what I do want."

Can the HR director act as a coach to the CEO and other senior managers? That will depend on the openness of the relationships at the top - and also on the courage of HR directors. One is quoted in the report as saying: "My CEO ex-pects to be challenged and receive insights about his leadership style. I tell him things he won't hear anywhere else.

He has learned the hard way that this is in his own interests."

That may not sound like many HR directors you know. But speaking the truth to power ought to be part of any senior HR manager's job.

Still not convinced that HR has anything to offer you? Turn to last July's Harvard Business Review, where two re-cent Harvard MBAs, Matthew Breitfelder and Daisy Wademan, talk proudly about their commitment to their adopted discipline. "In business school, we were trained to seek out underappreciated investment opportunities and to create value in surprising places," they wrote. "We see an undervalued and underpriced asset in the HR function itself, one that is poised to appreciate significantly."

Wademan is no fool. When she co-authored this article she was still a VP in HR for the investment bank Lehman Brothers. But by the end of the summer, before Lehman collapsed, she had secured a safe berth at Morgan Stanley. Human resourcefulness personified.

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