I had an interesting conversation with Jeff Hunter a few weeks ago where he was pondering why HR did not have the executive “power” that the likes of finance does. Well, he was not so much wondering as pointing out that the emphasis was misdirected. I completely agree that with today’s shift to a knowledge economy, the value of human capital (talent) versus the value of other capital is clearly higher. Finance is currently a more analytical center that happens to provide great insight into the performance of the organization to the executive team. However, if the real power exists in execution, then HR should have a stronger partnership with the business than it currently does.
It’s possible that the practices of talent acquisition and talent management are indeed recognized as critical aspects of the business. In fact, where most CEO’s were telling the world how “people” were their businesses most important resource, today CEO’s are telling the world that they will need to continuously find and develop talent in order to stay competitive. The problem that HR has is that we haven’t been finding solutions. For example, every recruiting executive I speak to complains about the ability to manage relationships with their highly talented prospects. However, recruiting solutions and technology may not be ready today to fully manage those relationships, even though we keep implementing them. As far as I know, Jeff’s is the only organization that strayed from the “normal” path to implement a highly successful CRM system as their talent acquisition engine.’
Similarly, we’re just starting to manage our talent effectively in terms of performance, but our overall understanding of how we apply competencies to the business is much weaker. At some point, we also need to take a more active role in developing talent – something that our learning programs, succession plans and performance processes are not really effective at today. So I look at the current state of our talent practices and quickly understand why we don’t have the stature that we should. For the most part, our talent practices are in their infancy.
So if we’re in the infancy of the talent practice potential, where are we going? In my mind, there is a holy grail here. Talent needs to be engaged, nimble and integrated with business and product innovation. Not only do we need to understand what our talent is and who has the right competencies, but we need to be able to move the right talent into the right projects quickly and seamlessly. To do this, our talent networks (which need to be created) need to be integrated with innovation networks and social networks. Basically, understanding who has talent isn’t enough. However, putting talent together with influence and driving innovation through those combined channels is the work of our future.
We talk about a seat at the table. On systematicHR I’ve taken the time to argue why we are already there and why we’re far from it. HR should be the right hand of the CEO, but to get there, we need to not only understand talent, but tie it together with the organization’s ability to drive production innovation.
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HR Versus Finance – Influence, Power, and a Seat at the Table Part 1 –
I had an interesting conversation with Jeff Hunter a few weeks ago where he was pondering why HR did not have the executive “power” that the likes of finance does. Well, he was not so much wondering as pointing out that the emphasis was … Read more
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[…] a read at SystematicHR titled “HR Versus Finance – Influence, Power, and a Seat at the Table Part 1“, here’s the question that has me puzzling this morning, “Is human capital more […]
[…] HR Versus Finance – Influence, Power, and a Seat at the Table Part 1I had an interesting conversation with Jeff Hunter a few weeks ago where he was pondering why HR did not have the executive “power” that the likes of finance does. Well, he was not so much wondering as pointing out that the emphasis was … […]
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