behaviors

Six characteristics of successful HR leaders

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Integrity – maybe the most important quality that a good HR leader needs to have (and one that is often overlooked) is integrity. I’m not just talking about handling the wealth of data and information that you have at your fingertips, but the conversations, the confessions, the knowledge and the insight. If at any point, your honesty and integrity is not felt by those around you, then you are going to struggle to be effective or successful.

Bravery – being a good HR leader means going out on a limb from time to time, it means having a willingness and a confidence to speak your mind, to swim against the tide and to stand alone. The best leaders I’ve seen have a quiet bravery, they don’t seek to draw attention to their stance, but instead recognise that their job is sometimes to ask the questions and hold the line that others won’t.

Generosity – one aspect of an HR leader’s work is that we see people at their worst. We hear the conversations, we see the behaviours, we experience the emotional turbulence that can occur. Being able to treat every situation, every moment and every interaction with a generosity of spirit is key to remaining objective, thoughtful and balanced. We are privileged to be involved in those moments, even if it doesn’t feel it at the time.

Perceptivity – it perhaps isn’t surprising that some of the best HR leaders I’ve met are also some of the most perceptive people. They listen, they observe, they feel. And through this, they ask the questions, see the information, feel the emotion that often other people miss. They will be the one that will follow-up with a colleague after a meeting because they sensed that something wasn’t right, or that asks the question to unlock a problem in a group.

Serenity – the volume of stuff that goes on in an HR leader’s world is often gargantuan in size and emotionally charged in nature. The ability to live with this without leaking on to those around is a key attribute for success. Nobody needs to know how busy you are, or how much you need to achieve – they’re looking to you for emotional leadership and calmness in the face of adversity. Be the swan, not the March Hare.

Humility – the realisation that it isn’t about you is key to being a successful HR leader and fundamentally underpins all of the other qualities. Great ideas, solutions and interventions will always be owned by someone else. Thanks will often be implied and sometimes slow to come. The hits that you take, the challenges that you face and the difficulties that you overcome will go unnoticed and you have to be ok with that and draw strength from your colleagues and your team.

Driving cultural change

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If we’re honest, most attempts at culture change fail. We like to pretend that we’ve made small steps forward, but in reality we witness the prevailing culture continue.

The reason? Most approaches aren’t systemic, instead they focus on only some of the levers available and shy away from others. And without shifting the entire system, the almost inevitable result is that change is temporary and unsustained.

To make this point, we can look to the structure of other systems.

The first stage of learning to drive in the UK is the theory test. It teaches us all “the rules” of the system. What we should do in response to certain signals, how we should behave, what the expectations of ourselves and others should be.

Then we go and sit in a car, with a friend, family or paid instructor. In the model, we learn to apply the theoretical knowledge in to a practical environment. The reality is that in this application we start to learn how things are really done but maintain a level of congruence because of the artificial experience of “passing the test”.

And assuming that we manage to retain enough of the “right way” to get past the test and into our own wheels, we then go out in to the world and experience first hand and for real how the behaviours are applied in the system.

Do people stop at red lights?
Do they follow the speed limits?
Do people speak on phones?
How many people keep to the stopping distances?

On top of this we have the structural implementation, the speed cameras, the police, the insurance companies. What do they reward, what do they punish? What is accepted and tolerated, what is looked down upon and reprimanded.

In reality, this isn’t far from the approach of most organisations – with some form of classroom based intervention. However, when we look at the application of this back within the department and then the organisation as a whole; when we look at the structures that we put in place in terms of recruitment, promotion, reward and development – that’s where we start to see the gaps.

No system is perfect and there will always be a certain level of incongruence and imperfection – that’s because we’re human. If you drive, you’ve probably jumped a red light, broken a speed limit, looked at a text once or more. But we have an expectation that people who constantly break the rules will be dealt with and that if we generally abide by the agreed norms, then we will be ok.

The problem in most organisational change programmes is that the interventions take place outside the system – like the theory test – and expect a transference back in. But individual behaviour tends to norm to the group and group behaviours tend to be driven by the structure of the system, which we tend to neglect.

Put simply, organisations are systems. And if you want to change the culture of organisations, you need to consider the whole system. Anything short of this will almost certainly involve a lot of time, a lot of effort and resource, but ultimately end in inevitable failure.