2. Question Authority
HR is bound on all sides by rules and laws. And, yes, you certainly need to be regarded by the leadership as a trusted partner in keeping the company on the right side of legalities. However, I would like to add this: Break as many rules as you can.
3. Seats at the Table, but Who’s Ready?
4. That Sartain Touch
If human resources has a household name, it's Libby Sartain, who earned her stripes at Southwest Airlines, mended a fracture at SHRM, made a leap to Yahoo and now has written a road map for human resources professionals who want to be like her.
When it comes to the long-sought “seat at the table” for HR leaders, Libby Sartain sees both good news and bad. Sartain, who sits on the board of directors at retailer Peet’s Coffee & Tea, notes that human resource leaders are increasingly joining such boards—a clear sign of growing clout for the profession. But she notices a dearth of HR practitioners who are prepared for top jobs in the field.
By Ed Frauenheim Comments 0 | Recommend 0
hen it comes to the long-sought "seat at the table" for HR leaders, Libby
Sartain sees both good news and bad. Sartain, who sits on the board of directors
at retailer Peet’s Coffee & Tea, notes that human resource leaders are
increasingly joining such boards—a clear sign of growing clout for the
profession. But she notices a dearth of HR practitioners who are prepared for
top jobs in the field.
On the profession’s progress: I probably know 20 HR people that are now serving on
public boards of directors. That’s a new trend. When you look over my 30-year
career in HR, it was a "personnel administrator" when I started, and now it’s a
"senior executive" and even a "board member."
I can remember when the Society for Human Resource Management
changed its name from the American Society for Personnel Administration, because
we were part of management. Now we’ve moved from part of management to part of
the senior leadership team. We’re that person who is part of the leadership
team—some people are fighting to get that seat at the table—there to manage the
return on investment in talent or human capital.
To me, the job of HR is evolving to one of, really, talent
management as a resource. Not all the administrative part, which is still there
and part of the price of admission.
The question that boards want to know about and CEOs want to
know about—and HR has to be prepared to address—is, if we’re investing this much
in our compensation of our senior leaders or our workforce, are we getting a
return on that investment, just like if we made any other capital investment?
Are we running our company with the right governance when it comes to ethics and
policies? Are things above board? Because nobody wants to be caught in any of
these embarrassing situations.
On the next generation of HR talent: That’s one of the things that I’m very concerned about. I
get a lot of headhunter calls for great jobs that are very strategic, that are
focused on all the right things.
And then I try to think, who do I know who can do this job?
What we’ve done is we’ve created some real specialists in HR.
So you specialize in compensation or you specialize in organizational
development, or you become a generalist. But we haven’t created the right mixes
of experiences so that enough people get everything they need for that top job.
They need the comp. They need the O.D. They need to have been the business
partner. They need to understand talent management more than anything else. So
that’s one thing I feel more HR leaders should be working on.
That’s one of the things I’m really proud of at Yahoo. I did
create the experiences, so I had two candidates who were capable of taking my
job.
Workforce Management, May 19, 2008, p. 21
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Ed Frauenheim is a Workforce Management senior staff writer based in San Francisco. E-mail editors@workforce.com to comment.
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hen it comes to the long-sought "seat at the table" for HR leaders, Libby
Sartain sees both good news and bad. Sartain, who sits on the board of directors
at retailer Peet’s Coffee & Tea, notes that human resource leaders are
increasingly joining such boards—a clear sign of growing clout for the
profession. But she notices a dearth of HR practitioners who are prepared for
top jobs in the field.
