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Chris Seabourne

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Are you moral enough to lead a culture of accountability?

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Effective human resources leadership can only be built upon a culture of accountability, says Chris Seabourne, Partner with CTPartners.

For any company – regardless of its industry, location, or business model – its employee base represents one of its most valuable assets and one that is absolutely key to achieving performance, growth and profitability objectives.

Getting the most out your people doesn’t just happen on its own. It needs effective – even inspirational – HR leadership. And one of the keys to obtaining this is to understand the essential role of accountability. That means putting in place strategic approaches that help to build a corporate culture based upon accountability and a variety of measures that enable corporations to quantify HR results.

While this sounds great in theory, the reality is often rather different. Perhaps the most fundamental factor that works against HR is that many companies simply underestimate the value of a having a superior HR team.

Why? It may sound trite, but when all other things are equal, the team with the best players will win. So great HR departments don’t only know how to hire the right ‘players’ – they know how to keep them performing and developing at the highest levels.

It’s important to remember that within any company, the best players are those people who understand their roles within the organisation and consistently perform at optimal levels. They’re aligned with the guiding purposes of their department as well as the larger organisation. Top-quality HR teams know how to make that alignment happen.

And that leads to another important point: Companies need to carry out a variety of steps in order to create corporate environments that promote productivity and high performance. Some companies ignore the issue of environment; or they take it for granted. But that’s a serious mistake, which can have all kinds of negative consequences, including the perpetuation of inefficient or dysfunctional cultures.

But here’s the upside. Environment can, and should, be used as an effective weapon to attract and retain the best talent, weed out the underachievers, and enhance productivity. The right HR team knows how to partner with managers throughout the organisation to create this kind of environment.

So far from being a simple administrative function, a great HR team has a multifaceted and complex set of responsibilities. But what about those companies that don’t already consider their HR teams in these terms? How should they be viewing the purpose of the HR agenda?

One  way of looking at it is to think of the set of values, systems and processes whose purpose is to elicit superior performance as ‘architecture.’ A great HR department should be the architect of integrated, performance-oriented systems that are supported by everything from the company’s hiring and training systems, compensation model, employee evaluation procedures to much more.

There are a lot of critical issues that a HR team needs to focus on: talent management, environment and remuneration structures to name nut a few. And while line managers throughout the organisation are impacted by these workplace issues, they’ve got their own responsibilities and performance-oriented objectives.

So it’s up to the HR team to design personnel management systems that will help the company achieve extraordinary levels of results. It can’t be left to others.

In order for all of this ‘architecture’ to work, two things are essential. First, employees must trust the company leadership. Second, they must believe in the fairness of personnel systems, especially the ones that relate to employee assessments and talent management. Top-quality HR departments ensure that this trust exists. They understand that maintaining and ensuring integrity in these systems is central to maintaining employee commitment and confidence on an ongoing basis.

Equally, however, the organisation must have confidence in the HR team –  which brings us back to the issue of accountability.

At the heart of this is the simple fact that the HR team can’t afford to play by different rules than the other operational functions within the organisation. To be impactful, HR executives must be held to the same standards as any other line executive. There is no quicker route to being marginalised and losing the respect of a firm’s senior executives than a failure to understand its business objectives and your department’s role in achieving those objectives.

Being accountable as a human resources leader means understanding that HR exists, not for its own sake, but to achieve specific business goals. And although HR’s subject areas are often difficult to measure, measured they must be.

Take measures of employee engagement. When a business unit’s employee engagement indicators are strong, financial performance will also be strong. Weak employee engagement indicators are precursors to weaker financial performance, and that can be useful as a proactive management tool.

So when HR teams are held accountable and results are measured, corporate goals get achieved and companies will find themselves on a continuum of ever-increasing performance and productivity.

Finally, accountability also means that employees will see an upside for good performance, especially as it relates to compensation, talent development opportunities, and succession planning. And there will be significant implications for mediocre or poor performance. In the absence of such systems of accountability, a company will find itself facing dysfunctional behaviors and erratic performance.

By Chris Seabourne, Partner with CTPartners

One Response

  1. Morality has to be Led from the Top.

    Greetings Chris,

    Great article with some wonderful insights.

    As a profession, HR had faced many crossroads and often lost, wondering how they could best serve to add "true" value to an organisation. Not many HR have the fortunate priviledge of serving in the right environment to be able to exercise and perform to their best. And, moral has little to do with it. 

    In fact, I would be audacious in saying that HR is, and should be, the "moral compass" or conscience for a company in it’s conduct to achieve results. Unfortunately, this is often not the case for the simple reason that HR are not perceived in the same light of significance than finance, sales or operations. Far too many HR exist as display "trophies", reduced to administrative roles to lend credence to rhetorics. In fact, I strongly protest in you saying, "its employee base represents one of its most valuable assets". If you are not even convinced you that people are at the centre of all things, what good would moral do in crusading the HR challenge.       

    We must understand that HR does not exist in a vacuum. HR is part of the eco-system and function’s in a "supporting" role to the leadership. There is no denying HR can champion it’s HR team’s moral cause and accountability, but it can’t spread it’s wings if the environment and corporate leadership is not in allignment. This requires a higher level of wholesome – intellectual, emotional and spiritual – maturity in understanding the need to balance between short and long term needs of the internal and external environment. For example, what can HR do if a top leadership does not buy-into EE surveys, let alone support it?. If EE forms a critical precussor to company’s productivity and growth, how come it’s not on the top leadership plate, among the KRA/KPI accountabilities.                    

    Given the current widespread lost of leadership trust, I would say HR should focus its full weight and might in re-building this. Yet, how many HR are giving this a serious or second look. You cannot expect to change the environment or workculture when you have an overwhelming positional power influencing morality in the opposite direction. It takes more than moral and courage to run it. That’s I am pushing for "regulatory" enforcement on the HR front, under the purview of corporate governance. It would serve the HR profession a better chance in calling for and institutionalising the accountability challenge, particularly in leadership devlopment and talent management. This, to me, is a more effective, worthy and value added proposition for the HR community to pursue compared to purely banking on the moral duties. It is time HR took center stage and its moral cause in turning around dysfunctional leadership environment towards creating  "real" stakeholding value. The irony and sad part is that the corporate beneficiaries such as owners, board and  shareholders fail to see critical missing link to achieving greater business sustainability.    

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