The spotlight is on Chief HR Officers in 2016. Can you elevate HR beyond administrative task management to become a true strategic partner of the CEO?

How do you create an innovative HR operation that delivers exciting, consistently business-aligned results?

Do you find yourself feeling excited about the unprecedented opportunity that awaits your team in 2016 ... while also feeling overwhelmed, wondering how you'll accomplish huge goals with a team that is already stretched to the limit?

You are in good company.

Research by McKinsey and the Conference Board consistently finds that CEOs worldwide see Human Capital as a top challenge, but they rank HR as only the eighth or ninth most important function in a company.

That has to change.

Beyond handling the usual HR responsibilities, CEOs want HR to develop these critical capabilities:

The CHRO should be able to assess the chances of meeting the business goals using her knowledge of the people side.

Finance and HR should work together to define ahead of time the value that is expected, using quantitative and qualitative factors.

The CHRO should also be able to make meaningful predictions about the competition.

The CHRO should work with the CEO and CFO to examine the causes of misses, because most problems are people problems.

The CHRO should also be expert at diagnosing how the various parts of the social system are working, systematically looking for activities that are causing bottlenecks or unnecessary friction.

The CHRO should be searching for people who could be future value creators and then thinking imaginatively about how to unleash their energy.

Other prescriptions might focus on improving the social engine - the quality of relationships, the level of trust and collaboration, and decisiveness.

Reducing the time lag between actions and feedback increases motivation and improves operations.

Korn Ferry research indicates that only 40 of the CHROs at Fortune 1000 companies had significant work experience outside HR before they came to lead the function.

This might leave a gap in terms of predicting, diagnosing, and prescribing actions that will improve business performance.

In order to play a central role in corporate decision making, HR must build a pipeline of diverse talent for its own organization.

In particular, HR team members will have to develop more fluency in communicating ideas using data-driven analysis that ties to the same financial metrics that line leaders manage.

Even if HR assembles a team of talented people with expertise in data-driven analysis and forecasting, those professionals are often frustrated by a lack of data to analyze.

The technology options for generating robust data sets are plentiful, but it will take considerable time and money to implement those systems.

HR leaders should absolutely champion investment in modern systems, but what tools can you leverage while you wait on those systems to arrive?

Patience is a virtue everywhere else, but there is little of it at the executive table. Two-to-three years may be a realistic timeframe for transforming the HR team and modernizing HR technology, but the odds are low that the current CEO and the current CHRO will both be in those same roles three years from now.

This partnership between the CEO and the CHRO requires that you achieve ambitious short-term goals while pursuing these longer-term initiatives.

So, what can you do with what you already have?

The intuition and imagination of your employees can be a powerful platform for predicting outcomes, diagnosing problems, and prescribing actions that add value to your business.

There are more valuable and impactful uses for employee feedback than employee engagement surveys. Use employee feedback campaigns to elevate HR as a value-creating strategic partner.

https://hbr.org/2015/07/people-before-strategy-a-new-role-for-the-chro

http://blogs.wsj.com/experts/2015/10/27/why-hr-belongs-in-the-c-suite/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/meghanbiro/2015/06/01/4-top-reasons-chros-are-c...

https://www.bcgperspectives.com/content/articles/leadership_talent_people_m...


http://www.mpathy.info/problems-we-solve-using-employee-feedback

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