The mandate for any new Head of Human Resources is to lead strategies and actions that lift work force capability, increase productivity, build employee engagement and support the organisation in achieving its strategic goals and objectives.

As the newly appointed Head of Human Resources (HR), your success in delivering against this mandate will depend on your ability to:

1. Listen, learn and understand your new organisation and the industry it competes in, so the right strategies are put in place and the right decisions are taken.
2. Build your personal credibility, engagement and trust, so you can lead through influence as you drive positive organisational changes that will improve performance.

Clearly it’s important you gain as much understanding of the market you compete in and the dynamics of your new organisation before you take your seat at the executive table. Ways you can do this before you commence the new role are: gaining insights into the company history, future vision, customer markets, industry trends, online articles, website information and social media posts. You can also explore the backgrounds and experience of the executives in the team you’ll be joining and the people you’ll be leading in your new role (thanks FaceBook, Google and LinkedIn).

But the real learning starts when you walk in the door.  

There’s great advice online for new Heads of HR on how to approach the first 100 days when commencing in a new organisation.

But my advice is invest time listening and learning what the executive team, your HR team and your employees’ think.

By investing time listening and learning and establishing relationships, you will increase your understanding and build your credibility and trust. This will help you successfully engage, influence and lead as you make decisions.

Three actions any new HR leader should prioritise are:

·    Listening and learning what the executive team thinks.

·     Meeting with different employees and hearing what they say.

·     Having your team share their views on current HR strategies.

One of your key accountabilities as the Head of HR will be aligning the organisation’s vision, strategy and objectives with the human resources people and performance strategy. You’ll also need to make decisions on the priorities for HR to deliver the agenda successfully.

By taking the above actions early in your role, you can accelerate your learning and understanding of the organisation, the culture and the bench strength. This is pivotal to ensuring your organisational people and performance strategy is in alignment. Even if you bring great experience from another HR leadership role, every organisation is different and your previous strategy will almost certainly need some adjustment.

It’s expected that all three actions, i.e. the meetings to listen and learn from executives, employees and your HR team will happen in parallel. However, the learning journey will never end and the importance of regular engagement and communication will be essential.

1. Listen and learn what your executive team thinks.

With the CEO’s support and having had time to talk with him/her, prioritise time to spend a number of quality one on one sessions with each member on the executive team. By meeting one on one you can immediately start establishing the collaborative trust that will assist you in your decision-making and as an influencer going forward.

These meetings shouldn’t be rushed, so ensure your executive colleagues have uninterrupted time to reflect and share their thoughts. Learning about your new colleagues and getting them talking about their career steps will provide insights into their personalities, motivators and values. This will help build a genuine connection and a deeper appreciation of them as people, along with an understanding of the collective executive team dynamic.

Take time to explore each executive’s understanding of the organisation’s purpose, vision, strategies and what the organisation’s cultural values mean to them.

This will tell you if there’s existing alignment across the senior leadership team and if there’s consistency in the messages being communicated down and across the organisation. Obviously this is important for employee engagement and trust in both the vision and the strategy being communicated.

Ask each executive:

1. “How would you describe the culture of the organisation?
2. “If there’s things needing to change in the culture, how would you want it described in 12 months time after the changes?
3. “What needs to change internally in the organisation to get there?”

Then ask each executive to also share:

1. “What are the success drivers and business measures in the areas you’re accountable for, and how do these drivers and measures contribute to the organisation’s strategy and objectives?”
2. “Where do you see the greatest internal challenges within your area and across the wider organisation?”
3. “What are the greatest challenges we have as an organisation to deliver for customers in the market and to be competitive?”
4. “Where do you see the greatest opportunities to make positive changes internally to lift our organisational agility and performance?”   
5. “What must we in your view do differently within our organisation to drive more customer value and achieve greater market success?”
6. “Where do you believe too much cost is being spent and how can the organisation achieve greater agility, productivity and profitability?”

The responses you get from the executives will accelerate both your organisational and commercial awareness and it will present you with different perspectives, interpretations and priorities as you chart your HR people and performance strategy.

To understand the talent map and bench strength across the organisation have each executive draw out their team structure.

Ask each executive to:

• Tell you about each of their team leaders as people, outlining their performance, their development needs and their potential to take on more senior roles in the organisation.
• Discuss the succession plan for them as an executive and for each direct report. Do they have a succession plan and if so what are the timeframes?

• Have them outline any talent challenges they have with respect to individuals, teams or general capability areas.
• Ask them what needs immediate action and what needs investment?  Where can you support them with their team to build capability?
• Ask them about critical roles and business continuity risks if team members with certain unique skills were to resign. Do they have a plan in place?

There are various other questions you can ask as you spend time one on one with each of the executives. Once you’ve captured their thoughts, ideas and understand their priorities you’ll have a good source of knowledge to help you start forming the building blocks of your HR people and performance strategy.

2. Meet with your employees and hear what they say.

As the internal communications go out to employees across the organisation they will know there’s a new HR leader joining the executive team. They’ll be aware that this person will have a potentially significant impact on the organisation’s culture and their working environment, including their engagement and well-being.

So the jury will be out for most employees on you and the impact you will have, particularly if it’s a newly created role or if the organisation is going through a cultural change. This presents an opportunity for you as the new Head of HR to influence their perceptions, open future doorways of communication and build bridges to achieve improved employee engagement and trust.

Trust won’t happen without evidence of action but by arranging opportunities to meet and talk with employees informally the first steps to building trust will have been taken.

 

‘Coffee with Rick’ – I can’t claim the title or the concept as both were used by a President in an organisation where I previously worked. This President, someone I admired had the Socratic approach to decision making. He would always ask questions and engage with staff to help him get the best information and viewpoints so he could in turn make the best decisions possible.

He also had a great saying when he spoke at leadership training events,“it’s not good enough to just be right”, meaning that if you can’t lead change and decisions through influencing others in the organisation then being right counts for zero.

Like many great ideas and initiatives we come across, I’ve applied this one in my roles to interact informally with small groups of staff from different parts of the organisation.

How it worked:

• I’d let the Reception team know of one or two time slots each week where employees could book a seat in our café to come meet and talk with me in small groups of 6-8 people.
• I’d ask the Reception team to book people from different parts of the organisation to make up the group so they could also meet new faces, learn about their colleagues’ departments and hear others’ views.

Bringing people together is a great way of building trust, collaboration and engagement. It’s also important for connecting senior executives with employees from all across the organisation and it’s not just the Head of HR who can have these meetings.

I’d pitched to all employees in a corporate message that they could:

• Use the opportunity to come meet me informally and be introduced as I was very interested in learning about the business, the various departments and what they did, and I wanted to meet employees from across the organisation.
• Help me learn more about the culture, the organisational values and their understanding of our vision and strategies for success, given their importance (as employees) in making success happen.
• Get a free coffee on me and meet some of their fellow colleagues working in other parts of the organisation.

At these sessions, I’d always make the attendees feel very welcome and genuinely thank them for helping me learn about the organisation, given my role was to help the organisation be successful through driving their (employee) engagement and performance. I’d also buy them their favourite coffee (or tea) which was always appreciated!

I’d spend a few minutes talking about what an engaged culture was and give a short introduction of my background and what attracted me to join their organisation. 

I’d also emphasise results, saying that “we have to be profitable, to return economic value to shareholders, have money to invest back into the business to innovate and sustain our market competitiveness, and importantly be able to reward you (our employees) through improved salaries and benefits”.

Before we got into the questions below, I’d ask each person around the table to introduce themselves, but just share their name, department, role, the main function of their role and how long they’d been in the business. I’d ask them to, after doing this, share two facts about themselves that they didn’t believe others would know. Maybe a life changing experience, a trip or an adventure they’d been on, a unique hobby or interest or a passion and talent outside of work that they enjoyed doing.

This not only helped us all learn more about our colleagues but it reflected the diversity of us all as individuals, and how we all had come together to enjoy our work, get a sense of achievement and feel valued for our contribution.

Organisations are at the end of the day made up of many unique people (AI hasn’t taken over yet).

Having done this we would have an open discussion about the organisation.

• I’d ask them all about the workplace culture and how they’d describe it, what the values were and if they felt these were true values lived and breathed across the organisation.
• We’d discuss their understanding of the organisation’s vision and strategy and I’d get a true sense of their awareness and interpretation of both, and how well they felt connected.
• I’d also ask them what we could be doing better as an organisational team, and what we should look to do going forward to lift engagement, improve performance and make the organisation more agile, productive and customer driven.

Great ideas come from talented employees, but you have to ask them and have a culture where they want to bring the great ideas to life.

Importantly, the focus was forward looking, and the language used in discussions was: “our”, “us” and “we”.

As the time together came to a close I’d open the doorway for any of the attendees to individually, or with others, come see me to discuss other ideas they had to lift performance, or if they had any particular concerns.

I’d always reinforce our common purpose moving forward, working together to empower a culture that raised engagement and improved organisational performance.  

In my last role I had over 30 of these sessions, and I conducted them in country offices in New Zealand, the U.S.A., Europe and the United Kingdom. These sessions not only helped me connect and meet many great people across the organisation, but it also helped me understand the synergy and disconnects between the executive leadership and the wider employee thinking. Over one year we had employee engagement rise by 33%, and these discussions, along with other positive employee experience initiatives contributed to achieving this.

3. Have your team share their views on current strategies.

Clearly your team of human resource professionals will have great insights into the organisation and the people in it. These insights will be extremely valuable as a source of learning for you. Discussing the people and performance strategy that exists already (if any) and how they see it supporting the organisational strategy and objectives will help you identify both opportunities and gaps that you and your team can focus on.

 

As each of them will have had different levels of exposure across the organisation, having a group session and asking them similar questions as those asked of the executive team (about the organisation) will most likely provide the best insights.

Early on it’s important to gain your team’s trust, encouraging them to be open so they can feel comfortable and safe contributing their ideas and views. Again listening carefully and learning about what HR strategy exists, any policies that are in place and the HR employee and business support service practices, will give you more valuable insights to guide your decision making.

Investing time with each of your team as individuals and exploring their backgrounds, their goals and their future aspirations is important to building trust and engagement. As with the executive team, it will also help you better understand their personalities, motivators and their values.

Knowing your team’s individual and collective strengths and their development areas will also enable you to allocate resources and assign projects appropriately to stretch and grow each member of your team as you execute the people and performance strategy.

Takeaways

As the new Head of Human Resources your role is to improve organisational success by having the right people and performance strategy. This can only be done by understanding the organisation, it’s vision, strategy and the market, its measures of success, its culture and the attitudes and feelings of employees that impact engagement and overall performance.

By prioritising meetings with executives, wider group employees and your own HR team when you first join the organisation, listening to and absorbing what they share, you can accelerate your knowledge and learning. As a result, you will be better placed to make the right decisions to align the organisation’s business strategy and objectives with the right HR strategy and priority initiatives.

Your employees will also have ideas, listen to them and inspire their energy and commitment to improving the organisation’s performance.

Learning about and gaining insights on the people in your organisation, understanding them as individuals and developing relationships built on trust, collaboration and shared purpose will also help you build your credibility to lead through influence.

This will help you be successful as you drive positive and impactful engagement and organisational performance changes.

Rick Helliwell, 17 October 2018