By Nancy Painter

Too often when we think of politics, we think of elected officials taking pot shots at each other for the benefit of the cameras in Question Period.

However at its most basic level, politics is about people, power and the ability to influence events.  It’s something human resources professionals have given considerable thought to over the years, articulating it in recent decades as “getting a seat at the table” or being recognized within organizations as an integral part of the leadership team.

The Evolution of HR
While it’s generally recognized that HR has earned its role at the executive level, it certainly hasn’t always been that way.

Cameron MacKenzie, CHRP

“I’ve seen over and over where trained professionals in a specific field of expertise have been promoted to leadership roles because they have designations in accounting or engineering or some other technical field,” says Cameron Mackenzie, CHRP, MBA, CGA. “They assume there’s a correlation between technical expertise and HR and leadership skills,” he continues, “and that’s not necessarily true.”

With three decades of experience in the areas of leadership and business education, Mackenzie clearly understands the gap, and the need to fill it. “As a principal in the e-learning area in the Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada, I recognize the opportunity to develop accountants in leadership roles, and to develop their HR skills,” he says.

“Management often confuses their technical expertise for the ability to be leaders. Some of them with more emotional intelligence recognize that they need different abilities and reach out to get the training they need to gain those skills,” explains Mackenzie.

The organization provides online training nationally and internationally to help accountants move beyond technical skills to leadership roles, recognizing that human resources skills are a necessary part of successful leadership.

Les Waldie, FCHRP

While it’s more broadly understood today that good HR is part of great business, there are still pockets of resistance. Les Waldie, FCHRP and an HR consultant out of Prince George, puts it bluntly: “Antiquated perceptions come from antiquated thinkers.”

“HR has evolved significantly as organizations moved from more mass production and rote jobs to a higher level of individual contribution,” he explains. “There are many more high tech, high information businesses now. Even within resource industries, there are much more highly skilled jobs now, from maintenance to operations.”

Culture, Strategy and Goals
Another significant factor in the changing appreciation of HR’s value has been the move in recent decades to participating in the global economy, Waldie adds.

“Businesses needed to look at all cost elements, and the cost of people is a cost they couldn’t ignore. If you don’t have an effective workforce, you’re not getting the return you should on all of your investments, in all aspects of your business,” says Waldie. “Businesses came to the realization that they weren’t maximizing their people. They began to think differently, and see that they needed people who were thinking and taking responsibility individually. That was not necessarily the case 30 years ago, in many organizations at many levels.”

As roles have evolved, business has come to see the value of making sure people have the opportunity to make decisions, Waldie explains. “You need the right attitudes in organizations, you need to have good leadership, and to have that, you need to have good HR.”

“I think the top companies today recognize the value of HR to the success of culture and strategy and bottom line success,” Mackenzie says. “Without a strong culture, there is no hope of realizing the strategy and goals that you could compared to a company with a strong culture. Informed companies know that HR has to be one of the key players in the C-suite to create the success the company needs. It’s a chess game between culture and strategy and the business environment.”

HR’s Impact Ignored at Risk

Lisa Fuller, CHRP

Lisa Fuller, CHRP, CPP, is the manager of HR at KGHM Ajax Mining Inc. in Kamloops and, like Mackenzie, is a member of the board of directors of HRMA. She believes understanding of the value of HR depends on the level of sophistication in a business, as well as, often, the size of the organization.

“Smaller organizations without an HR presence or professional, or where resources are tight, don’t have access to or understand how HR has evolved,” she says. “They don’t see the need for that in a small corner store.”

“Most larger businesses are on a learning curve, Fuller adds. “They’re learning the value. As we continue to grow ourselves, people understand what we can bring—the awareness, understanding, experience and value that we bring to the table.”

Mackenzie points out that organizations ignore that value at their own peril. “The business risk increases by not being aware of human resources and the relationship factor within an organization, particularly with the Millennial generation. They’re focused on engagement, interesting work and being respected. If they don’t see those things, they’ll be gone, taking their fresh ideas and your strategic advantage with them.”

“I would say that some companies learned the value of HR through the School of Hard Knocks,” he adds. “When they forgot HR, they forgot culture and the effects flowed into morale, absenteeism, lack of productivity. They had to look at culture and achieve commitment, buy-in and ownership.”

“Companies can leap tall buildings in a single bound if they have their employees backing them up. A balanced scorecard has to include the human factor or an organization cannot be successful,” says Mackenzie.

Once seen as transactional—cutting paycheques, tracking vacation days, placing want ads in the paper—HR has grown over the decades into key roles in employee engagement, organizational culture, succession planning, training and development, leadership support and more.

Measuring HR’s Impact
Playing those roles successfully is the key to gaining, and keeping, influence in any organization. However, part of the reason recognition has sometimes been slow to come to HR is that many of those benefits are not as easily measured as is the volume coming off a production line.

“There needs to be a clear line drawn by HR connecting what they do with the success of the organization,” Mackenzie says. ”The more clearly defined the impact and consequences of HR functions are, the more HR will be valued within the business community.”

“The value of HR is not as immediately tangible as the amount of money in the bank account, but HR is one of the biggest influencers of the amount of money in the bank account,” he adds. “HR needs to make sure they connect the dots between what they do and the impact it has on the strategy and goals and financial results of the organization. It’s all there but we need to raise awareness of it, which will raise the perception of our value within the organization.”

“We have to be able to show our value in more concrete terms than in the past,” Fuller adds. “Our value may be more subjective and harder to measure, but it’s also evolving. We can now link employee engagement to results, wellness to reduced costs, relate the quality of a new hire to how soon they’re up to speed, the reduced need for external hires because of the development of internal people – we have well defined metrics in place to show our impact on the return on investment and the business success.”

Measurement is a key part of the HR toolbox, Waldie says. ”Sometimes there’s a disconnect between HR’s contribution and the recognition of it. We need to be able to show the cost of turnover, recruiting, accidents in the workplace, untrained people or labour disruptions. Measuring our value is absolutely important.”

Optimizing Results: Avoiding Pitfalls
Waldie knows that HR can make a huge difference to effective leadership, by providing the tools and support to leaders who need them. “HR’s influence comes from providing guidance and tools so those charged with making things happen have the best support and skills available,” he says.

Mackenzie concurs. “Just like the world’s best athletes have coaches to help them perform at their optimal level, there has to be training and development at all levels for a company to achieve its optimal performance,” he says, adding that includes leadership. “If you think you know all the answers for leadership, you’re going to do what you’ve always done and get what you’ve always got, and you won’t see much change.”

Achieving success is not without its pitfalls; politics always presents challenges.

Mackenzie sees entrenched ideas as one of the biggest pitfalls. “Executives who are experts in their technical fields often think that the way they’ve learned it is the way the business has to be run for success. In many cases, in what they’ve learned on their own, the human factor is absent,” he explains. “You can have the best HR department in the world, but if you have a leadership team that walks around not aware of the opportunities, not much is going to happen.”

Waldie agrees. “If the executive team is resistant and non-committal, that’s a huge impediment. You have to work with each member to build the understanding and show your value.”

While HR deals with thorny issues every day and must see them as opportunities, Fuller says, its biggest challenge is “dealing with a variety of personalities—how HR is perceived by management and employees is key to its success.”

Fostering Relationships Key to Credibility
“For me, as an HR professional and business partner, it’s really important to me to know that the fundamental value I have as an HR leader is built on the importance of relationships. They’re important for everyone in business, but especially in HR. It adds credibility,” says Fuller. “We must have the ability to manage relationships with all of our stakeholders, all the diverse groups we deal with.”

“I’ve thought a lot about the importance of credibility of HR people,” Waldie says. “To build that credibility requires developing a solid reputation as a contributor to each member of the executive team. We need to understand not only the CEO, but the others around the table and throughout the organization, understand their business and their issues, to establish and maintain trust.

“We need to understand what it is that’s important to each of those executives and help them achieve their goals—whatever that executive needs assistance in to help their business. It could be something with recruiting, compensation, performance management, leadership development, building their executive team, labour relations, or employee relations,” Waldie adds. “HR will stay the table as long as it is seen as, and can demonstrate, that’s it’s contributing,” he says. “Overall, the HR profession’s success is so dependent on our ability to earn and maintain the trust, not only of the executives, but of everyone in the organization. We need people to feel that they can come and talk to HR about issues.

Demonstrating Value, Earning Respect
Above all else, Waldie emphasizes, “Respect and integrity is paramount. We have to know how to manage the information we get without compromising our principles and while protecting our reputation. We’re in a unique position.”

Relationship building must include sensitivity to the organization, Fuller adds. “HR can have some brilliant ideas, but if the organization is not ready, they won’t land. You need to be astute, understand timing, planting seeds and influencing people,” she says. “If leadership is focused on different risks and concerns, your ideas may go nowhere. You need to be intuitive to understand timing so that the idea is embraced.”

“We have a huge opportunity to influence decisions at senior levels,” says Fuller. “As credible business partners, it’s important for us to be there to provide HR solutions, to provide positive people practices. Our value is really just beginning; we’re seeing the benefit of our hard work. Nothing is achievable if not done through people—that’s the foundation of any business, so it’s critical that HR be involved at the strategic level. There’s a tremendous amount of opportunity by keeping HR involved.”

“It’s incredibly important to take the time to understand all aspects of the business,” she adds, in order to provide the most value as part of the leadership team. “Showing leadership in an organization the competencies we bring increases the opportunity we have to develop and execute on those strategies that will definitely demonstrate the evolution of HR.”

The Certified Human Resources Professional (CHRP) designation has played a critical role in evolving the profile and professionalism of human resources in the eyes of the broader business community. Without a doubt, the CHRP has helped build HR’s credibility, according to Fuller. “As we continue to grow ourselves, people understand what we can bring.”

“The value of the CHRP and the value of HR is the ability to enable companies to develop and reinvent themselves and to be at the leading edge of business,” Mackenzie adds.

Waldie sees the designation’s biggest contribution to date as raising the bar for new HR practitioners, and improving the quality of those entering the field, but also sees awareness of the CHRP as a long-term change.

Too Much For HR Alone?
There are those who wonder if HR, in its efforts to demonstrate its value, has taken on too much.
Mackenzie disagrees. “The role of HR is very broad. I think there’s a need for education of executives in many companies as to the scope of HR responsibility and the relationship of that scope to strategy and success.”

“I don’t think it’s possible for it to be too much,” Fuller says. “We’re involved in a lot of diverse situations, but as a credible business partner, it’s important to be there to provide HR solutions.”

“Nothing HR is involved in is in isolation,” Waldie points out. “HR doesn’t create strategic alignment by itself, it doesn’t hire and fire by itself—it provides assistance and skilled guidance. We bring a range of skills that are a support to management and that are components of how the organization is managed. We can be a key contributor to that, but we don’t do it alone.”

If politics is influence then, does HR have it?
“I think the top companies today recognize the value of HR and its contribution to their success,” Mackenzie says.”It’s a collaboration where HR has a responsibility to raise that awareness, and executives have to be in the right mindset to listen to HR and other areas within the organization.”

“When we’re proactive in developing solutions, we build the credibility of HR’s role in the business,” Fuller says. “Ultimately, I’m there to grow the business and support the business. How we do it is through people—in a proactive and positive way to get the most out of employees.”

Nancy Painter is a freelance business writer and a member of the International Association of Business Communicators.

(PeopleTalk Summer 2015)