Three. Ian Ziskin

of the steps needed to make it happen and to overcome resistance along the way.

      Advice and Partnership refers to the ability that you and your team members have to provide trusted coaching and counsel to the operating, line, and/or other functional leaders you support. It implies knowing and speaking the language of the business, but perhaps more importantly, it is heavily reliant on the ability to ask good questions first – the kinds of questions that cause others to make good decisions and tough choices about business and people issues.

      Driving Performance refers to the comprehensive knowledge that you and your team have to utilize the full array of tools that influence business performance. These tools might include building a performance culture, ensuring appropriate incentives and consequences are in place to influence the right behaviors, maximizing the value of compensation and benefits-related costs, reducing headcount, increasing management spans of control, minimizing the number of organizational layers, and/or redesigning organizations to be more effective and less costly.

      Board Relationships refers to how much you and your team understand and contribute to the HR matters that board members care about. Increasingly, boards are paying attention to executive compensation at the CEO and leadership team level; succession planning and talent management for the CEO role, leadership team roles, and high potential and other pivotal roles; diversity and inclusion initiatives and progress; workforce engagement scores and actions; employee safety and well-being; environmental sustainability efforts and their contribution to employment value propositions or brands; and human capital dashboards supported by people analytics. Depending on your role and level in the organization, you may find yourself spending more time with board members personally on these and related matters, or you may be working indirectly on projects and initiatives that are of increasing interest to board members – even if you are not personally spending time with the board.

      HR Excellence refers to the degree to which you and your team are focusing on assessing whether the HR organization is up to the task of leading and addressing the human capital issues and challenges your organization is facing. It suggests a willingness and ability to look in the mirror and ask yourself: “Do we have the talent, processes, operating model, and credibility we need in HR to do what the company needs of us, and if not, what are we doing about it?”

      Future of HR refers to the ability you and your team have to see around corners, to understand the changing nature of the workforce, workplace, and work itself – and the implications these trends have on how HR work, HR people, HR technology, and HR organizations will have to change to remain relevant and add value in the future.

      The above HR capabilities are certainly not all-encompassing, nor are they intended to be. They are instead meant to highlight the things I see the very best HR people paying attention to and addressing. The other things you are doing, such as employee relations, high volume hiring, policy interpretation, shared services, and more, are all extremely important and foundational to high-quality HR work. Generally speaking, however, they are not going to differentiate you, except negatively. In other words, doing them well is table stakes. Doing them poorly generally means you won’t be around long enough to worry about the other stuff anyway.

      HR Leader Development Triangle

With these capabilities and definitions as a foundation, I would like to encourage you to expand your perspective about HR leader development. Think of it as a triangle – a balancing act between three critical dimensions of development: What?, Who?, and When? (Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2 HR Leader Development Triangle

      What? involves the areas of content knowledge and capabilities that we have already been discussing in this chapter, so I won’t belabor them other than to reinforce the importance of these dimensions as foundational elements of HR leader development. They are so important that we will address each one in more depth in subsequent chapters of the book. But they are simply not enough to ensure well-rounded and well-prepared HR leaders.

      Who? includes a critically important and often under-emphasized element of HR leader development, the people with whom you spend time, and how that distribution of people and time should change substantially as you move along in your HR career.

      As you think about who you spend time with now, and who you might need to spend time with in the future to be even more effective, consider the following five premises, and ask yourself: “Do any of these sound like me?”

      1. Most HR people don’t spend enough time on HR-related public policy issues at the local, state, federal, and/or global levels, nor do they influence public policy in ways that would be beneficial to their employees, companies, industries, or to the HR profession.

      2. Most HR people understand very little about what other companies do, both within and outside of their own industries.

      3. Most HR people are so inwardly focused that they spend very little time with their peers in other companies to network, share best practices, learn new ways of doing things, and/or advance the HR profession.

      4. Most HR people over-rely on spending time within the HR function to the detriment of working effectively up and across the rest of the organization outside HR.

      5. Most HR people are spread too thin, try to be everywhere for everyone, and are uncomfortable differentiating their time to spend higher quality time with specific employees or talent segments that are in the highest priority pivotal roles.

      If you see yourself in any or all of the above five premises, you may have some work to do to change the way you are spending your time, and with whom. Generally speaking, the most effective HR leaders I know are very good at balancing the internal demands of their day-to-day jobs with spending more time outside to gain a broader, more external perspective. That’s where the HR profession is heading, so if you want to distinguish yourself relative to others, here’s your chance.