https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=shVdDjNht74

https://soundcloud.com/user-600361765/hr-works-e35-how-can-hr-truly-impact-the-c-suite-a-qa-
with-dave-ulrich

A Q&A with Dave Ulrich: How Can HR Truly Impact the C-Suite?

What is a strategic positioned

1. know the business – how do we make money

2. know strategy of the business – how do we differentiate ourselves how do we let
3. know your stakeholders – customers, investors, communities
4. know the business context – what's happening within our industry

We did something called HR outside in – strategic HR is looking in a mirror and doing HR practices.
Outside in HR is looking through the mirror as if it's a window to the external world and building HR
to win in the marketplace if you want to play in that space.

Need for the HR to exact to be a paradox navigator –

Good HR professionals who drive business results navigate paradox. Paradox is so fun we see it
everywhere – should a company be long term or short term? Yes. Should Company be top-down or
bottom-up? Yes. Should we be global or local? Yes. Should we be centralized or decentralized? Yes.
Should we focus on individuals or teams? Yes. Almost everything we find is that business is a series
of choices – should we zoom out or zoom in? should we be divergent or convergent? The greatest
impact on business that HR people can make is when they navigate those two guardrails what that
means is if my company tends to be too convergent everybody walks like talks like thinks alike we
got to push divergence. On the other hand if my company is to diverge and everybody does their
own thing we have to be convergent. If my business executives zoom out they focus on the future
they see what's next but they don't zoom in I got a focus on zooming in. If we zoom in but don't
zoom out I got to do the other and we found that the best HR professional know how to create
tension without contention, disagreement without being disagreeable and they navigate those
paradoxes never solving them that's the view of navigation. That’s the key to good leadership.

Three Strategic Enablers

 Culture and change champion – somebody who can make things happen, manage change
 Human Capital Curator – you don't just manage human capital you curate, nurture &
develop it
  Total rewards steward – both financial & financial rewards – you're the steward of the well-
being – economically and socially – of the employee

Foundation enablers
 Compliance manager
 Technology and Social Media
 Analytics and Data Integration – using data to make decisions

HR Analytics –

Here's our data when we did analytics on analytics when we studied – does the HR person's ability to
do analytics have an impact on the business results? Our answer was no. By the way that just shocks
people well but it's analytics it must be good. Here's the insight. If analytics don't focus on the
business they're wrong. Lots of HR analytics are around HR scorecards – it's HR for HR, they're
around HR interventions – let's do this to do better hiring. Unless the analytics start with the
business – who are our customers, why are they buying our product, what's our cycle time for
innovation, who are investors, why are they buying our stock or reducing our cost of capital. Unless
you start with those outcomes analytics becomes another false hope for HR. Our analytics of
analytics is in the HR field. Today analytics is not having business impact. By the way when I say that
to the folks who study analytics they get really angry well I'm an analytics person I must be right. No.
You got what statistics called type-three error – you're measuring HR scorecards, you're measuring
interventions of HR, you're not starting with business and showing how HR will drive business.

HR as Guardians of Ethics –

I get so frustrated with HR people who don't become the guardians of that ethical process. Now you
don't you know you don't stand up in a meeting say oh you can't say that but in your private
discussions you go back to that executive and say – you're judging yourself by your intent others are
judging you by your behaviour. When you told that story you probably intended to be funny and in
fact people laughed but let me tell you how it's going to come across and you're going to undermine
yourself. I wish our HR people could get that part of their personal credibility part of their success In
building the right culture is being willing to confront people that their intent is not reflected by what
they do. By the way if the leader has bad intent and he or she is a racist or sexist then even more
cause to stand up and be right. Was that an individual and if so let's root out that individual or was
that endemic to the culture has that become a pattern. You can change individuals you also have to
change the patterns.

HR – from 1987 to 2016

We have seven rounds of data since 1987. On these competencies that Steve's been talking about
here is the most shocking thing we just put together a couple weeks ago – the HR profession since
1987 through 2016 has improved dramatically on every confidence on a five-point scale; we've gone
up over one full point one full point on knowing the business; we've got a 0.7 on changed; 0.6 on
managing HR. We and HR have made incredible progress as a profession and we can document it.
It's time for us to start you know we don't we're not done yet – improvement is always in continuous
and continual and we've got to get better but we should stop bemoaning how bad we are. We are
doing great stuff as an HR profession.