Why More Executives Should Consider Becoming CHRO

If you’re a business leader looking for an opportunity to have real impact on your company — and position yourself for the top job — which career path is best? CFO? COO? CMO? What if we told you that the CHRO role might be the best job you could ever have, with real opportunity for reshaping an organization? That the CHRO role, although at first it may look career limiting, can have more impact than any other position reporting to the CEO?

That’s precisely what we found. We interviewed search professionals, CEOs, and CHROs with nontraditional backgrounds to find out what happens when business leaders outside of HR move into the role. We confirmed that CEOs are well aware of the importance of talent, rating finding the best human capital as a top challenge, but that business leaders without an HR background can be reluctant to take the CHRO role, because of their negative perception of HR, their fear that the role won’t have an impact, and their concerns about lacking necessary functional knowledge.

Lucia Luce Quinn is Chief People Officer at Forrester Research. Earlier in her career, she left a position as SVP of business development and emerging businesses to join Boston Scientific in a senior line job. Upon arriving, she flatly refused the CEO’s offer of the CHRO role. He had to ask her four more times, including once on a conference call with the whole executive team, before she finally relented.

Phil Johnston, an executive search leader at Spencer Stuart, confirms that Quinn’s initial reaction wasn’t unusual: “When a CEO asks a business leader to run HR, the most frequent response is ‘What did I do wrong?’ It’s not seen as a desirable role; it’s seen as punishment. Of course, they haven’t had a chance to think it through, but that’s the first reaction.”

Yet business leaders who took the CHRO role, including Quinn, report it is the most impactful role in their career, and many would not accept an organizational leadership position that didn’t come with the CHRO role.

And many CEOs we talked to, like Owen Mahoney of Nexon, agree that the CHRO is one of the most strategic roles someone could have: “Businesses grow or die based on the quality of their people, so the human resource executive role is arguably the most strategic in the company. If I weren’t the CEO now, I’d probably want to be the CHRO.”

According to those we interviewed, there are four reasons why “outsiders,” as opposed to those with a traditional HR background, succeed in the role:

Their focus on business results, not only people outcomes. Nontraditional CHROs see outcomes like engagement or retention as paths to business outcomes, while traditional HR might view such goals as ultimate outcomes. Jacqueline Reses, a former private equity investor who became Yahoo’s CHRO, said, “We should drive HR like a product organization that finds the most critical use cases of our customers and then builds products to solve those needs. We shouldn’t execute programs that don’t serve the business. A lot of HR professionals think in terms of the functions activities, such as, ‘We need to change the organization structure’ or ‘We need to run a training program’; I think in terms of the business outcome I want to get to, then figure out how I’m going to get there.”

Their role in pushing fellow leaders, not just supporting or serving them. Second, nontraditional CHROs see their role as pushing leaders, but they have often found that traditional HR thinks in term of partnering with or serving leaders. As Reses said, “I look at every leader and decide if they are right for the job. I push leaders. I drive them to higher performance.” When Quinn accepted the CHRO role at Boston Scientific, her HR organization planned to implement a program even though they knew it probably would not work. Why? Because organizational leaders wanted it. Quinn insisted that her HR team devise a program they believed would work, and she pushed organization leaders to adopt HR’s better alternative. If you would be the kind of CHRO who thinks in terms of driving success instead of supporting leaders, then you could have a huge impact across the organization.

Their desire to embrace opportunity, not only reduce risk. Third, nontraditional CHROs embrace risks to generate opportunity where traditional HR might exclusively focus on reducing risk. These leaders don’t just tolerate risk; they hunger for it, in the form of important challenges where risk comes with potential upside opportunity. Rick Jensen, who left a big job in marketing to become SVP, Chief Talent Officer at Intuit, recalled a lesson he learned in marketing: “Fall in love with the problem.” Traditional HR leaders might feel compelled to offer conservative solutions, rather than risk trying an unconventional approach to unknotting a problem.

Zabeen Hirji, CHRO at the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), grew up in retail banking and operations management roles before moving into HR. She says she applies a little self-test: “If I’m not presenting ideas that get turned down by the top team, I know I am playing it too safe. My job is to push the envelope.” One recent example of taking on risk she could easily have avoided was setting up a company-wide online “jam” to involve employees in defining RBC’s purpose and resetting its values. The live event could have failed in many ways; the safe thing to do would have been to back off the project. However, Hirji’s eye was on the potential upside, so she went ahead with the jam. Employees responded enthusiastically (there were over 20,000 participants), but the lesson is not that she got a big win — it’s that she was willing to risk failing.

The personality that embraces risk is best illustrated by Reses. She changed industries from private equity investing to technology; she changed geographies by moving from New York to San Francisco; and she changed functions from M&A and investing to HR. Interestingly, Reses would argue that as an investor she was the ultimate HR lead, as she helped CEOs invest in the right resources and people to build a business. If you find that this kind of challenge fills you with excitement, then a cross-functional leap into HR could be a great career move.

Their application of diverse business skills to the role. Fourth, nontraditional CHROs approach HR with skills and frameworks that reflect a variety of business disciplines, while traditional HR leaders might rely too exclusively on function-specific HR disciplines. “I was surprised by how much I personally enjoyed running the HR function versus taking on a CFO role,” said Reses. “HR was a position where I had a view across the biggest challenges of everyone’s business — leadership issues and how to allocate people across teams. It was vehicle for changing the growth trajectory of the company.”

Quinn said, “I don’t love telling people I’m in HR, but I love leading HR. Many leaders experience HR as administrators who can be barriers rather than enablers. I discovered that HR doesn’t need to be like that, and as CHRO I use every skill I ever learned.”

Our interviews, not surprisingly, also suggest that transformational HR is not the sole province of nontraditional HR leaders. It can be achieved by those with traditional HR backgrounds, too, with the right view of results, relationships with fellow leaders, attitudes toward risk and opportunity, and diverse business skills.

HR, like all professions, requires specialized talent and knowledge. Nontraditional CHROs emphasized that their transformational role was only possible with the support of HR leaders with deep traditional knowledge and capability.

Often underutilized and overlooked as a lever for business impact, a shift into the CHRO role — done correctly — can be a great career move.

By John Boudreau - professor and research director at USC’s Marshall School of Business and Center for Effective Organizations / Peter Navin - proven leader in high-growth, rapidly changing global organizations and passionate about reshaping the health care experience in his role as Grand Rounds’ SVP of Employee Experience / David Creelman - CEO of Creelman Research. 

Employee Burnout is a Problem with the Company not the Person

Employee burnout is a common phenomenon, but it is one that companies tend to treat as a talent management or personal issue rather than a broader organizational challenge. That’s a mistake.

The psychological and physical problems of burned-out employees, which cost an estimated $125 billion to $190 billion a year in healthcare spending in the U.S., are just the most obvious impacts. The true cost to business can be far greater, thanks to low productivity across organizations, high turnover, and the loss of the most capable talent. Executives need to own up to their role in creating the workplace stress that leads to burnout—heavy workloads, job insecurity, and frustrating work routines that include too many meetings and far too little time for creative work. Once executives confront the problem at an organizational level, they can use organizational measures to address it.

In our book Time, Talent and Energy, we note that when employees aren’t as productive as they could be, it’s usually the organization, not its employees, that is to blame. The same is true for employee burnout. When we looked inside companies with high burnout rates, we saw three common culprits: excessive collaboration, weak time management disciplines, and a tendency to overload the most capable with too much work. These forces not only rob employees of time to concentrate on completing complex tasks or for idea generation, they also crunch the downtime that is necessary for restoration. Here’s how leaders can address them.

Excessive collaboration

Excessive collaboration is a common ailment in organizations with too many decision makers and too many decision-making nodes. It manifests itself in endless rounds of meetings and conference calls to ensure that every stakeholder is heard and aligned. Many corporate cultures require collaboration far beyond what is needed to get the job done. Together, these structural and cultural factors lead to fragmented calendars and even fragmented hours during the day. Our research found that senior executives now receive 200 or more emails per day. The average frontline supervisor devotes about eight hours each week (a full business day) to sending, reading and answering e-communications—many of which shouldn’t have been sent to or answered by those managers.

Burnout is also driven by the always-on digital workplace, too many priorities, and the expectation that employees can use their digital tools to multitask and power through their workloads. Multitasking turns out to be exhausting and counterproductive as we switch back and forth between tasks. The costs of context switching are well documented: switching to a new task while still in the middle of another increases the time it takes you to finish both tasks by 25%. A Microsoft study found that it takes people an average of 15 minutes to return to an important project after an e-mail interruption.

Companies can begin to address the collaboration overload problem by adjusting organizational structures and routines. One easy step is to look at the number of nodes in the organization. These are intersections in the organizational matrix where a decision maker sits. A proliferation of nodes is a sign of unnecessary organizational complexity, and nodes act as organizational speedbumps, slowing down the action and stealing organizational time and energy.

Companies can also systematically examine how people go about their work. You can, for example, zero-base meeting calendars to determine which meetings are really necessary, how frequently they should be scheduled, how long they last and who really needs to attend. You can also look at how you staff teams. Instead of isolating star players by distributing them across teams, companies can often get better results by putting the high-energy, high-achieving players together on the same squad and having them tackle the highest priority work.

In addition to formal organizational changes, leaders can reduce burnout and raise enterprise productivity through softer interventions. For example, by adopting agile principles, leaders can motivate and energize teams, and give individual team members a way to own the results. With Agile approaches, teams focus on fewer, more critical activities. Initiative backlogs are used to set priorities, and the team reprioritizes the list whenever they add new tasks. This provides a mechanism for sustained focus on the most important priorities and constant pruning of less important ones. Projects are time-boxed and focused so that there is more doing and less energy-draining process.

Executives can also work on culture and coaching. Leaders can help establish new cultural norms around time and make clear that everyone’s time is a precious resource.

Weak time-management disciplines

In most large organizations today, the demand for collaboration has significantly outpaced the development of tools, disciplines and organizational norms to manage it. Most often, employees are left on their own to figure out how to manage their time in ways that will reduce stress and burnout. They have limited ability to fight a corporate culture in which overwork is the norm and even celebrated. And few employees have the power—or temerity—to call off unnecessary meetings.

But company leaders can do something. The first step is to get a handle on the problem. While executives like to measure the benefits of collaboration, few have measured the costs. But there are useful tools to measure how employee time is spent and how that affects burnout and organizational productivity. Ryan Fuller, the cofounder of a workplace analytics start-up acquired by Microsoft, notes that executives often simply do not know how much time employees spend on activities that contribute to enterprise productivity, nor do they know how much time is lost or spent on less productive activities. His company’s product is now marketed as Microsoft Workplace Analytics and provides one way to estimate how employee time is spent.

Using data from such tools, you can map the places in your organizations where too much time is spent in meetings, emails, or online collaboration. With this information you can target changes in specific groups and functions to reduce the organizational drag that drains productivity and leads to burnout. Our data suggest that most executives have an opportunity to liberate at least 20% of their employees’ time by bringing greater discipline to time management. Equally important, doing so gives employees back control over their calendars. We find that one of the greatest sources of organizational energy is giving employees a sense of autonomy. It pays to give people back control of their days. It also helps to avoid micromanaging, which is another contributor to stress.

Overloading of the most capable

Employee workloads have increased in many organizations in which hiring has not matched growth; companies overestimate how much can be accomplished with digital productivity tools and rarely check to see if their assumptions are correct. The overload problem is compounded for companies because the best people are the ones whose knowledge is most in demand and who are often the biggest victims of collaboration overload. In one company we studied, the average manager was losing one day a week to email and other electronic communications and two days a week to meetings. The highly talented managers will lose even more time to collaboration as their overwork earns them more responsibility and an even larger workload.

The same workplace analytic tools that can measure how much employee time is lost to unproductive activities can also measure the excess demands on the time of the best managers, enabling their bosses to redesign workflows or take other steps to avoid overload and burnout.

Everyone knows the human toll of burnout. Unchecked organizational norms insidiously create the conditions for burnout—but leaders can change them to make burnout less likely. Giving people back the time to do work that drives the company’s success will pay huge dividends by raising productivity, increasing productive output and reducing burnout. Everybody wins.

By Eric Garton, partner in Bain & Company’s Chicago office and leader of the firm’s Global Organization practice. He is coauthor of Time, Talent, Energy: Overcome Organizational Drag and Unleash Your Team’s Productive Power (HBR Press, March 2017).

The Shocking Cost of Workplace Conflicts

A large number of my clients contact me when faced with employee conflict they are trying to mitigate after it has already reached the boiling point.  Employee relations is one of the most important facets to focus on not only as a tool for productivity but also employee development.

Inc. Magazine published a Infographic providing a snapshot of the detriment workplace conflict can be in a fun comic way.

Let me know what you think !

Summary:

As an entrepreneur, you no doubt have plenty of experience dealing with conflict in the workplace, but you're probably unaware of exactly how much it costs your company.  

Amazingly, office workers spend more than two and a half hours per week trying to resolve conflict, which translates into $359 billion in losses for U.S. companies every year, according to task management software firm AtTask.

The infographic HERE explains the most common causes for workplace conflicts, many of which can be easily avoided simply by improving communication. 

5 Ways to Help Get Employees to Think More Strategically

When asked to select the leadership behavior most critical to their organizations’ future success, executives chose strategic thinking 97 percent of the time, according to a large scale global research study by the Management Research Group, and strategic thinkers have been found to be among the most highly effective leaders.

Executives rated a strategic approach to leadership as ten times more important to the perception of effectiveness over other attributes including innovation, persuasion, communication or results orientation.

You need to think systematically

Strategic thinkers take a broad, long-range approach to problem-solving and decision-making that involves objective analysis, thinking ahead, and planning. That means being able to think in multiple time frames, identifying what needs to be accomplished over time and what has to happen now to get there.

It also means thinking systemically – identifying the impact of decisions on all areas of the organization, as well as suppliers and customers.

The high priority senior leaders place on strategic thinking reinforces the importance of building this mindset into professional development programs.

How to foster more strategic thinking

Here are several ways you can foster more strategic thinking with your team:

1. Be generous with information. Encourage employees to set aside time to think strategically and provide information on your market, industry, customers, competitors, and emerging technologies. One of the key prerequisites of strategic leadership is having relevant and broad business information that helps employees elevate their thinking beyond the day-to-day, and then sharing the results of their thinking and efforts throughout the organization.
2. Develop a mentor program. One of the most effective ways to develop strategic skills is to be mentored by someone who is highly strategic. The ideal mentor is someone who is widely known for their ability to keep people focused on strategic objectives and the impact of their actions.
3. Create a philosophy. Communicate a well-articulated philosophy, a mission statement, and achievable goals throughout the company. Employees need to understand the broader organizational strategy in order to stay focused and incorporate the strategy into their own plans and objectives.
4. Reward thinking, not reaction. Reward people for evidence of thinking, not just reacting. Wherever possible, organizational culture should encourage anticipating opportunities and avoiding problems, and discourage crisis management. Reward your employees for being able to quickly generate several solutions to a given problem and identifying the solution with the greatest long-term benefit to the organization.
5. Ask better questions. Promote a future perspective for employees by incorporating it into training and development programs; teach people what strategic thinking is and encourage them to ask “why” and “when” questions. When they suggest a course of action, ask them to consider what underlying strategic goal this action serves, and what the impact will be on internal and external stakeholders. Consistently asking these two questions whenever action is considered will go a long way towards developing strategic thinkers.

Developing a strategic approach often makes the difference between an average and an exceptional outcome. Instill the skill in your best employees and managers first, and they’ll help pass it along to other natural leaders within your company. 

The post originally appeared on OCTanner.com

Michelle M. Smith is the Vice President of Business Development at Salt Lake City-based OC Tanner, an international appreciation company that helps more than 6,000 clients worldwide appreciate people who do great work through consulting, training, and creating customized award and recognition programs. Michelle is a renowned speaker, writer, consultant and trusted advisor to Fortune 500 companies and governments, and President Emeritus of the Incentive Marketing Association.

Crash Course on Employment Law for Employers

We found this very cool and very affordable seminar for Employers, hosted by the                                     Greenwich Village Chelsea Chamber of Commerce.

The seminar aims to provide insight for employers on the topics such as

•  New York Earned Sick Time Act
•  1099 or W2? The Proper Classification of Independent Contractors vs. Employees
•  The Necessity of an Employment Handbook
•  Social Media Policies

For more information follow the link above.  And if you happen to attend, let us know how it went !