An 18-month in-depth research project was the first step in a personal and professional journey.

This is a summary of the motives and methodology behind the research, and what its findings tell us about how HR can align itself to a business, so its ‘foot soldiers’ can work as a fellow leader alongside the senior management team, rather than as simply purveyors of HR best practice.

Experienced HR professionals know their skill and contribution is about more than legal compliance, policies and employee incentives. The future for HR holds many challenges. Understanding the impact of the changing business landscape is crucial to a bespoke HR strategy and action plan.

The HR profession has been at the heart of my career for over 15 years. As well as delivering one-to-one coaching, I embrace my own personal development, and one day my coach asked me what will be my career's legacy.

This made me realise I wanted to devise a way to address the barriers experienced by me and my HR peers. I wanted to ‘give something back’ to the profession I love to ensure it is fit for purpose for the global business landscape ahead, by helping to develop a deeper understanding of the skills the HR professional of tomorrow needs to influence the business agenda, and give them time to think about their role.

My frustration is that HR hasn’t effectively aligned itself within a business. All too often HR specialists are forced to think about the process rather than understand the business and how and why HR should be at its strategy's forefront to help achieve success.

And by this I don’t mean this can be tackled by simply having HR at the boardroom table; it is more about making a significant impact as a leader, on the leadership team within a business, and in turn, the business itself. If achieved, HR will be the debate within the boardroom.

So, the idea for a study into the perceptions, behaviours, views, misunderstandings, and value of HR was borne.

I began by inviting an elite group of HR professionals, commentators, experts and managing directors from business to help develop my initial thinking using a range of methods. The main forum was a focus group where we debated and challenged what makes an HR leader in today’s commercial environment.

The discussions were fascinating, and prompted the next stage of the research – interviewing other groups and individuals from HR, business owners and leaders.

I also investigated views from around the world on personal development models for professionals and specifically HR practitioners, to uncover global thinking on aligning HR to a business’ strategy.

The research's final phase involved interviews with some of my personal HR heroes, including experts from academia – HR facilitator and coach, TEDx / International speaker on the future of work, Adviser to the CIPD on Social Media and Chartered CIPD Member Perry Timms; and Professor Paul Sparrow, author of ‘Do we need HR: repositioning people management for success’.

Distinct roles

Together the findings helped identify very distinct roles that require time to reflect, develop and support, to become more effective and efficient:

• The newly qualified HR practitioner
• The business partner
• The HR Director

Interrelated quadrants

Alongside identifying the personal capabilities a HR person needs to become more efficient, I created a model of four key interrelated quadrants to define them:

• Commercial Judgement
• Cultural Leverage
• Collaborative Relationships
• Politics

Together, these unearthed why – and how – the thinking on the impact and consequences of decision making in HR has to undergo an evolution.

We now have the previously missing platform from which to assist senior managers and CEOs to better understand why they need to embrace HR and embed it into business strategy.

Building on these drivers, a tangible set of outcomes emerged. I used the intelligence and insights to develop what I believe is a unique HR leadership framework, that reflects and addresses the personal capabilities a HR person needs to be a highly effective and efficient ambassador of the future.

In this way, we can ensure HR professionals have the skills to be resilient, tenacious, courageous and agile as a HR leader, by focusing on the knowledge and application of the four drivers and associated skills, through discussion, embracing deep reflection, and application back in the workplace. 

Trends and findings

Experienced HR professionals know the real benefits to a business of embedding its HR team and strategies into operational and strategic plans.

However, the research found the vast majority struggle to get their MD’s ear, and repeatedly face barriers to engaging the organisation’s senior management on the strategic input available from HR’s creativity.

Furthermore, senior HRs admit their organisation is too focussed on policies and feel current business strategy practices and thinking don’t get close to maximising the true potential of HR’s ROI and benefits to the bottom line.

HR is about understanding ‘impact and consequences’ from the employee and employer’s perspective. At a strategic and operational level, decisions need to be thought through in the context of the organisation, the employer and employees. Our research confirmed that HR is often used to just look at a business, or more often an employee perspective, or provide the tools to simply follow process.

Ask yourself, how many HR people are invited or proactively get involved in the numbers of the business – to understand a business, its temperature and rhythm has to be measured and understood – from the Business Plan to the financials. But we found this rarely happens.

It's vital to understand what employees need from the business, today and tomorrow – in my view employee engagement is the differentiator, so to work, this level of understanding has to be relevant, robust, investigative, thorough.

The research provides a framework to enable HR professionals at all levels to reflect and continue to evolve the commercial knowledge, language and tools to communicate and negotiate with their senior management team, who need to support the benefits a scoping HR strategy can deliver, from brand development, to recruitment.

The most experienced HR professionals need the courage, tenacity, resilience and, for some, the skills and confidence, to engage and get their organisation to listen, (and not just through coaching and thinking) by guiding on the benefits of aligning HR to business strategies.

To do this they need ‘time to think’ about themselves, their role, their development, in a way that is directly related to four key areas for HR and also for business.

Time to think

Dr Howard G Awbery, founder and MD of Awbery, says: "By combining the research analysis and findings, Jane has identified the capabilities a HR professional needs to develop into the most effective practitioner at the highest, strategic level. She has developed a programme that will equip HR professionals with the skills to achieve this – IC2.

"The IC2 programme creates ‘time to think’ in a supportive environment amongst fellow HR professionals.

"It tackles the barriers identified in the research, to ensure the continued evolution of HR, to enable its professionals to successfully embed HR in every organisation’s business strategies. It gives them the tools to have space and time to think about their roles, and how working with the most senior management, they can revolutionise HR’s impact on decision making in the workplace."

Perry Timms comments: "I share Jane's passion to enhance the impact professional people and organisational development can have in business. Anything that gives HR practitioners more competence and confidence will help improve work and working lives for us all, and I look forward to seeing the impact this programme will have.