Essential HR Skills & Capabilities

In Human Resources


Essential HR Skills & Capabilities - read the full article about 2021 HR trends, Human Resources and Recruitment, Staffing, Payroll from Tom Haak on Qualified.One
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Tom Haak
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what are the crucial skills for a modern hr professional in the workplace it now seems you need everything from commercial awareness influencing skills through to data analytics so lets discover what are the key competencies you need to develop to be the full stack hr professional welcome to talking hr trends with natal and tom im natale dank and im tom hack and we explore the latest hot topics and business challenges impacting the people side of organizations stick around to the end for our practical top tip and if you like this discussion please subscribe okay tom were going to explore what makes the modern hr professional and look at the key competencies someone thats trying to get into this job would need to develop and also how could someone start to progress their career in hr through to being a hr leader we should be a little bit careful not to talk too much about dhr professional because i think dhr professional does not exist but there are of course some basic competency skills you expect of every hr professional one is a real good interest and knowledge you could even say passion for the organization and the clients of the organization secondly its about methodology yes you should know your methodology basics and your analytics basics thats important in every job three agile methodologies and that thats your area but the combination of agile and design thinking i think every hr professional needs that in her or his basket four a good understanding of technology technology is a driver of of of the transformation and you should not stand on the sides of your technology thats thats not my area no you should be able to understand technology and and be able to ask the right questions and when you say knowing the client you mean sort of the the end customer of an organization absolutely the end clients are not the internal client not but the extern editor the external client because often the distance between hr and the final clients of the organization is too far away and that can result in too inward looking too much looking at hr and not considering for everything hey but what are the benefits for the client why are we doing this i often talk about this idea of hr needs to help people be great in their job so then you see value flow through the business to that end customer and so and we need to understand that value stream dont we that absolutely float through the business yeah and then i think theres a bit around this sort of organizational design and development so getting a sense of how do you start to build organizations uh for the you know for the different business context in which you operate but a lot of this links into this term the full stack and this comes from software development where if someone can work across both the front end and back end of software development theyre considered the full stack professional so i was wondering if you took this concept into the world of hr people and culture does this mean perhaps the end of this old split that we had of the generalist which was sort of more front of house you know consulting working with the business and then the specialist which was considered years ago more back of house you know you did the designing and um the developing that would then be sort of implemented out through the the journalists roles i have some objection against the term the full stack because that that kind of you know yeah you if you dont have the full stack well you you cant be a good hr professional and i dont know so even yeah even with a little bit of the stack you can do a good job but i think its bose so you need to know all kinds of different disciplines but it also helps if you have debts because just being a generalist generalist well that doesnt help either and then you get to your t profile basically saying well and you know many elements of the stack but you also have depths and because with dabs you can add a lot of value to the organization yeah and do you see that those depths are the ones that we have known for a while in hr what what are sort of some of the key ones that come to mind for you for example adapts can be operational excellence not knowing how to really serve what service means to people in the organization so efficiency service hospitality that could be one of those elements another one is really being kind of empathic understanding people being able to relate people being able to coach people that could be one of those elements an other one is really the the the the yeah you could say the architectural skills depth and architecture because i know my tools but i can really create something fantastic with that i would like to now move to where what the competencies and the skills the behaviors that a hr professional needs to start to be mindful of to develop ideally strategically over time if they want to become a hr leader and you yourself has been a hr director two things are most important one is back to really being very close to the organization and the business understanding what do we want where do we want to go because then you can start to think about how can we contribute from a people organization perspective secondly as i call them often hr architects its knowing your material yeah you should have an in-depth knowledge of all the possible building blocks of an impactful hr strategy and you yeah and architect knows all those materials and knows what works what does not work so thats the second element yeah the third element is probably because if you have both of that you are still probably not able to really have impact because you have to be able to influence the organization yes you have to able be able to influence your team thats probably the easiest part you have to be able to influence the wide people who are connected to the organization and you have to work with the people in charge the top of the organization influence them yeah have impact there stand for what you yeah what you want and thats often a difficult part that leads to the forest element that is you have to also to be independent you have to be independent because if youre independent then you can really add value and if you make yourself too dependent for example of your boss or your bosses yeah then you become vulnerable and you you cannot be totally effective uh the advocate for the for the employee in the in the organization is that what you mean yeah the advocate for the employee but also the advocate for the profession for example so well we have learned some things in for example social sciences some things dont work yeah yeah so so you you have to stand also for your profession but advocate of the people is becoming more and more important and being also you could say that uh weve talked about that earlier as well that the element of ethical leadership saying well some things that we have to contribute what are we contributing to make the world a better place how do we make sure the lives of people in our organization and the lives of people outside the organization are are becoming better so its its a huge role super important role so tom talked about the t shape and that will be our practical tip how do you start to develop your t shape specifically in hr so to remember the horizontal is your general capability and then the vertical is your deep specialism lets look at the horizontal first can i get you to identify one general capability that you already have it might be good commercial awareness it could be good influencing skills it might be good at consulting so recognize one general capability that you already have now lets recognize a specialism so this could be something like learning and development or talent and recruitment so identify that deep specialism now lets think about developing this t shape and think of one general capability you would like to develop further so this might be agile tools and mindset this might be building a product mindset this might be actually i think i need to get better at building my network and building relationships what is a general capability thats really going to take your skills and your impact to the next level and really start to move you forward as a great modern hr professional thanks for your time today this was talking hr trends with natal and tom if you find this discussion valuable please subscribe thank you

Tom Haak: Essential HR Skills & Capabilities - Human Resources