In conjunction with the release of our Strategic HR Partnerships Best Practices Report, APQC is conducting a series of interviews with thought leaders on the topic of strategic HR business partners. This second post in the series features highlights from my interview with William Tincup, SPHR, CEO of HR consultancy Tincup & Co. and contributor to Fistful of Talent, HRTechEurope, and HRExaminer.
APQC: Why does the strategic HR business partner topic matter?
William Tincup: HR as a profession is only about 30-to-40 years old. So what we’re really saying with the HR business partner topic is that HR’s evolving. HR started with tactical transactions and compliance with employment laws. HR still has to adhere to those, but furthering the business objectives is more important. We’re not saying that the tactical things don’t matter. They do. But if they get done and we’re out of alignment with the business goals, then we’ve failed. The HR business partner model basically says: “We’re not going to be the speed bump any more. At the end of the day, we’re going to be working with you not against you.” Now we’re working with the other functions, the other line managers, department managers, and the rest of the executive team to further the business interest, and, oh by the way, we’re taking care of all the things that need to be taken care of from a competence perspective in HR.
APQC: Why aren't all HR functions already operating as strategic business partners?
William Tincup: Time is the biggest barrier. Sometimes you get people that really hate HR that would have you believe that it’s incompetence—that HR doesn’t have the intellectual capacity or HR is lazy. That is not true. The truth is: HR is doing tactical things because that’s what the business wanted it to do 20 years ago, 10 years ago, and five years ago. It’s only recently that the business has determined that HR, people, and human talent are actually really important.
And thus, HR really needs to be doing strategic initiatives. We’re a little late in recognizing that the business wants us to be there. We want to be there. Yet we’ve got all of this tactical responsibility that we have to figure out a way to still get done–potentially outsource it, potentially give it to other departments. I am not talking about all of it. I’m talking about breaking it all up into little bitty pieces and saying: is it really critical that we own this thing? In doing so, we get back that time and then put that time, money, and energy into being strategic.
APQC: What are 3 actions that an HR professional can take to foster strategic HR business partnerships?
William Tincup: 1) Learn statistics. Learn math. And, understand the quantitative side of HR. HR very much runs via intuition. It’s not really running on science. Intuitively HR’s good. Intuitively who should we hire? Intuitively who’s a bad manager? Intuitively who’s our best employee? Intuitively they know. Anecdotally they know. Scientifically, they don’t. And, it’s because they don’t have a command of math. They don’t have a command of stats. They don’t have a command of quantitative analysis. So the first thing you need to do is fall in love with stats. You want to get better at this? Go take a stats class. After you take a stats class, you start to understand that you can use both. You can use intuition. We are not going to say that you can never use intuition. That’s foolish. Always use intuition. Just base it on math. That’s the first thing I would do.
2) The second thing I would do is I’d learn coding. Take some coding classes. Have an understanding—rather than just being a consumer of HR technology or recruiting technology—actually understand what the 0’s and 1’s really do—basic stuff. I am not asking anybody to go program in Java. What I am asking people to do is to understand how code works so that they understand how data works. Because everything we do in HR is all about data. That’s why the concept of big data scares HR because at its core HR is not good at data. We don’t understand data. The second thing I would do outside of math and stats is I would just fall in love with technology. You’ve got to find a way because software runs the planet and it runs HR. With us or without us, it runs HR. So get on that train.
3) The third thing I’d do is network with people who are already strategic. If you’re in that tactical land but you aspire to be strategic, find a group of people that already are strategic. Go have a beer with them. Go have coffee with them. Go break bread with them. Do whatever you’ve got to do to find out how they got out of tactical and what they’re learning in strategic.
I think all too often HR leaves the job at the job. And so they are not getting better because they don’t do a great job of networking and being out there amongst a peer group. And, this is very specific: I want you to be in a peer group of people that are really above you. So it’s about going out there and having a beer with a bunch that have already made it, especially from tactics to strategy and doing whatever you’ve got to do to build a network of those people. Conversationally you’re going to learn and some of them are going to help you pull yourself up to that place.
APQC: What are 3 actions that an HR leader can take to position his or her function to operate as a strategic partner to the business?
William Tincup: 1) When interacting with other professionals in the organization, get rid of the words “I feel” or “I think.” Replace them with “the data says.” Get other people to understand that we’re looking at spreadsheets. We’re looking at the data and the data is telling us this. We’ll see that’s a much different conversation with the CEO than “I believe,” “I think,” “I feel.” We’ve got to get rid of those words. Because what happens is if you talk about the data, and say “the data shows this,” then the CEO will ask you the question: “What’s your take?”
2) The second thing is nail retention of top talent no matter what it takes. The most important thing in HR is the retention of top talent. Our ability to retain top talent is the game. You do programmatically whatever it takes to keep top talent, because 80 percent of the value of a firm comes from 20 percent of the employee base. Your ability in HR to keep the 20 percent keeps the machine running. Everything else doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you have a great culture, if you can’t retain your top talent. If you can retain top talent, everyone in the organization will perceive you as a hero. And so that’s the game.
3) Now the third and last thing is that there needs to be a pursuit to root out bad managers. People don’t quit companies. They quit bad managers. So, our job in HR is to find the bad managers, invest in them, train them, retrain them and/or fire them. Get rid of them. We have to go on a hunt and the hunt has to be for bad managers. And not just allowing a bad manager to fester because tying back to the second thing, if we have top talent underneath that manager we’re not going to be able to keep that top talent. So, we need to find the bad managers and again let’s invest in them. Let’s train them. Let’s retrain them. Let’s do whatever it takes to get them on plan and if that doesn’t work, fire them with quickness. If we allow bad managers, that’s on us.
William Tincup, SPHR, is the CEO of HR consultancy Tincup & Co. William is one of the country’s leading thinkers on social media application for human resources, an expert on adoption of HR technology and fine marketer. William has been blogging about HR related issues since 2007. He’s a contributor to Fistful of Talent, HRTechEurope and HRExaminer and also co-hosts a daily HR podcast called DriveThruHR. Tweet him @williamtincup and check him out on Facebook and LinkedIn. Not up to speed in the social media game? Reach out via email.