And You Thought HR Was Easy- Are You a Competent HR Professional?

I was reading an excert from The HR Scorecard: Linking People, Strategy, and Performance, by Brian Becker, Mark Huselid and David Ulrich and thought it would be instructive to pass on some of this information. The excert was Chapter 7, Competencies for HR Professionals. One thing is clear it is not easy to be an HR professional!

From a comprehensive study they determined that there are five competency domains that are necessary. These are, in order of importance:

1. Knowing the business
2. Mastering HR practices
3. Managing culture
4. Orchestrating change
5. Demonstrating personal credibility

A bit about each.

Knowing the Business

They state that HR professionals add value to an organization when they understand how the business operates. Understanding this allows them to adapt HR and organizational activities to changing business conditions. Only by knowing the financial, strategic, technological and organizational capabilities of your organization can you play a valuable role in any strategic discussion. Further, business acumen requires knowledge, if not direct operational experience, in functional areas such as marketing, finance, strategy, technology and sales, in addition to HR. My experience has been that not enough HR people know this and make no effort to learn it.

Mastering HR Practices

This means you have to "know your stuff." According to the authors "Knowing and being able to deliver state-of-the-art, innovative HR practices builds these professionals' credibility and earns them respect from the rest of the organization."

Managing Culture

This is being the "keeper of the culture" as they say. Understand, deliver on it, preserve it, reflect it.

Orchestrating Change

According to the authors an "HR professional must demonstrate the following abilities: the ability to diagnose problems, build relationships with clients, articulate a vision, set a leadership agenda, solve problems, and implement goals. This competency involves knowledge of change processes, skills as change agents and abilities to deliver change."

Demonstrating Personal Credibility

This is "walking the walk and talking the talk." You have to be credible both in and outside of the organization. HR professionals that violate company policy, such as getting sued for sexual harassment, will not have any credibility, regardless of how much HR knowledge they may have. (Think Elliot Spitzer here.)

So, as you can see, this is not any easy job. I dare you to print this off and take it to your boss and ask if you are fulfilling this role and demonstrate these competencies. If not, you know what your improvement plan needs to look like.

Thinking About Your HR Thinking: The Tool of Metacognition

Rob May, writer of the Businesspundit blog wrote about a personal subject for him that has nothing to do with HR. But in his blog he mentions the concept of METACOGNITION. He states "Metacognition occurs when you think about your thinking. It means that instead of just analyzing evidence at face value, you start to ask questions about why you favor certain facts over others. You think about whether or not you have emotions, cognitive biases, peer pressures, or other things that are affecting your thought processes. You ask yourself if you would think something different if the roles were reversed, if you had a better day, if you had not had such a bad experience last time."

His definition got me to thinking of metacognition as a great tool for the human resources professional. It is a very good thing sometimes to question why you think the way you do. Is your thinking grounded in fact or just what you believe to be fact? Do you have underlying biases about employees, applicants, groups, backgrounds, etc. that should be questioned? Do you do things because the peer pressure (or boss pressure) is there to do it that way?

If you are an effective behavioral interviewer you are already somewhat trained to do this in that you are trained to question your "gut" feeling on someone. Why not extend this to all of the rest of your HR work?

So plan to go through the exercise of metacognition and question your HR practices. Ask yourself:

• Why do we do things the way we do here?
• Why do we hire whom we hire?
• Do I have biases that get acted on in our HR processes?
• How would I see what we do if I were on the outside looking in?

Try it out and get a fresh perspective. Oh, by the way, having someone come in from the outside can be helpful in asking some of those tough questions if you can't do it yourself.