The key to HR Relevance: Getting Feedback "Fat Controller style"

If there is one thing not lost on my kids it's that they are never allowed to give me the Fat Controller compliment - at least not publicly. When Thomas the Tank did something praiseworthy, The Fat Controller (his name, not my description) could give the beaming young engine the ultimate compliment which was: "Thomas, you're a really useful engine". Of course I love to know my kids love me. Once, I got that I'm "emotionally available", and a few times that I inspired them to try something at least once. Yet call me pedantic but I don't want to be loved for what I give them, cook for them and certainly not for what I buy them. Occasionally it's great to hear that I'm a good cook and I think my eldest son genuinely does love me (partly) for my schnitzel. But at the risk of sounding like the Elephant Man ("I am not an animal. I am a human being!") - I want our relationship and what we all mean to each other to go beyond any culinary expertise. In other words, I am more than just my schnitzel.

When it comes to work though and for those of us in enabling roles, our seniority on an organisation chart, the salary we command, the resumé capital we may think we have because we've done a swanky course at a swanky institution (dare I say possibly somewhere like Harvard) counts for naught if those who look to us for real value view us as irrelevant, even obstructive or worst of all, a waste of money.

Now I've seen some extraordinary arrogance in "the line". In some organisations, people are subconsciously categorised as the "hunter gatherers" or the "hangers on" and you guessed it, we're the hangers on. While I may also be an organisational psychologist, I identify strongly with my 'tribe' of HR/OD/change management community members. Indeed many of them are my clients, not just line executives. So this is a conversation about "we", not "you". For us to be seen as valuable, we have to give value and then delight our customers or strategic partners (you choose) by adding value they didn't even anticipate.

Perhaps once too often line managers have shared with me their acute frustration with "our HR department". Similarly HR has often complained bitterly to me about failure of the line to consult with them early in the change journey and resents the request to don one's cape, pick up one's wand and magic away someone else's mess. You know as well as I the signs and symptoms of an organisation in which HR/OD is losing the battle for relevance. And sadly sometimes, we don't even realise we're at war. Conversely, I get to work with members of the HR/OD fraternity like the Executive - People Strategy I met with last week who are as good as they get. She inspired me to write this post. Of course it helps if you are aided and abetted by your CEO who knows what you can do, gives you space and money to do it and remembers to acknowledge, even celebrate the contribution when it's done but we've got to do something worth acknowledging if we want them to keep knocking on our door and giving us high impact, high value work to do.

So in no particular order these are some of the things I think really count and hopefully I haven't already offended my tribe such that you've all stopped reading:

1.   Make your priority supporting and executing the enabling of strategy by building organisational capability. To do that we need to know what knowledge, skills, aptitudes/attitudes are needed, how much exists and where and how to close the gap. Then we have to fight for the resources to do it.

2.   Develop understanding of the actual business, the products, the competitive context, the impending threats/challenges and the economics of what the business does. Read a book, hire a biz coach, take a CFO to lunch and study the annual reports. Spend time observing and taking notes at the Ops Centre, show wonder and interest in what they do for no reason other than they deserve to see you are interested but tactically it means you acquire an ability to talk the language critical to the foundations of trust and rapport. And don't do it once. Schedule regular "shopfloor" moments as a matter of discipline. Deciding that with your training and preferences, their thing is "so not your thing" or you could never hope to understand it, sounds feeble. Of course knowing when you need to shut up when they're talking to the control tower is essential! And even if you love chocolate, expect to feel a little seedy at the overwhelming smell at the factory after a while.

3.   Understand that what got you the job may be somewhat to very different from what enables you to keep it and flourish in it. We may not get a crack at some of the best HR/OD jobs unless we have amassed good resumé capital by doing some choice professional development and acquiring great experience but ultimately the line will respect us for what we know and do, more than what we have studied and what we have done elsewhere. I cringed this morning when a client told me his new Clinical Director has only been there five minutes and is busy telling people how everything in the business should be run and all the great successes she's had in the past. They'll put out a contract on her within weeks if she's not careful. And he'd told her on her first day how much change there had been and how fragile the staff were feeling!

4.   Develop your consultancy/facilitation skills. There is pure gold in knowing how to ask questions that can discriminate the wheat from the chaff, the white noise distractors from the most salient issues. Are we deft in asking the best question at the right time in the right way? So, adroit questions coupled with the ability to synthesise information and observations to help others make sense of what is going on in their patch and what might be done about it. These are the most powerful ways I have seen for us to add value. It is maladaptive to the extreme if we prematurely sell solutions or get sucked into dependent relationships in which clients expect us to come up with all the answers and/or blame us when things they did don't work.

5.   Manage expectations ruthlessly then over deliver. The same sorts of things external consultants do when they're touting for business - "Just saw this article in BRW and thought you may find it useful, Mary" - can work just as well and happens more easily inside the business as they're more likely to open your email! The worst criticisms I see of HR are the time it took for us to come back to clients desperate to progress something in the business on, say, some complaint or ER issue and felt like they were left for dead because HR is busy dealing with a fire that's already burning and not the smoke our client can see on the horizon. Clients bemoan the fact that they just started getting traction on a difficult people issue and then lost momentum because they couldn't get clarification on a key issue for weeks/months or got two pieces of conflicting advice from different HR personnel that unnerved them, served to paralyse them and make them lose trust and confidence. I know this is so obvious and basic, but do we shoot our proverbial selves in the foot? Is doing the opposite in an intentional way as natural as breathing?

6.   Build relationship credits everywhere you go as strategic influencers par excellence. Firstly because every person regardless of their role deserves to be treated well. But you may need to call in some favours when a mountain needs to be moved. The discretion to help you in an emergency when that parcel absolutely has to get there overnight (remember that ad?) helps you do the extraordinary for clients when they really need it. I sat on a recruitment panel last year and the client told me it would take up to 6 weeks before all the requisite paperwork/contracts would be finalised for the candidates. Would anyone other than internal candidates already there getting paid be likely to wait 6 weeks to know for sure the new job was squared away?

7.   Model the hunger for development we're supposed to care about. Do we have mentors and coaches? Do we engage in 5 hours a week dedicated learning like Bill Gates and Oprah? Do we integrate work and home life well and engage in health-promoting strategies or eat at our desks and curse the salad dressing (or caramel milkshake) that found its way into the keyboard?

8.   Prioritise the work that alleviates pain for the line. Nothing fills them with more dread that the courageous conversation they are being asked to have with the employee who has already lodged multiple grievances, has an open WorkCover claim, cannot have a conversation with their boss without a third party present, is a prodigious note-taker and may decide to tape the meeting discreetly with their mobile phone and an app. If you can provide ethical guidance around policies and procedures, coach to mitigate risk, build confidence, co-design conversational scripts and 'realplay' them and generally have the well-meaning boss's back, they will possibly love you more than members of their own family (appropriately, of course).

This brings us full circle because all the bullets I have just listed are all ways to build organisational capability which I've suggested up front must be our ultimate goal.

9.   And finally, let's get our own house in order. No-one is perfect. We can all have bad days and certain styles and personalities may grate on us. But nothing breeds more cynicism than having outsiders see us, the "people people" engaging in infighting, destructive organisational politics, workplace bullying, refusal to collaborate and any behaviour that reflects low emotional intelligence.

No-one wants to be the bank manager who doesn't want to admit it to anyone at a BBQ on weekends. Just as we know better than anyone that line managers are ultimately the custodians of culture, we, the HR/OD fraternity are responsible for our own reputations. A consistent, integrated and unified approach to be the best we can be, collaborating, adopting a growth mindset, getting important messages straight and talking up our own colleagues will only bring credit to all of us and ensure we get to make the difference that drew us to the profession in the first place.