“Making HR a Driver of Results™” is how we describe what HR Leadership will do for our clients and prospects. However, the experience required to implement HR Leadership is not so easy to find. If an organization wants to implement HR Leadership, it has two choices: go through the difficult and costly process of hiring a highly experienced HR professional or outsource the function to a firm that embraces the HR Leadership concept.

To move HR from its tactical, cost-control, compliance-focused past and make it a driver of results requires individuals with both a breadth and depth of HR experience. Their competencies would have to include technical knowledge, intent, planning, careful implementation and measurement. Most of all, this new breed of HR executive will have to maintain a strategic focus on five critical areas:

·      Culture and communication – develop employees who understand company’s mission and their role in making that a reality;

·      Right staffing, retention and succession – know what talent is needed now and for the future;

·      Total rewards – develop meaningful rewards that drive results;

·      Performance management – collaborate to achieve outcomes; and

·      Professional development – challenge personal growth to link with business outcomes.

If the findings of key industry research organizations, such as Watson Wyatt Worldwide and The Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies at Cornell University are true, then the strategic implementation of these five activities, supported with all the usual required functions involved in tactical or “core HR”, can and does lead to deliberate, sustainable and measurable results in staff retention, customer satisfaction, growth, and profit. CEOs of organizations, both large and small, are beginning to make this connection between HR and results. The next step is finding the HR professionals who can hard-wire that connection into an organization’s day-to-day performance.