have the right kind of people, but then you also have to figure
out what is going to escalate their performance. What is going
to trigger them to want to reach new heights and go to different
places in their own profession, either to develop personally or to
be even better, faster, quicker, slicker?
William Tincup: So, you feel that in the future, human resources is
going to get much more granular and much less general?
JC: I do, because as we start to drill down into exactly what it
takes to manage an organization, we’re going to find that so
many things that we focus on today are going to be less valuable
at work. What we’ll see is a whole lot of folks who are trained in
specifics, such as benefits management, payroll, performance
management. The softer side of human resources is going to
move back to management. It will become less a place where
employees go, because when employees are working in a flexible
environment, a lot of the workplace issues go away. Human
resources will be very much operational, the same as finance
or accounting or scheduling or whatever else is going on in the
organization. It will become more of a support to the business
of the organization. I don’t want to say it will become less about
compliance, because we’re always going to have to comply
with the rules, which are going to be less about punishment for
noncompliance.
NR: You talked about human resources becoming part of the
business function of the organization. Do you see more HR
professionals becoming CEOs of organizations in the future?
JC: I know of only one person who has successfully moved from a
CHRO position to a CEO position. So, even though they have done
very well, that is not going to be their focus. If it’s a sales-centered
organization, the person who is more likely to move into the CEO
position is a senior VP of sales. If it’s a services or operations-type
organization, the person who is most likely to move into it is going
to be the person responsible for those services or operational
functions. The only way that I can see an HR person moving into
a CEO role is if they move out of the support function and into an
HR-centric organization or one that provides either services or
products at the HR stage.
WT: What will your perfect HR team or talent management or
HCM [human capital management] team look like in the future?
Tell us how you would put that together if you had all the
resources in the world.
JC: I have actually had the opportunity to live the dream at one
point in my life. I had an incredible rock-star HR department.
They were phenomenal. They worked well together, and that was
the key. They all knew their own particular function, and probably
what was paramount was that we all liked each other. We did not
socialize together, but when there was an organizational reason
for us to be together over an extended period of time, we did that
flawlessly. Everybody knew his or her job. Everybody respected
each other. If I’m building a team in the future, my mantra is
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going to be ‘Less is more.’ I don’t ever want an HR organization
to get a reputation for being the HR police. So, for me, it’s going
to be about making functions and HR protocol easy to follow. If
you put a whole lot of stuff out there, it makes it very difficult for
managers to do their jobs. They will just choose not do it, which
becomes very frustrating for people who feel as if they have a
need to have information. I don’t want to collect data just for the
purpose of being able to regurgitate it in a different form.
BW: I’ve gone on record and said that the most important skills
that human resources needs to come to grips with in the future is
stats, actually having command of statistics and learning how to
code, learning what the ones and zeros mean and how to create
them. What skills do we need to be developing right now?
JC: Business-related skills. I have absolutely no use for an HR
person who tells me that they got into human resources because
they’re good with people. That’s not our function. Our function is
to create a workplace that is as clear as possible about the goal of
the organization, whatever it is — to drive revenue through sales
or through generation of sources or developing new products,
whatever it is. What can our HR department do to make sure that
happens? Help to recruit or create awesome recruiting strategies
that will drive talent into the organization. Simplify systems;
create new methods of getting the same job done, perhaps even
more efficiently or more cost effectively. Every HR department
has to be focused on the organization and get the focus off
compliance. We can’t forget about compliance, but that’s a given.
We don’t have to constantly remind our employees, ‘Don’t steal;
it’s against the law to steal.’ There are all kinds of regulations
that govern what we do. They