Brilliant HR people can be held back by operating in siloed teams
I know lots of brilliant HR people, but they’re held back by operating in siloed teams.
Each team works hard — but rarely together.
The impact? Sub-optimal decisions, mixed messages to the business, and missed opportunities to add real business value.
- Typical symptoms?
HRBPs focused on their stakeholders and losing team connection. - CoEs focused on their specialism and not asking for the input of the HRBP.
- Shared Services being treated like an admin function.
It isn’t intentional. But the pain points get worse as the expectations of business leaders rise, for example:
- ROI of CoE interventions is lost because they don’t land well in the business and leaders don’t engage with, support or implement them
- HRBPs find themselves unable to meet the needs of their stakeholders because of lack of support from their own colleagues
- The potential to leverage efficiencies and people analytics is lost because of lack of clarity about the role of Shared Services.
The first step in our work with clients is, quite simply, getting HR leaders together to become clear about the kind of HR function they want to be.
Spoiler alert! They always want to be aligned, effective, credible, influential and delivering impact, and they know that they can only achieve that when they’re working together and clear about how they add value.
Once that’s out in the open, barriers come down and collaboration goes up. We then can work on:
- Finding out what the business wants from HR
- Getting the whole HR team lined up behind that
- Reviewing how HR want to operate and organise themselves
- Relationships and teamwork.
For more about this, I had great feedback from my recent webinar ‘How to build a united, business-led HR team‘ or contact me to arrange a chat.
Once everyone is on the same page, they can also tackle the issues that hold them back. Which issues impact your own HR team and get in the way of working as one united team?
