Understanding how to manage Human Resources will be key to your success as a business leader.
Believe it or not, many business people with great business strategies, plans, and products fail
because they do not fully grasp the importance of human resource management.
Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM said you can get capital and erect buildings, but it takes people to build a business.
Managers use a lot of words to describe how valuable people are to their organizations.
Human resources, human capital, intellectual assets, and talent all imply that people play a vital role in business success.
No matter what part of the business you're dealing with,
whether it's figuring out where to put a new plant, designing a new product,
formulating your strategy, or developing a cost structure, every single business issue ultimately becomes a people issue.
At the heart of it you've got to have people with the right skills, opportunities, and motivation
to face those challenges and achieve business success.
This is the essence of human resource management: to manage people in a way that drives business success.
To drive success, human resource management involves a wide variety of activities including analyzing
a company's competitive environment and designing jobs so the company's strategy can be successfully implemented.
This in turn requires selecting the right people, developing their skills
to meet strategic objectives, and motivating them toward a common goal. So if you enjoy bringing
people together for a common purpose, coaching and training people to succeed in an organizational setting,
and making sure people are properly rewarded and recognized for the work they do,
then Human Resource Management may be the career for you.
To provide additional insight on whether HR management is the career for you,
we've gone out to ask some experienced managers questions about why they chose HR as a career.
We got some pretty interesting answers. What do you love about HR?
I love the variety in HR. I am an HR generalist which means I work in organizational talent in
training and hiring and recruiting. I work in organizational structure,
helping to reorganize companies and restructure them or bring in companies that are being acquired.
It's actually an interesting field, I had a great mentor once that talked about
why he went into the field of OB and HR after doing undergraduate work in finance.
And something resonated really well with me. Basically it said that no matter what business or organizational issue
you're dealing with, that could be entering a new market, that could be designing a product,
that could be solving some analytical challenge or technical challenge, every single business
issue or organizational issue ultimately becomes a people issue. At the heart of it you've got to have
someone with the right skills, capabilities to face that challenge, and so it's how do you find
those people, how do you get them into the right roles, how do you motivate them,
how do you help manage and unleash their performance, but ultimately every business issue is a people issue.
And the one function HR and OB is one that touches every aspect related to people.
There are so many reasons why I love the field of Human Resources.
And it's actually hard to sort of figure it out and if I go back to what drew me into the field of Human Resources it's really sports.
I was a big jock in school I played three sports in high school, I played two in college and everything
I loved about sports I find is translatable to the world of organizations, such as organizing to win,
just as if as when you're on a team and you've got to try to figure out what's the right way
that we can organize the skills and talents we have to achieve our goal, the same thing is true in an organization.
When you're in organization development and human resources, you're getting a
chance to figure out how do we assemble the people and the resources and the assets we have to win in
the markets that we want to win in, to put the best people in the best roles and amplify their skills and their strengths.
And so I found over the years the more I got into human resources, the more I loved it
because everything I loved about sports is what I loved about human resources.
Why would you want to work in HR? I knew ever since I was an undergrad that I wanted to go into consulting
and I knew I really wanted to go into consulting around leadership development, executive coaching,
organizational behavior, and organizational design because in my experience having had jobs through
high school and through college, I knew most of the challenges in an organization were with the people.
You know organizations have figured out how to make products
they haven't figured out how to rally people around a cause.
Of course HR is a fun and exciting area to work in,
but what will you get from studying organizational behavior and human resource management in school?
What skills will you develop to help effectively manage people and drive business success?
What do I get from studying HR?
I think the advantage is that we've actually been trained with people who have spent time in this field,
leaders in the field, thought leaders in the field of Human Resources, organizational development,
organizational design, you have a chance then to put those theories into practice when you go out into the field.
The great thing about OB HR coursework is it will make anybody in any profession more successful.
In fact we've done a study at General Mills of the things that derail a person's career
and it's usually the OB HR competencies that are the great derailers.
So even if I'm planning to be a finance director or a marketing VP,
if I learn about the HR skills: communication, collaboration, innovation, understanding the organization,
being empathetic and listening to the organization, all those things that HR has
kind of an upper hand in, it will make anybody's career more successful.
What is the most useful skill you learn from studying HR?
So for me it hasn't so been a skill that's been most useful for me in my work, it's been a mindset.
And the reason I say that is because the mindset that people have when they're dealing with a talent
is that if people aren't doing something right, it's a motivation issue and
you know these lazy people or I have the wrong people in the job.
But a lot of times they're mechanisms set up within an organization, so the structure can influence,
processes can influence why people aren't successful. But they'll look at people as
you know shame on them they're not doing the right thing. But the really really interesting
and fascinating thing and the mind that I think you have to have is to look at
an organization as a system and look at how things are influencing that system because
so many times you'll figure out that it's that system, it's not the individual that's creating
the outcome and if you can change the system the individual within the system will change as well.
The theory and skills you'll obtain while studying organizational behavior and human resource management are pretty valuable.
They'll help you think more holistically, to push against the status quo,
and question existing assumptions. They'll help you examine organizations as systems
and be able to change dysfunctional systems to ensure that people and organizations are aligned towards success.
But such competencies are not only important for HR managers, they are vital for
all people working in organizations. How do you know if HR is the right career for you?
Probably the test question that annoys me most when I interview people is they want to get into OB HR
because they like people. That's that's helpful, but that's not really what drives the field,
it's really the intersection of the strategy the business is taking and your ability to influence that,
the degree of effectives you have in terms of building systems and processes that enable strategy,
and then your ability to translate that in meaningful terms to the broader employee population.
That's really the art of OB HR, so if you have an interest in that intersection of
strategy process and people, that's where it all comes together. So it's much broader than liking
people, and again I've been at enough campuses around the world where a lot of HR people will
tribute their, their need to get into HR because they like people. It helps, but that's not a
differentiator, the differentiator's be able to connect strategy, process,
systems with people. And a very effective, in a very efficient way that drives value in the business.
If you're thinking about it, I would say ask yourself if you are comfortable in both
partnership situations and team situations where you can help build on the momentum of a team,
but also if you're comfortable in pushing back and dealing with confrontation and interjecting
ideas or disagreements in places where it's not as comfortable. If you can be successful
in both of those or be comfortable in both those you'll do great in HR. The other would
be business partnership. Are you comfortable not just as a people person, not just as an amiable,
but as someone who can again understand the whole business and understand how
the organizational aspect fits into making an entire business situation become more successful.