Who Will Step Forward and Lead?
Even today, HR roles and functions tend to operate in relative isolation from one another. HR generalists tend to handle the day-to-day people issues, and HR specialists tend to the day-to-day of running their functions - recruiting, training, leadership development, compensation, and benefits. Sometimes one or the other “rolls out” a program intended to plug a gap or improve a process. But mostly HR generalists provide general guidance to business leaders and, from time to time, ask for some service from a specialist function. All this despite a decade or more of concepts like “strategic HR”!
I think a major reason why this is so is because few senior HR leaders know how to lead and organize people to produce holistic, integrated talent strategies tightly connected to business strategies through a holistic, integrated talent assessment and workforce planning process.
Yet, right in the middle of all of the issues about “talent” and “human capital” is the person in charge of learning & development whether titled as CLO or not. The people in this role are in a unique position to pull together their HR colleagues and fashion a holistic, integrated process with which they can engage business leaders to attend to their current and future talent. Why should the L&D people take on this challenge? The reason is that it is likely the most significant learning challenge their organizations face, learning how to operationalize talent strategies robust enough to execute business strategies, year-on-year.
A place I like to go for fresh thinking on this topic is http://www.newlearningplaybook.com/ hosted by Jeanne Meister.
Tags: Assessment, CLO, Holistic Talent Plan, Human Capital, Integration, Strategic HR, Talent