Features of the Digital HR Leader (Part 1)

Nowadays, in the midst of innovation transformation, the objectives of HR leaders have remained fairly constant to attract, grow, develop, reward, and retain the talent needed to achieve business goals. HR leaders are being called on to bring new skills and capabilities to meet the challenges of a digital, global, and dynamic business environment.

Strategic thinking

In the digital age of knowledge workers, quality of an organization’s talent will increasingly become a key differentiator. Furthermore, research indicates that those organizations who approach the acquisition and development of talent in a strategic way, achieve better business results.

Curious, quick-to-learn, and agile

This is due to its process and compliance focus, historically, the HR function has not commonly been associated with curiosity and agility. As the pace of technologic change and innovation grows exponentially, the solutions that work today will be ineffective tomorrow.

HR leaders will need to bring curiosity to their roles, identifying trends that could present challenges or opportunities, and actively ask and do research. In an increasingly fast-moving environment, those who are curious and quick to learn will gain advantage.

Agility will be another key differentiator, as HR leaders will increasingly recognize that just as product and delivery cycles accelerate, so HR solution lifecycles must accelerate.

Enabling, not controlling

With the advent of the Cloud, the predominant HR voice was one of concern about data security, about process control, and about governance issues. The arrival of social media tools was greeted by HR with a flurry of policies and controls to manage employee behaviour in these new environments. But technology can be a great enabler, those HR leaders who focus less on the control issues (although guidelines will be needed), and more on the opportunities the technology provides will better serve their organizations.

Willing to take risks

This approach will not serve HR leaders well in an environment where safe, known solutions are unlikely to be found, and if they are, they will be yesterday’s solutions, and as such will fail to yield competitive advantage.

Future focused

When the pace of change is slow, it is often sufficient to be reactive and responsive. But in our fast-paced digital world, those HR leaders who are unremittingly future focused will be best placed to meet the talent challenges they face.

HR leaders will increasingly be called upon to play a key role in identifying future opportunities, in assessing likely future strategies of key competitors, and of equipping their own organizations to complete well in tomorrow’s marketplace. To nurture this sort of future focus, HR leaders will have to cultivate and maintain good networks to obtain input from diverse sources, as well as rely on their own intuition and judgment to spot which future trends are the most important.

More to discuss on Digital HR Leader Features, stay tuned and find out more in our next article.