*Today I’m thinking about people who are leading in HR and Mike Grindell came to mind.  Mike is the EVP and Chief Administrative Officer at 22squared and serves on the board of SHRM Atlanta (Board Chair 2011-2012)  and will be hosting the SHRM national conference this summer.  I’d like to share a guest post he did for me a couple years ago.   Be sure to read to the end so you can connect with Mike on Twitter.

Lately I have been thinking about what makes organizations and people successful – my own company, girls soccer teams, boards, communities, etc.  As some one who spent a number of years in Human Resources, and is helping shape the direction of SHRM-Atlanta – I wonder what role HR leaders play in today’s new environment:

I believe it ultimately comes down to a straight forward equation:

Better HR leaders and efforts create great leaders, great leaders create better companies, great companies create great communities in which to live and work.

So, how does HR get there?

A few suggestions/questions:

Be a student and expert in your business/area of expertise

• allocate time to read about your organization, its category, how money/success is made, competitors – do you truly have time blocked on your calendar?

Be a killer business person

• Know the P&L better than the CFO, track the equities markets, track competitors, visit operations of your organization and those of competitors – does your time allocation reflect being a killer business person?

Engage in the development of the HR discipline

• SHRM (national and local), HRLF, conferences, follow experts – are you regularly involved with your discipline?

Coach, mentor, develop

• There are mentoring organizations everywhere – they are always looking for mentors – are you a member, do you allocate time every month to offer advice, counsel, provide real feedback, a supportive comment?

Many HR leaders manage the largest budget items in any organizations P&L – what are you doing to drive different results with those budgets?

• Salaries, benefits, training dollars, and other budgets often represent the largest set of investment/expense dollars for any organization – are you bringing innovation and new ways to invest and drive results?

Accept that the rules have changed forever

• HR is not about programs and processes anymore (yes, there will be recruiting, compensation, benefits, talent management, etc.) – it is about driving sustainable business results that matter – you must be able to answer the question „we are doing xxxx in order to drive yyyy results“
• and, I am convinced the decades long practices of driving engagement through compensation, rewards, talent practices have changed – it is simply not a given or assumed anymore that salary increases, affordable benefits, great training and other efforts are part of the employment deal – do you have a point of view and a business agenda you are advancing at your organization in the context of today’s new realities?

Are you nourishing your own soul, spirit, health?

• I truly believe each of us must flourish as an individual before we can help an organization be healthy
• Are you making time for health, for learning, for love, for culture, for laughter?  Are you a more fulfilled person today than last year?  Are having the life you planned?

Offer your point of view and thoughts – its an interesting and challenging world we find ourselves operating in every day.  The HR discipline must develop its own great leaders so we can drive the results required.

So, what do you think?  Let us know in the comments.

Thanks to Mike for this thoughtful post.  Mike is a senior change, strategy, and operations executive focused on driving business results through organizational capabilities and by building processes and operations that matter. Serving in a variety of executive and management roles, Mike has a history of leading change management and process improvement initiatives that drive sustainable business results.  As EVP, Chief Administrative Officer at 22squared, he leads Finance, IT, Human Resources, Office Services, Campaign Management, Real Estate, Media Buying and is helping shape the agencies Digital strategy.

Previously he lead his own change and leadership consultancy, and was a 16 year executive of The Coca-Cola Company holding a variety of executive roles focused on building organizational capabilities and driving talent management initiatives. Prior to Coca-Cola, Mike held positions of increasing responsibility with Citigroup and Federated Department Stores, respectively.

and Quality Care for Children.

You can find Mike at:

Twitter @mgrindell

www.22squared.com

Care to wager a guess how I feel about presentations given from behind a podium?  <insert sarcasm here>

There is something  about the podium that makes me feel disconnected from the person.  It hides their body language, it is often something they grip with great fervor.   When I attend an event of any kind and the speaker hides behind a podium as he or she reads a PowerPoint presentation to me I cannot help but be disconnected.

I spoke at Talent Net Live earlier this week and one of the best parts of the event for me was that no one stood behind the podium.  It was on stage, available should anyone like to lean on it, set a drink on it or if they needed to hide from the audience.  But, no one needed it.  Every speaker used the stage in a different way.  Bruce Morton gave the opening keynote and walked the stage like a pro.  Jason Seiden, the closing keynote, started his “Profersonal” presentation seated on a red couch.  The panelists in various sessions were seated talk show style.  Paul Smith stood at both the front of the room and at the back.  It was unique to see so many great speakers use the space given to them in the best possible way- to engage with their audience.

Whether you are someone who regularly gives presentations or someone who dreads it, I challenge you to shake up the way you present.  Walk around, use the space, break away from the dreaded podium.  And, check out events like Talent Net Live to see how the pros do it!

Thanks to Craig Fisher (@Fishdogs) the #TNL social recruiting forum  features big names in recruiting and social media covering the hottest tips and topics of the day for job seekers, social media enthusiasts, and talent professionals. Craig and his planning team did a fantastic job!

Occasionally other commitments get in the way of writing as much as I’d like to on my blog. Whether it’s my day job, family commitments, travel or other projects, I am constantly grabbing scraps of paper to write down ideas for this site.  While I have many in various stages of completion, none were quite ready for “prime time” today.

Instead, I thought I’d hightlight several other writers who have recent articles I’ve enjoyed. I hope you’ll click through and give them a read and leave some feedback.  They are people like you and I, people who like to contribute to the HR and Recruiting profession and who are passionate about sharing with you.  Enjoy!

• Sirona Says: How to Add the Social Recruiting Layer Across Your Recruitment Process
• Welcome to the Occupation: TNL and Alternative Life Styles
• Steve Boese: When the Roomba Grows Up
• HR Fishbowl: TNL “Cover it Live” and Building Social Influence (a panel I was on)
• Stillman Says: Tattoo Placement and Re0imagining the Body (Guest post by Shauna Moerke)

I’m attending the Senior HR Executive Conference today and live blogging a panel session focused on enabling innovation.  Led by Kent Greenes from The Conference Board, three global HR leaders are sharing their organization’s strategy on how to produce innovative products and results.

Archana Singh from AMD, Monique Matheson from Nike, Inc. and Brenda Dennis from Cisco Systems Inc. are all able to articulate the vision and approach for innovation in their organization, how their cultures support the innovative ideas and the type of diverse talent needed to come up with innovative ideas that are actionable.

I like the example that Cisco Systems has to drive innovative results.  Cisco no longer thinks about diversity and inclusion, they have changed the focus to inclusion and collaboration.  By doing this as a business imperative, it’s brought tighter alignment between HR and the other lines of the business.  The challenge is barriers like language differences or cultural differences.

One way they drive innovation is by hand selecting teams to work on innovative ideas.  They:

• Choose a team with diverse experiences from diverse business units.
• Put them on teams that work together for 6 weeks- 6 months.
• These team members are supposed to spend 60% of their time on the new project, although Brenda shared the reality is they spend far more time on these initiatives.
• They recognize and reward ideas that drive 90- 180 day results.

One drawback I hear though is when they are  selecting the team members, they have a fairly tight set of criteria of who can participate.  For example, you must be on the promotion track.  This eliminates a “popularity contest” in their opinion but I think it eliminates more than that.  While it is beneficial to have criteria, I see the risk of alienating some of the best ideas that may come from the staff level or from people who have deep history with Cicso but may have never been on the promotion track.

I want to do an experiment today and it will only take a moment of your time.  I would like to collect comments on what is the one piece of advice you would share with a global CHRO who is evaluating the benefits of using social tools.

So, please share your one tip or piece of advice in the comments, then tweet or share this with other professionals who use social media.  This is crowdsourcing at it’s best!