Many South African organisations adopted (or plan to adopt) the strategic HR competency model as described in the fifth round of the Human Resource Competency Study (HRCS) in 2007 on the Society for Human Resources Management’s website (www.hrm.org) and the book “HR Competencies: Mastery at the intersection of people and business” by Ulrich and others in 2008. The aim of this article is to highlight ineffective HR transformation as one of the major barriers in applying these competencies.

The Human Resource Competency Study (HRCS) has been conducted five times over the past twenty years and has provided the most comprehensive global empirical review of the HR profession. Over the lifespan of the study over 40,000 HR professionals and their line management associates have been involved. With the help of regional partners, the 2007 round of the HR Competency Study involved the participation of over 10,000 HR professionals and their line management. Six major categories or domains of HR competencies emerged from the fifth round of the Human Resource Competency Study (HRCS). The Competency Model is depicted below:

The competency domains are described as follows (quoted verbatim from the HRCS Executive Summary, 2007, www.shrm.org):

• Credible Activist. The HR professional is both credible (respected, admired, listened to) and active (offers a point of view, takes a position, challenges assumptions). Some have called this HR with an attitude.
• Culture and Change Steward. The HR professional recognizes, articulates, and helps shape a company’s culture. Culture is a pattern of activities more than a single event. Ideally this culture starts with clarity around external customer expectations (firm identity or brand), and then translates these expectations into internal employee and organization behaviour. As stewards of culture, HR professionals respect the past culture and also can help to shape a new culture. They coach managers in how their actions reflect and drive culture; they weave the cultural standards into HR practices and processes; and they make culture real to employees.
• Talent Manager / Organizational Designer.  The HR professional masters theory, research, and practice in both talent management and organization design. Talent management focuses on how individuals enter, move up, across, or out of the organization. Organization design focuses on the capabilities an organization has that are embedded in the structure, processes, and policies that shape how an organization works.
• Strategy Architect. The HR professional has a vision for how the organization can win in the future and plays an active part in the establishment of the overall strategy to deliver on this vision. This incorporates recognizing business trends and their impact on the business, being able to forecast potential obstacles to success, and facilitating the process of gaining strategic clarity. The HR professional also contributes to the building of the overall strategy by linking the internal organization to external customer expectations. This linkage helps make customer-driven business strategies real to the employees of the company.
• Operational Executor. The HR professional executes the operational aspects of managing people and organizations. Policies need to be drafted, adapted, and implemented. Employees also have many administrative needs (e.g., to be paid, relocated, hired, trained, etc.) HR professionals ensure that these basic needs are efficiently dealt with through technology, shared services, and/or outsourcing. This operational work of HR ensures credibility if executed flawlessly and grounded in the consistent application of policies.
• Business Ally. The HR professional contributes to the success of the business. Businesses succeed by setting goals and objectives that allow them to respond to external conditions. HR professionals contribute to the success of a business by knowing the social context or setting in which their business operates. They also know how the business makes money, which we call the value chain of the business (who customers are, why they buy the company’s products or services). And, they have a base understanding of the parts of the business (finance, marketing, R&D, engineering) so that they can help the business organize to make money.

The implementation and application of these competency domains is seriously by the difficulty that most organizations experience in transforming HR to play the role of a strategic business partner. Many organizations want to or have implemented the HRCS competency model as part of their strategy to move the Human Resources (HR) function from doing mainly transactional work to becoming a strategic business partner. These organisations usually restructure the HR department to create the HR Business Partner Role, Shared Services to take care of the transactional issues and Centres of Expertise to deliver specialised HR services. Most of these organisations are however experiencing difficulty in implementing this type of structure. The role of the Strategic HR Business partner is particularly problematic.

Dave Ulrich excellently captures the problems that are experienced with the new HR structures in an article called “The new HR Organisation” (www.workforce.com/section/09/feature/25/28/64/index.html). He describes the situation as follows: “While the embedded HR professionals are expected to be strategic and do organisation diagnosis, they often find themselves overwhelmed by operational HR work that conflicts with their main purpose and renders them unable to make time to be strategic. They report that they spend a growing amount of time doing individual casework, such as handling disciplinary issues; performing operational tasks, such as setting up and attending recruiting interviews; doing analysis and reporting, such as managing compensation reviews; delivering initiatives, such as creating development experiences; implementing business initiatives, such as doing the analysis and execution for a new organization structure; or implementing initiatives from the centers of expertise.

Service centers typically do not perform these operational tasks since they require personal attention. Centers of expertise do not do them since they usually require deep and unique knowledge of the business and strong internal business relationships. Line managers do not do them since they lack the technical expertise. Hence, embedded HR professionals feel drawn into this operational work by the volume of it, even when they have the skills and self-confidence to be more strategic and are encouraged to focus on their transformational role. It is also the case that these embedded HR professionals often come from an implementation background and lack the self-confidence and skills to comfortably play a more strategic role. For these individuals, the urgency (and comfort) of the operational present outweighs the importance (and developmental interest) of the more strategic future”.

The reason for this might be explained by research conducted by the Corporate Leadership Council (Building Next Generation HR-Line Partnerships, 2008). The Corporate Leadership Council analysed the factors explaining variations in HR strategic role effectiveness. This revealed that the most important attributes affecting the  Strategic HR Business Partner’s strategic role effectiveness are “The Person” and “The Design of the Job,” not the “HR  Function Structure and Budget.” A number of factors at the individual level—background, skill set, development experiences—have the largest aggregate impact on the effectiveness of the HRBP.

The Corporate Leadership Council (Building Next Generation HR-Line Partnerships, 2008) combined these factors into “The Person” category, and they comprise 54% of the variation in the HR Business Partner’s strategic role effectiveness. Job design also influences the strategic role effectiveness of the Strategic HR Business Partner and comprises 43% of the variation in strategic role effectiveness. The one group of variables with relatively little impact on HR–Line Support effectiveness is HR Function Structure and Budget, which explains only 3% of the variation in strategic role effectiveness. This means then that focusing on the person in the role of HR Strategic Business Partner is critical, but not sufficient. To increase effectiveness HR should also address the design of the job and the interactions with the line. Another implication of the research is that strategic role effectiveness does not require a wholesale reengineering of the function, though structure could be critical for a variety of factors (e.g., cost).

Our experience in practice confirms the research in the sense that most organizations focus on getting the HR Structure right, but neglect the design of the different jobs in the new design. Very little attention is also paid to process mapping the new way of doing HR and the up-skilling of HR staff to fulfill their new roles competently.

Organisations that try to implement the six competency domains in this type of situation find immense resistance from Strategic HR Business Partners and line managers. The Strategic HR Business Partners find some of the competency domains irrelevant to their situation and are unlikely to take responsibility for the application of many of the sub-components in the six domains. The line managers start to question the role of HR and the change that was supposed to improve the effectiveness of HR, seem to create even more conflict.

The lesson in all of this is that HR transformation should be planned and implemented through a rigorous change management process. The rationale for the change should be clear in the first place and all the relevant stakeholders (including line managers, employees and customers) should be involved in the change effort. Adequate attention should be given to job design and the placement of the correct people in the newly designed roles.  Without this foundation, organizations could find that their efforts to implement the six strategic HR domains will not be effective.

Contributor: Lydia Cillie-Schmidt

Lydia is an independent consultant and owner of “The Talent Hub”. The Talent Hub’s focus areas are the design and implementation of talent management processes and systems, including acquisition, deployment, development and engagement. These processes are supported by leadership development programmes, assessment centres, psychometric assessments, the design and presentation of training programmes, coaching, mentoring, management of learnerships/internships, performance management and succession development.

Lydia has more than 25 years’ experience as an industrial psychologist and leader, working as a permanent employee for major corporate companies in South Africa. She has worked at Vodacom for 11 years and for the last 7 years of her tenure, Lydia has been the Head of Human Resources Development. Before this she worked at companies like the Department of Post-and Telecommunications, Sasol and the SABC. As an independent consultant Lydia gained experience in workforce planning, organisation design, including business process mapping and Role Profiling. She is also a registered Industrial Psychologist and completed a doctorate in Industrial Psychology, focusing on the use of Narrative Technique in Management Development. Lydia can be contacted at lydiacs@yebo.co.za