人力资源部门建设与企业人才管理

拉姆`查兰，戴夫·尤里奇  2014/9/4  14464

　　最早人力资源专家拉姆`查兰（Ram Charan）在《哈佛商业评论》发表文章认为：人力资源部应该分拆了（Why the human resources department must go）。他调查发现，大多数人力资源管理者未能像企业CEO希望的那样，成为很好的董事会成员和值得信赖的合伙人，并凭借他们的技能，将员工和业务数据联系起来，从而找出企业的优势和劣势、令员工与其职位相匹配，并为企业战略提供人才方面的建议。因而他建议分拆人力资源部门：一部分可以称之为行政人力资源（HR-A），主要管理薪酬和福利，向CFO汇报。这样，CFO便能将薪酬视为吸引人才的重要条件，而不是主要成本。另一部分称为领导力与组织人力资源（HR-LO），主要关注提高员工的业务能力，直接向CEO汇报。
　　随后人力资源专家戴夫·尤里奇（Dave Ulrich）提出了不同的意见----顶尖的的HR关注三个方面：人才、领导力和组织能力：（1）人才：HR应当为组织培养有能力、有意愿、能做出贡献的人才；（2）领导力：HR应当确保各级领导者都能够具备正确的思维和行动方式，为员工、客户、投资者和社区创造可持续的市场价值。（3）组织能力：识别和打造能够驱动公司赢得竞争的组织能力（有时也被称为文化、制度、流程、资源等等）。这些能力可能包括：服务、信息（预测分析）、创新、协作、风险管理、效率、改变(适应性、灵活性)、文化变革、学习、战略聚焦等。他认为并不能像拉姆·查兰所建议的通过拆分解决问题。
　　无论人力资源大师如何来提出人力资源重建的方案，人才问题始终成为最重要的核心。
附原文：

Why the human resources department must go

By Ram Charan

Would organisations be better served if the position of CHRO were eliminated and HR split into two strands?

It’s time to say goodbye to the Department of Human Resources. Well, not the useful tasks it performs. But the department per se must go.

I talk with CEOs across the globe who are disappointed in their HR people. They would like to be able to use their chief human resource officers, or CHROs, the way they use their chief financial officers – as sounding boards and trusted partners – and rely on their skills in linking people and numbers to diagnose weaknesses and strengths in the organisation, find the right fit between employees and jobs and advise on the talent implications of the company’s strategy.
But it’s a rare CHRO who can serve in such an active role. Most of them are process-oriented generalists who have expertise in personnel benefits, compensation and labour relations. They are focused on internal matters such as engagement, empowerment and managing cultural issues. What they can’t do very well is relate HR to real-world business needs. They don’t know how key decisions are made, and they have great difficulty analysing why people – or whole parts of the organisation – aren’t meeting the business’s performance goals.

Among the few CHROs who do know, I almost always find a common distinguishing quality: They have worked in line operations – such as sales, services or manufacturing – or in finance. The celebrated former CHRO of General Electric, Bill Conaty, was a plant manager before Jack Welch brought him into HR. Conaty weighed in on key promotions and succession planning, working hand in glove with Welch in a sweeping overhaul of the company. Mary Anne Elliott, the CHRO of Marsh, had had several managerial roles outside HR. She is overhauling the HR pipeline to bring in other people with business experience. Santrupt Misra, who left Hindustan Unilever to join Aditya Birla Group in 1996, became a close partner of the chairman, Kumar Mangalam Birla, working on organisation and restructuring and developing profit and loss managers. He runs a $US2 billion ($2.1 billion) business as well as heading HR at the $US45 billion conglomerate.

A double-pronged solution

Such people have inspired the solution I have in mind. It is radical, but it is grounded in practicality. My proposal is to eliminate the position of CHRO and split HR into two strands. One – we might call it HR-A (for administration) – would primarily manage compensation and benefits. It would report to the CFO, who would have to see compensation as a talent magnet, not just a major cost. The other, HR-LO (for leadership and organisation), would focus on improving the people capabilities of the business and would report to the CEO.

HR-LO would be led by high potentials from operations or finance whose business expertise and people skills give them a strong chance of attaining the top two layers of the organisation. Leading HR-LO would build their experience in judging and developing people, assessing the company’s inner workings and linking its social system to its financial performance. They would also draw others from the business side into the HR-LO pipeline. After a few years these high potentials would move to either horizontal or higher-level line management jobs. In either case they would continue to rise, so their time in HR-LO would be seen as a developmental step rather than a ticket-punching exercise.

This proposal is just a bare outline. I expect to see plenty of opposition to it. But the problem with HR is real. One way or another, it will have to gain the business acumen needed to help organisations perform at their best.

（C)2014 Harvard Business Review


Do Not Split HR – At Least Not Ram Charan’s Way

by Dave Ulrich

Ram Charan’s recent column ―It’s Time to Split HR‖ has created quite a stir. He argues that it’s the rare CHRO who can serve as a strategic leader for the CEO and also manage the internal concerns of the organization. Most CHROs, he says, can’t ―relate HR to real-world business needs. They don’t know how key decisions are made, and they have great difficulty analyzing why people—or whole parts of the organization—aren’t meeting the business’s performance goals.―

While I have enormous respect for Ram’s wisdom, I believe CHROs have much to offer CEOs and can be better prepared to do so without splitting HR.

Much of Charan’s recent work has tilted towards organization and people (books on strategy execution, leadership pipeline, talent and advice on intensity, change, leadership traits, performance management, and governance). I believe that Charan’s perspective reflects an increasing emphasis among business leaders on the organizational capabilities required to win. Charan has turned his attention to these organization dynamics in response to CEOs recognizing that technology, operations, access to financial capital, and even strategic positioning statements are less differentiating than their organization’s ability to respond to opportunities. As business leaders demand more of their organization, they look for counsel to create more competitive organizations, thus raising the bar on HR. Charan’s latest column actually affirms the value of HR to sustained competitiveness.

More is now expected of HR professionals. Charan (intentionally or not) lambasts the entire HR profession (―It’s time to say good bye to the Department of Human Resources”). This is both unfair and simplistic. It ignores what I call the 20-60-20 rule. In HR (or finance or IT), 20% of the professionals are exceptional, adding value that helps organizations move forward, 20% of HR folks are locked into a fixed mindset and lack either competence or commitment to deliver real value, and 60% are in the middle. It is easy and fair to critique the bottom 20%, but it is not fair to paint the entire profession with this same brush. I tend not to focus on either 20%. The top 20% are exceptional and don’t need help. They should be role models for others.

Charan noted a few of these folks in his column. The bottom 20% won’t take help. But, the 60% seem, in my view, to be actively engaged in learning how to help their organizations improve. Sometimes they are stymied by their own lack of ability, but I find that often they are also limited by senior leaders who don’t appreciate the value they offer. I advocate teaching the 60% what they can do to deliver value even in difficult circumstances (working with non-supportive leaders or in difficult markets, for example).

As HR professionals engage with business leaders to deliver value, the conversation should not just be about talent. The top 20% today (and I hope more of the 60% tomorrow) focus on three things: talent, leadership, and capability, along with their attributes:

Talent: delivering competence (right people, right place, right time, right skills); commitment (engagement); and contribution (growth mindset, meaning, and well-being) of employees throughout the organization.

Leadership: ensuring leaders at all levels who think, feel, and act in ways that deliver sustainable market value to employees, customers, investors, and communities.

Capability: identifying the organization capabilities (called culture, system, process, resources, etc.) that enable organizations to win over time. These capabilities would vary depending on the strategy, but might include service, information (predictive analytics, metrics), innovation, collaboration, risk, efficiency, change (adaptability, flexibility), culture change, learning, strategic focus, etc. I strongly believe that excellence in talent, leadership, and capability requires an outside-in not inside-out perspective. For talent, being outside-in means not being the employer of choice, but the employer of choice of employees customers would choose. It means that effective leadership is defined through the brand promise made to customers and the intangible leadership capital investors value. And that capability becomes defined as the identity of the firm in the mind of key customers. As I’ve suggested before, this outside-in view of HR complements current strategic HR perspectives.

Charan’s advocacy for a ―talent‖ HR role actually limits the breadth of what HR can and should deliver. When HR professionals bring unique insights about talent, leadership, and capability to the senior management dialogue, they add enormous value. I suggest that HR professionals are better at delivering in each of these areas than line managers who get moved into HR roles—the path Charan recommends.

Charan’s recommendation for splitting HR into two groups raises two concerns. First, it offers a simplistic structural solution to the fundamental challenge of increasing HR’s value to the business. I am a little surprised that Charan, who is known for his integrated strategic approach to business, has reduced the HR challenge to a governance problem. Upgrading HR requires more rigorous redefinition of how HR can deliver value, how to develop HR professionals, and how to rethink the entire system of HR.

Second, advocating the separation of the HR function into two groups cannot be a blanket solution to HR governance. The structure of the HR department should be tied to the business structure (a centralized business should not have divided HR governance nor should a pure holding company). In diversified organizations HR departments should be run like professional services firms. This approach offers the benefits of centralization (efficiency, economy of scale) and decentralization (effectiveness, local responsiveness). In fact, many large diversified organizations have separated HR into three groups: the embedded HR generalists who work with business leaders on talent, leadership, and capabilities; centers of expertise that offer analytics and insights into HR knowledge domains; and service centers that do the administrative work of HR. All can be governed under the HR umbrella–just the way finance and accounting or marketing and sales work together.

I suggest a holistic approach to helping the middle 60%. This includes redefining the strategy (outside-in) and outcomes (talent, leadership, and capability) for HR, redesigning the organization (department structure), innovating HR practices (people, performance, information, and work), upgrading the competencies for HR professionals, and focusing HR analytics on decisions more than data. It is not easy to move a profession forward. The top 20% don’t always share their lessons in ways that teach others. The bottom 20% get too much attention. And, the vast middle gets discouraged when respected colleagues (unintentionally, I believe) belittle them and their efforts. We can do better than this.

（C)2014 Harvard Business Review