Your HR Team Drives Business Success

If you are a business leader planning for the future without including your HR people, you are making a huge mistake.

Sure, you have probably talked to Marketing about future demand, and with Finance to discuss the budget, and even to your IT person to discuss your tech requirements. But there’s a good chance you have not brought your head of Human Resources into the mix, and if so, that’s a problem.

In most industries today, your most critical resource is your people. While financial capital is essential, and physical capital in the form of buildings and equipment and land may be necessary, none of that matters unless you have the human capital to do the work. More than just having warm bodies filling positions, you need people with the right talents for what you want to accomplish. Just as you have experts for other aspects of your business, you have also got human resource professionals who should be participating as an equal business partner in your planning and leadership, rather than just being handed the plans later and told “go find some people.” All too often, HR is seen as merely a support function, when it is instead a key player in driving revenue, not just in keeping costs down.

As you are planning, HR can help identify the types of, and numbers of, people you need. They can also clue you in to any challenges you might face, such as a better recruiting environment in another place (which means you may need to be ready to pay relocation costs), or timing that is better at one point in the year than another (and that could lead you to adjust project timelines). They should also have a pretty good catalog of the talent already in your organization. HR can help identify talent management and employee development priorities that can help you move beyond your competition. A big part of being successful in an industry is making the best use of the right resources. You need leaders who truly understand that.

A few years ago I knew a telecom firm that made the decision to bid on a license in a lesser developed country that was just opening up to foreign telecoms. They saw a great commercial opportunity in a new market, so they submitted the bid. Afterwards, the CEO came back to HR (which had not been part of the planning) and said, “get ready to find us some people.” What HR found is that the talent market for telecoms was pretty small. They were going to have trouble finding people to man the customer call centers, never mind finding network engineers to build a support a cell phone system. Not only were there few qualified people, there were also three licenses up for bid, meaning they would be competing against other firms for qualified employees. They would need to bring in a lot of people from the home country, and the expat costs associated with that meant it would be a long, long time before this venture would ever be profitable. Had the planners known this in advance, they could have made different decisions. Perhaps fortunately, they did not win the bid.

Recruiting, retaining, and developing your talent is not something you can afford to get wrong, so your HR experts need to bring their strategic view of human capital to your organization’s leadership, rather than just processing paychecks and answering questions about sick leave. get your HR team into the business planning process, because revenue and costs — which means profit — will be determined by your people more than anything. The traditional HR support functions are still important, but there is an increasingly important role for strategic HR leadership.