by Donna Hamlin

Created on: August 08, 2009   Last Updated: August 14, 2009

A Good HR Manager Can Never Be Underestimated

A common distinction in management is the reference to "hard" and "soft" management roles. By this, people suggest "hard" relates to the operational functions, such as engineering, manufacturing, sales, research and development and finance. The "soft" alludes to human resources, including employee relations, communications, training and employee morale.

In fact, it's more true to say operational functions are "hard" while human resources is "harder". Here is why.

The base operational roles deal with targets, goals, project management and deliverables. The focus is on results which can be measured. Human resources deals with people - including all their unpredictable emotions, personalities, levels of engagement and motivation, needs and mix of competencies and insecurities. It is far more dynamic a challenge to work with the swings and surprises of individual and team attitudes, psyches and moods than it is pressing to meet a revenue target or engineering deadline.

A talented HR manager is adept at understanding how to deal with individuals and teams. Good managers develop a deep clarity about what makes employees tick, how to motivate and incent them, how to facilitate groups when morale is slumping and how to create a breakthrough when a team loses its creativity to solve a problem. They become the "glue" that connects people, moderates the tempo of teams and interprets the culture and reactions of employees about events and changes which occur day to day.

Good HR managers serve a valuable role communicating both the needs of employees to managers and the goals, philosophy and practices of management to employees. Employees can count on an HR manager as the person to seek out when there is a personal issue, a concern or a potential violation of corporate ethics. Every employee should have one person to whom he or she can go - in confidence - to resolve such things. The role requires the trust of employees, strong diplomacy skills to resolve issues and demonstrated skills at mediation and problem-solving.

Managers can count on a gifted HR professional to serve as a business coach and counselor. As a strategist and sounding board, a human resource person becomes a partner with a functional manager to improve the overall functioning of the team and the leadership skills of the managers.

The contributions of top shelf HR managers are wide-ranging. They : 1)contribute to strategic planning for the company, 2) source and develop the executive team and its leadership capability, 3) assess the talent requirements of the organization and recruit capable employees, 4) develop ways to continuously train and improve overall competencies of employees to improve their abilities to serve the changing needs of their customers, 5) develop retention strategies to retain people and maintain highly-engaged teams, 6) design compensation and long-term incentives to competitively reward contributing employees, 6) develop optimum ways to manage major changes to ensure employees support new processes and directions the company elects to take, and 7) constantly looks for new ideas to keep a company exciting and to ensure employees are proud to show up and give it their all every day.

The talents required to be a good HR professional are not easily come by. It requires education and experience in psychology, communication, organization development, compensation, strategy, consulting, coaching, training, change management and - often - multi-cultural expertise. If a company is lucky to have an excellent HR professional, hang on to him or her. What a hard lesson it is to discover the value of an human resource professional after it's gone!

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