Critical Skills for HR professionals

There are some skills that are never taught in HR courses, but once you join the workforce you realise how important all of them really are:

Business Acumen Basic understanding of how your organization makes money and what one as a HR professional can do to impact it positively. Business acumen has be the lodestone by which you measure and evaluate any HR initiative. Communication Skills - It is painful when HR people don't get this one right. Written and spoken skills are both critical to being a successful and effective HR professional. It sends out wrong messages about your capability when you cannot communicate an intervention/initiative's. Try it. Inter-personal skills Empathy; Respect; Listening; Openness; These are approaches that you are expected to have. But many HR leaders and professionals who are egotistical, snooty, pig-headed and totally disrespectful of others. They are also the ones who are servile to higher ups and contribute to the stories that stress "HR is a spineless dictator". Don't be one of them. Negotiation Skills - When one has chosen to be part of a function that is evaluated by what others do, negotiating goes from a life-skill to a critical to succeed professional skill. Learning to Learn - We've all heard of the quote "the future belongs to those who learn to learn, unlearn and re-learn". But what does it mean? Then it struck me. Learning a higher level skill, specially at the analytical, synthesis and evaluation levels on the cognitive level - or any skill at the affective level - or the adaptation and origination category in psychomotor level - really calls for changing one's world view. While the word for all these might be learning - yet it does not justify the full import of the changes that are needed. Let's take the developmental and learning need of managers who have to graduate to the next level and actually lead. As Marcus Buckingham points out what a great manager does and what a great leader does can seem contradictory. To manage well requires that you recognize the subtle, but important, differences between people and that you know how to put those differences to work for your organization. Great managers thrive on helping people experience incremental growth.

The dynamic creativity of figuring out how to move from the player to the plays is the real genius of a great manager. Leadership isnt about that at all. Leadership is about finding the words, stories, and images that bring great clarity to people. And thats just different from being a good manager. You could have both talents, but good managers dont necessarily make good leaders. So when you actually "learn" leadership - you actually make a great shift in your worldview. You cannot build a new worldview on top of your existing ones. You have to let them go. These mindsets could be dependent on context of the role one is doing, too. For example, specialist functions in HR focus on making a standard policy/process that can be applied uniformly across the business unit/organization. As a Training Manager/OD Specialist that was my role. However, the mindset of the HR generalist is actually to manage exceptions and they face issues depending on how the specialist's policy/process is impacting their employees. When I did my stint as a HR Manager of a business unit that was clear to me. So in a role, I couldn't really say which was correct and which was wrong. As both the roles are structured and the contexts are different. Letting go of non-relevant mindsets is the first step of learning to learn. That is the most difficult part than actually picking up the 'skills' IMHO. This is particularly true when learning interventions are given based on potential, rather than for people who are actually facing the situation. So when you tell a Manager that he/she needs a certain skill for being a General Manager/VP then they really don't know what would be actual shift required. Consulting Skills - Lot of people ask me "Hey I am great at HR/Finance/IT. I love solving problems and like working with people. Would that be enough to make me a consultant? Is the professional ready to be a consultant - even when one thinks they are not! So what are the prime skills of being a consultant or an internal service provider. Most important Contracting / Networking. Knowing the scope of your work and what your client expects is the biggest skill you can build. It means being truthful about your abilities and also how it makes sense for the client. People don't want scope creep to happen. Contracting needs patience, communication and assertiveness skills. It might also mean walking away from a lucrative deal - so it also needs courage. The failure of most sunk consulting projects can be traced back to this phase of the consulting engagement.

Discovery - Diagnosis calls for a skill where you play detective. Not to make your own conclusions after listening to everyone's point of view (including your own!) is a skill that tough to master. But discovery is a key skill to keep a consultant objective and not to jump to 'obvious' conclusions. Implementation - For different kinds of consultants, implementation looks different. However the key skill in implementation is making the implementation survive your own departure. How you do that either as an external consultant or as an internal one is key. It most of the time means building skills in the client organization that might impact your recall for the same project but will add a lot of value to you Marketing Skills - The learning was that services businesses are people related. Their behaviour and skills is the actual product that the client/buyer is paying for. And then reporter said one thing "Marketing has to get off its ivory tower and talk to HR to actually build the brand in reality" That's so true.If your brand promise is something else and your recruiters and HR generalist select and measure people against other standards, you're setting up your services organization for a failure in front of your customers. Is your a services organization? How much does Marketing and Branding work along with HR? Sensemaking - Sensemaking involves turning circumstances into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in words and that serves as a springboard into action.As learning facilitators/OD professionals/HR professionals or even managers helping people make sense and meaning from their experiences and turning them into plans for further action ought to be a key skill. Building time and space into organizational processes and skills to make that happen is very important to gain the insights that makes a virtuous cycle come alive.