Strategic talk - Making it real

Tuesday November 15, 2011

 Lehan Stemmet is a personal and organisational development professional. He has diverse work experience, ranging from HR management tooperations management, biotechnology, security and marketing in South Africa, Ireland and New Zealand. www.lehanstemmet.com Fredericka Stemmet has many years of business management experience and providing HR advice within the corporate project and event management industry. She is qualified in international human resource management. www.stemmetconsulting.com.

For a number of years, and increasingly more in recent years, there has been an ongoing reinforcement among Human Resource leaders and authors, researchers and consultants that HR should become more of a strategic partner within organisations instead of the back office administrative and people champions.

The reality is that we often write about becoming more strategically involved and adding value at all levels of the corporate hierarchy, but seldom do we take this beyond the printed word or HR discussions and forums. HR practitioners may feel overwhelmed by the technicalities of financial, marketing and operational jargon, and as is typical of human behaviour, we then choose to stick to what we know best: HR practices, policies, procedures and the employment law, recruitment, selection and metrics. However, if we want to become a strategic partner within organisations, we have to be proactive about it, and also creative. We have to speak the language of other divisions within the business and be very clear about how HR can add value. Is it or will it be easy? Certainly not. For the HR professional, getting a foot in the door with the marketing division can be as challenging as for the marketing division to get a budget approved by the finance division. What the marketing division has learned to do though is two-fold: they state their case clearly and creatively and sell the benefits of the investment (not expenditure). Secondly, they simply don’t give up easily and passionately believe in what they propose. Those are core competencies we have to develop as HR professionals.

he reality is that we often write about becoming more strategically involved and adding value at all levels of the corporate hierarchy, but seldom do we take this beyond the printed word or HR discussions and forums. HR practitioners may feel overwhelmed by the technicalities of financial, marketing and operational jargon, and as is typical of human behaviour, we then choose to stick to what we know best: HR practices, policies, procedures and the employment law, recruitment, selection and metrics. However, if we want to become a strategic partner within organisations, we have to be proactive about it, and also creative. We have to speak the language of other divisions within the business and be very clear about how HR can add value. Is it or will it be easy? Certainly not. For the HR professional, getting a foot in the door with the marketing division can be as challenging as for the marketing division to get a budget approved by the finance division. What the marketing division has learned to do though is two-fold: they state their case clearly and creatively and sell the benefits of the investment (not expenditure). Secondly, they simply don’t give up easily and passionately believe in what they propose. Those are core competencies we have to develop as HR professionals.

Technically we have the strongest argument possible for getting a hearing from almost any manager or team within the organisation. We know people. We know what makes them tick and what makes them more effective. And considering that basically every part of the organisation requires some sort of people effort, organisations,divisions and projects cannot exist without people capacity. So, how do we make sure our bemoaning of the strategic role of HR becomes a reality? Here’s one possible example, relating to brand building and marketing. Do yourself a favour and spend a day walking from one store to the next, from one retailer to the next, from one hotdog stand to the next and just focus on what really makes you want to go back to that specific store, retailer, hotdog stand, and so on (or what causes you to decide never to go back or buy from them again). There simply has to be a universal factor that plays a role. The golden thread that runs through all the different ways people, customers, end-users, consumers, whatever you want to call them, measure their like or dislike of a specific brand… let it be a super store, or the little shop around the corner.

When most of us sit down in big corporate meetings strategising “the way forward” in building the brand we wear a hat saying: think budget, think above the line, think below the line, think brand image, equity, and all the other buzz words that get us going. We call in consultants, branding companies; spend huge amounts of money on point of display strategies and so on to do brand building.

This is where we think the common misperception comes into play. What you’re doing in the previous paragraph is not brand building in the true sense of the word – it’s probably all semantics. There is a difference (in our minds at least) between marketing and brand building.

So what makes you go back to the same retailer time and time again? The amount of money they have spent on marketing activities or the awesome way they treat you when you walk into the store?

Brand building is more than just throwing money at a marketing campaign, incentive schemes, t-shirts and training for the sales force. Brand building starts on a far more personal level. Here’s the question: How many times have you sat at a Saturday BBQ with your mates and caught yourself bragging about how awesome your company/ brand is? If you are one of those people who are passionately behind your brand (or company) you are few and far between the masses.

Without risking sounding too esoteric and like too much of an HR advocate, brand building is to a large extent investing into the lives of the people that work for the brand. Not necessarily financially, but by empowering them to play a bigger role in building the brand, by bringing some sort of personal and character ethics into the picture…some sort of humanity maybe?

Brand building is helping employees to buy into the brand so much so that they work over a weekend doing a promo because they just love it, not because the manager in charge threatened them or because they need the extra money to save up for that long overdue holiday they need. Contrary to popular belief personal life and business cannot be separated. If you are irrationally hard on your employees and threaten them with clichés like: “It’s a wonder we still pay you a salary,” the result may well be a resignation or worse, no resignation, but a very unhappy customer care specialist dealing with customers. Whether they show it or not is not of importance... the fact is that employees will slowly but surely become more and more despondent and that will affect their passion, drive and the way they portray the brand.

More often than not the brand building equation seems to be: Brand Building = Investing Money + Longer Hours + (Managers stepping on toes minus Employees are just lazy unengaged people). How many times have you, as a manager, heard that productivity must be improved? Your first course of action is (instinctively) to call in everybody, give them the odds and to dish out the third degree about how things are not going the way it’s supposed to. Why? Well, because the same happens or will happen to you if your team doesn’t perform. It’s a self-inflicted vicious circle!

Basically, brand building is an internal affair that needs to be addressed on every level within the organisation. Why? Well, people work in accounts, HR, sales, PR, the warehouse, and arguably the most important of all, customer care, and so the list goes on. Each and every one of these individuals is a part of your organisation... but are they a part of the brand? Have they truly brought into that A4 piece of paper framed against the wall in the boardroom where you have your mission, vision and values engraved on?

Cliché? Certainly, yes. It is a cliché that we need to build our brand by building the people working as a part of that brand... and it will remain a cliché until the day we all create changes within our organisations, organisational attitudes, beliefs and the way we look at employees, as well as the leaders in organisations. Counting the number of books we have personally read on these matters leaves very few excuses. Everything from open communication, leadership skills, the effective manager, the productive manager, the good manager, management by objectives, and so on. And to top it all there was a big yellow or red sticker on the book stating that 1,000,000 copies were sold worldwide. Technically speaking 1,000,000 people/ managers should know how to treat their people and bosses and what the benefits of this synergistic relationship will be for the brand.

There is an African saying that goes like this: “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.” It basically means: a person is a person because of other people. If you want your brand to achieve, help the people in your organisation to achieve what they want to achieve as far as you can. And vice versa… if you want to achieve what you want to achieve, help your brand to achieve what it needs and wants to achieve. At this point you should be imagining the late President J F Kennedy waving his hand in the air: “…ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country…” Ask what you can do for one another as company/brand and employee, and HR professional.

So now you may think: what does this article have to do with Strategic HR. EVERYTHING! Why? People manage people. People sit in corporate strategy meetings. People come up with ideas. People design and implement advertising strategies. People interact with other people in your organisation. People are the representatives sent out to take care of customers’ needs. People answer the telephones at reception and customer care. People buy from people. There is personal interaction or intervention at almost every level, in some way or the other, so who better to have as a strategic branding and marketing partner than the Human Resources professional!

(This article was in the October/November Issue of the HRINZ mangazine and kindly shared with Grow-Me by Lehan Stemmert)