?Is your HR workday stuck in a perpetual reaction loop, constantly dealing with the latest crisis caused by the same manager or poorly written policy? Those problems will continue to crop up unless HR professionals take action to address the real issues “upstream” that are triggering those problems.
“Think about your day-to-day activities at work. Are you waiting for things to come downriver and reacting and responding to them, or are you going upriver … and preventing those bad things from happening in the first place?” asked Richard Fagerlin, president of Peak Solutions, a Colorado-based leadership development firm, at the SHRM Annual Conference and Expo 2023 in Las Vegas.
“As HR professionals, if we lived more upstream and less downstream, I think the world would be a better place and your organization would be a better place. So live your life upstream and focus your efforts upstream,” said Fagerlin during his June 11 session, “Becoming a Strategic Leader, Thinker & Value-Adder.”
For HR professionals, that means identifying the root of reoccurring problems within the company culture, including nagging turnover, performance and compliance issues. To identify those core issues, said Fagerlin, HR professionals need to ask the hard questions, such as how to prevent good people from leaving and to make sure bad managers don’t get promoted.
It’s also important, Fagerlin said, to ensure your HR department and leadership teams are actively promoting and demonstrating the values it wants to see in employees.
“You can define what your culture is, but your culture is really a result of what you do. It’s a result of both what you permit and what you promote,” Fagerlin said. “And organizations that have the best cultures have an overemphasis in what they promote … And organizations that have the worst cultures have an overemphasis in what they permit or what they allow.”
Healthy Cultures: 3 Key Values
Fagerlin said that for an organization’s culture to be healthy, it needs to successfully focus on these three values:
Clarity. Team members have a firm grasp of the organization’s guiding principles, strategy and values. They know where you are going and why.
Cohesion. Your employees buy into the strategy. They’re committed to working together to make it work.
Execution. Teams are efficiently aligned to achieve your goals. They understand their progress (or lack of it) and hold each other accountable.
Fagerlin asked attendees to rate—on a 1 to 3 scale—the health of their organizations and HR departments in terms of those three areas.
“If you don’t have clarity, cohesion and execution around the things that your organization is promoting, your core values and mission statements are marginalized and ignored,” Fagerlin said. “Those values shouldn’t be on your walls if they aren’t going to walk through the halls. … No amount of squish balls or T-shirts are going to make your culture come alive. You’ve got to model it, you’ve got to live it and you’ve got to work through it.”
Fagerlin warned attendees to stop outsourcing their leadership and allowing consultants and other people to make the hard decisions in their organizations.
“My team in the last couple years has become more convinced that [leadership] is the scarce resource in the world today—not just in business, not just in families and not just in government,” Fagerlin said. “You know you can tell that you’re outsourcing your leadership is if there’s something difficult to do and you’re happy for someone else to do it.”
Strategic Questions = Strategic Answers
While it’s important for HR to be prepared with the right answers, Fagerlin said it’s almost as vital to ask the right questions that can help trigger those key answers. Some examples he cited:
- What important topic are we not talking about right now?
- What’s the evidence of that?
- What would you do?
- What’s different this time?
- What needs to be true to make this work?
- What’s missing?
- How would you kill the organization in three easy moves?
“It’s important for you to have good answers, but I want you to have good questions,” he said. “Because powerful questions lead to powerful answers and strategic questions lead to strategic answers.”