As an HR professional, how do you jump into conversations about the business side of your organization, particularly when it’s about finance, marketing and operations? How do you learn what’s truly keeping your CEO up at night, and how you can become an even greater asset to the organization in your HR role? Lori Kleiman, author of Taking Your Seat at the Table – Being a Strategic Executive Creating Actionable Plans and Embracing Technology joins us to discuss the keys to developing a career in HR and gaining a strategic role within an organization on the executive team.
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Brandon: Welcome to the HR for small business podcast, this is your host Brandon Laws. Today’s guest is Lori Kleiman, Lori is a human resource speaker and author. She comes to us with 30 years of experience in HR consulting. She has written several books including HR You Can Use, Fire HR Now and the book that we are actually planning to discuss today is Taking Your Seat At the Table – Being a Strategic Executive Creating Actual Plans and Embracing Technology. Lori, it is awesome to have you.
Lori: Thank you! It is fabulous to be here. I am glad we could make this work today.
Brandon: Yes, I am very glad too! So you sent me your books and I loved them, for one, and I really want to spend our time today talking about Taking Your Seat At the Table because I think, for this audience, that book is so relevant because, as HR leaders, we’re trying to figure out a way to really take a seat at the table and to be with that executive team and make strategic decisions. But before we dive into that I really wanted to ask you about your previous work Fire HR Now. That is a pretty harsh title and in the introduction for Taking Your Seat at the Table you talk about that and why maybe it wasn’t well received but I think your point in the whole book is probably spot on. Can you just elaborate on that point on maybe why you titled it that way?Lori: Absolutely, Brandon! And it was really fun, it was actually a real decision of do I or don’t I, and it’s part of why that it’s a little bit in retirement right now. Fire HR Now was really my message to corporate America and really to small business people who were constantly saying that their HR department wasn’t strategic, their HR department only did what employers wanted, they didn’t watch out for the best interests of the company, the HR department was just a bunch of administrative people. And so the idea of that book, which is still available out on Amazon, is really about that type of HR person. And if that’s the kind of HR person you have in your organization, then fire them. That isn’t what we as a HR profession want to be or want to be known for.
So the way I wrote that book which is really interesting, I think, is that its written every chapter has a message for the CEO or a leader of the business and a message for the HR person, and essentially what I do is advocate for that HR person if they are in an organization that’s keeping them in that administrative role and how to get out of that place or it may be time to look for a new position. And so really what evolves from the book and the presentations I gave around it was taking your seat at the table. And taking the seat your seat at the table is really a very positive message, I hope and think for HR people that came out of the HR side of Fire HR Now really helping people advocate for themselves. And the idea we’ve all heard so much about getting your seat at the table and it really is a little passé and I was worried about that with my third book. The message I am trying to send is stop waiting for somebody to ask you to join the table, which Taking Your Seat at the Table really is all about.
I want to say to HR people, hey just take your seat. Show up at the meeting, be there, have a great idea that really forces your organization to do nothing but pay attention to you, and that is the whole idea of the book Taking Your Seat At the Table.
Brandon: I love that point just because I think most of us can be pretty passive and we are not just likely to just take our seat at the table necessarily. And I think there is a common misconception about HR people with the executives or leaders of companies. What are some of those misconceptions and what do CEOs of a company often say about HR professionals?
Lori: I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that HR people don’t understand the business. The vast majority of HR people that I know either came into the HR role through operations, so they really know the business, or through business school. Many HR people these days, although I don’t have the exact statistics, go into a business related collegiate program with a focus in human resources, so they have taken accounting, they have taken economics, they have taken marketing. They know more about a business than owners sometimes give them credit for. It’s for the HR person to show how they can utilize those things and show the business owner that they really can demonstrate that kind of strength in the operation.
Brandon: I want to ask you what kinds of competencies are really needed nowadays in that HR role? Because if we sort of look at how HR has been viewed, which is “paper pushers,” “administrative,” “department of no,” all those things that you hear about. Today, the new strategic HR person, what sort of competencies are needed to be at that table?
Lori: I think the most important competency is linkage and I kind of just made that word up, but the idea that we as HR people can link the program and processes that we are involved with to the rest of the business. When I give presentations, for instance, at association meetings and that kind of thing, I talk to HR people, about don’t go in and tell the CEO or the management team that you want to have a company picnic because everybody should get together and there should be social event and isn’t that wonderful. That isn’t driving the business forward. What you want to do is say that the reason we are going to have a company picnic this year is because we’re going to use those communication points to be able to show our employees maybe our new customer base. Or we’re going to have a new way of interacting, we’re going to have the leadership team actually do the cooking. And as people come through that line, we are going to tell you people’s first names, and you are going to address them by first name. Maybe I have gone to some great company picnics where we have cross functional groups that are all on a softball team together, and we are going to use that company picnic so that the sales people can stat to work with the shipping people, the customer service people, and our operations people, and so that we are linking some of our programs and processes. We really have to get out of this mindset of we are just doing things because it’s nice to do for the employees. It’s nice to do nice things for your employees, don’t get me wrong, but you want to make sure that the nice things you’re doing are really tied to business outcomes that are going to drive your organization forward in the future.Brandon: In your book you talk about the 20-60-20 formula, and I don’t know whether or not you created that, but you brought up the point in the book just about the HR profession in general. Can you elaborate on that? Because I thought it was a pretty interesting point.
Lori: Yes absolutely, and I would love to give full credit to the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. That comes out of the work from David Ulrich, and most of us in HR know about David Ulrich he has written a number of books and he runs a consulting institute out of the Ross school of business, and that data comes from them. And what it says is that today, now it’s about 3 years old but honestly as I travel the country and I ask people where they are today, I think it still really does hold true, 20% of our profession, the HR professionals, are actually sitting at that leadership table. They are part of management, they are making decisions every day and they are making decisions that truly do impact the organization as a whole. Another 60% of our profession is in one of two places. Either they, and this is where I digress a little bit from the literature probably and add my own observations of working with HR people on a national basis, 60% of the HR people that I see are really divided into two categories.
One is those HR people who have decided to really become subject matter experts. Those would be our recruiters, our people that specialize in comp and benefits, training and development people, organizational design, those subject matter experts who’ve really decided that they don’t want a seat at the leadership table, but have a great opportunity to move their career up by being a part of that kind of expertise. Then we’ve got the group in that 60% that really is trying to become that HR leader, and sometimes that can be done in the organization you’re in today and sometimes you have to move on to find that kind of a role.
The bottom 20%, and I say bottom with all due respect, because those are either 20% that, again, they would say our administrative professionals who are not really interested in moving up the corporate ladder, but I like to look at that 20% with a lot of respect as well and I will tell you why.
First of all, it’s a lot of entry level people. We have a lot of people that come out of HR and join organizations and learn the field, learn the profession by starting in those entry level roles, but we also have a group of people that I like to give a lot of respect to, and those are the HR professionals that have chosen, as a way of addressing their own work life balance, to really be in more of a support HR role, and the nice thing is that we are always going to need HR professionals who are primarily focused on internal customer service, helping people doing those kinds of administrative tasks. So we want to make sure that we respect all three buckets, the first being the leaders, the second being people that are still figuring out where they want to go next in there career, and then both those entry level people and the people who can really drive our organizations forward.
Brandon: This doesn’t necessarily tie into that point, but it was in your book – technological advances. We are living in an interesting time right now and things are moving so rapidly from a technology standpoint, and as HR professionals, we are having to adapt to these new tools and they are changing the way administrative tasks are done. What is your thought about the role that technology advances in HR are really changing the profession? And the follow up question to that would be, how do HR professionals adapt to this evolving technological landscape and use that technology to their advantage in becoming more strategic?Lori: Let me start by telling you the fears I hear, of moving forward with technology. One is that they will lose that personal connection with their internal customers, or essentially the employees. The other is that they don’t trust their employee population to enter data into databases, essentially, that they rely on all day every day. For example, I was the prime leader of this march probably 10 years ago, in my defense, to say that there is no way I would ever go with employee self-service on payroll because I was not going to allow employees to enter data. I don’t even mean sensitive data, but I will give you a great example of something that happened to me years ago. I live in Chicago, which is right on the Indiana border for your listeners that may not be familiar, and we had an employee who moved across the border into Indiana, put in his own address change, which would be normal, and payroll never picked it up and we never started withholding Indiana taxes. So it was not until the W2 was issued at the end of the year that he came to us and said I’ve got a problem, you’ve still been withholding Illinois. So what we need to do as HR professionals, there is the whole trust but verify, we need to trust employees to do these things but also put systems in place so that we are making sure that mistakes like that don’t happen to the extent that we can. I believe in always admitting my mistakes and learning from them, so I have. But also understanding the great value that technology can provide our employees and our internal customers being able to access things 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, they don’t have to wait for you to be out of a meeting to get access to information that they might otherwise want.
Technology has made enormous strides in the way we do recruiting today. I can’t even, I laugh when I think about what my office looked like back in the 80’s! I had rolodex and I had stacks of resumes. We used to mail out postcards thanking people for applying!
Brandon: It’s wasted resources, it’s crazy.
Lori: Right. And what it’s really done, I mean, I believe that technology is the one thing that has allowed HR people to take that seat at the table, because we can rely on technology to get so much administrative work done that our time is then freed up to work on the more strategic, interesting HR projects. So I think technology is essential when we talk about electronic employee files, I think are just critical, employee self-service, using technology for applicant tracking, using technology for performance management, there is just no reason to do all that on paper anymore.Brandon: No, technology absolutely makes it simpler for us to do our jobs and if you really want to calculate a return on investment or whatever you can definitely figure out where your resources are going and how they are best used, and I think technology gives you the data behind it. So I love it for that. One of the fears you talked about when we first started talking about technology is the fear that people are not going to be connected anymore, so HR feels like they are going to have no connection with the employees anymore and would you agree that it’s just different now it’s a different form of connection? And that it frees them up to actually connect more often because they are not spending time licking envelopes and sending out resumes or response letters?
Lori: Not only more often but I also think on more substantive things. You can sit down and really have a career development conversation with an employee rather than sitting with them and talking with them about when they lost their last ID card or what their new address change is all about. Really getting to know them, understanding where there blockages might be, where they needed additional training, where they need additional resources, and really spend dedicated time helping them solve problems that truly will make a difference to your organization rather than just basically being their secretary, if you will, and doing things that they really could do themselves if you force them to do that.
Brandon: In the book you say money is the language of business, and I wanted to ask you, how do HR professionals, if they don’t really have a business background, they didn’t go to school for it, how do they get the business competency and be able to speak finance, marketing, operations, how do they have conversations with the executive team if they don’t really have that training or experience?
Lori: I am so glad you asked that because it is my favorite solution! And that is I really believe, and I have a great blog on my website about it, the value in getting involved in nonprofit organizations. So the reason I say that is, for example, let’s say you don’t have that kind of finance, accounting, economic, tax background that you might need to participate in some of these organizations. Pick any charity that’s important to you, it can be your kid’s PTA, it can be a religious organization, it can be something focused on a health issue that you or your family have, and volunteer to be on their local board. Just go in, there are always boards looking for people, and then volunteer to be their treasurer. There is no better way to learn than to jump in and do it. But obviously at your own company, your CFO or controllers are not just going to hand over the books to you one day. The advantage to doing it in a nonprofit is you get to know the people personally, so there is a little bit of safety, and you can talk about what you’re seeing in the finances, they can ask you questions, but they know you’re not really the expert, and typically there is in these organizations somebody who really is ultimately responsible who will watch over. I did this for myself with the National Speakers Association and took on the role of treasurer for our Illinois chapter and I said, but I am not having anything to do with taxes, that was my caveat. But our professional administrator said no problem I do the taxes and I will show you what I am doing, so I was in an oversight role just to make sure it was all fair, so I had exposure to it.So, of course, you can listen to the podcast, just like this. There are all sorts of opportunities for free webinars, you can go to your local community college, but I really love the idea of learning by doing, and I think being able to give back, I am a passionate giver as it is, and being able to be involved in a nonprofit that you really care about and feel good about, and you can take away some learning and education I think would really be a great win-win for everybody.
Brandon: I love that. I never really thought of that idea of just volunteering in a nonprofit and getting the hands-on experience and sort of coaching from the team members, I think that’s brilliant.
Lori: Well thank you! I really encourage people to do it.
Brandon: Yes, so for people who maybe don’t have the time to volunteer or maybe they just have limited time, what are some of the other things besides podcasts and those sorts of things that they could do for self-learning. Would you recommend going getting a MBA or other condensed courses?
Lori: You know, I would say if you don’t have time for a little bit of volunteer work you certainly probably don’t have time for an MBA! There are all sorts of courses online, there are lots of certificate programs, that sort of thing. I encourage people to be cautious. It seems like the more expensive that they are, the less valuable they might be! There are some programs out there that are just really focused on money making opportunities, so I would just encourage people to make sure that what they are getting or what they are learning is truly not just a certificate for the sake of putting that certificate on your resume, but rather something that really is going to further your career and provide the kind of tools and education that you want going forward. I would just encourage people to look around and to scrutinize heavily to make sure that what they are paying for, in fact, is something they are going to get a lot of value out of.
Brandon: I want to talk about HR titles real quick. HR Generalist is typically the title I have heard, but then in the last 5 years it’s changed to a HR Business Partner. Can you explain the shift to that business partner and what the differences are? I just think it’s popping up more and more and when you look at job descriptions they are functionally very different.Lori: They really are, and that’s what I was going to say. Typically I see the role HR Business Partner in much larger organizations where they are truly focused on helping leaders manage the human capital of that division, department, organization to move forward. Typically, at least what I have seen, where there is a HR Business Partner, there is support for benefits and comp and recruiting. And sometimes the HR Business Partner does that, but often the HR Business Partner facilitates that for their business unit through those subject matter experts we were talking about earlier that support the entire organization. In a smaller company, which is where a lot of my world had come from, really the title HR Generalist is exactly what it says. It’s that HR person who can do a little bit of everything. And I actually just saw a really interesting article, I am pretty sure it was in the Harvard Business Review, that HR Generalists tend to make 20% more than subject matter experts, because in organizations they’re really bringing everything to the table.
So when you hear “HR Generalist,” some people see that with a negative connotation. I would think of an HR Generalist like your internist or your family practitioner for a doctor, where it’s just the person who knows a little bit about everything. That can be a very highly skilled position. I consider myself an HR Generalist and I also consider myself really to be among the top of the profession, so I think it can be a very important role in many, many organizations. But you are right, where we see it and in bigger companies especially they are going to the term HR Business Partner and I think it’s really just to elevate those HR people to say what we are about is supporting the business. Yeah, we are doing it through people, but that’s not why our position exists, our position exists to support the business. So even in a small company if a HR Generalist were to choose that title of HR Business Partner I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. But I think HR Generalist should also be really a well-respected title. Typically HR Generalists are a little bit younger in there career, we may see them the people that are 3 to 7 years of experience, beyond that you start to move up to HR Manager, Director of HR, that sort of thing. So that’s a little bit of a difference too, its evolution.
Brandon: I would like to shift over to the point of view of a CEO real quick and I want to ask you, and this may change, but what are the things that are keeping CEOs up at night? The reason I ask that is really because I want to find out how HR people can figure that out so that they can use it to start having strategic conversations to solve some of those problems or challenges that CEOs are really having that keep them up.
Lori: I think it’s a great question. The literature will tell us that what CEOs say is finding top talent, and really making sure that the skills that they need tomorrow are in the workplace today. But in there you posed a great other question which is, how can HR find out? And that’s most critical. Just like with everything, we don’t want to assume what’s keeping our CEO up at night is what’s keeping the survey people up at night. So what do I say you do? I say walk in and ask him or her, and one of my tips, you know, a lot of HR people say to me well I don’t have access, he won’t take a meeting with me, dah dah dah dah, invite someone to lunch. It is amazing how many people that are so busy all day long will accept a lunch invitation. Everybody wants to go out for lunch! So where you’re having trouble making those connections, and I encourage HR people to make lunch dates with all the functional leaders, I think they should be going out to lunch with their CFO, with their head of operations, with somebody in marketing, it’s the best way to just get out of the building, be two people, and just talk about, what are your main goals this year? How can HR support those? What are you looking forward to doing with your next step? Those sorts of things, and really be there in the other person’s space and see how you can interact with them that way.
Brandon: You talked a second ago about how one of the main issues that will keep CEOs up at night is finding talent, and whether or not that’s true I think there is probably some truth to that and there probably will be for the years in the future. But I wanted to ask you, in the past I think HR people, recruiters would do more I think you call it “fill the seat activities,” why is that not such a good idea anymore, and why are we shifting to really just focusing on the long term and fit?
Lori: You know Brandon, it’s so much about what you said about technology, or our conversation around technology, it’s a complete waste of time. If we don’t put the time in up front to find a candidate that’s going to be a really good fit not just in skills but in culture fit, we are going to be turning around doing this same thing in 4, 6, 8 months. We do know today you’re not going to recruit somebody who’s going to stay 25 years, likely, but you want them to stay 3 years, 4 years, get a promotion, maybe they will stay 5, 6, 7 years. If you don’t find that right person upfront, people think nothing these days of starting a job, they will be in it for 3 months, decide that this isn’t for me, and in 2 minutes they will go find another job. And you’ve not only wasted your own time as an HR professional but you’re wasting your manager’s time, your manager’s wasting the coworker’s time, and even somebody who trained them.I was actually recently at a tour of Zappos, which was really fun. I think every HR person, if you are ever going to be in Vegas, go over there, it’s a great tour. They talked to us about how to hire someone for their call center, they spent 4 months interviewing them. Now obviously they are not talking to them all day every day for 4 months, but part of their logic is that they want people who really want that job and are willing to wait for it and are willing to come back in and take another test and sit through another interview. And they have good long term employees in their call center, so their logic is put the work in upfront so that once you’ve got a great person there you can move on and start running your business. I think there is some really good logic to be learned from that.
Brandon: The next question I have for you is sort of selfish, I found it pretty interesting in the point you made in the book, and from what Xenium does, I think this is very relevant. You talk about outsourcing and how in the past it was really seen as just a way to restructure and reduce headcounts and basically just do HR a different way. But we have seen it in our business where it’s not really outsourcing anymore, it’s more of an augmentation of HR, a different way of doing HR. We can wrap around HR people that maybe aren’t as experienced. What’s your overall take on outsourcing as a way to just cut headcount?
Lori: Well I think you are absolutely right that organizations like Xenium have a fabulous place in organizational culture, especially where the organization may not be large enough to support their own HR person, but they want their employees to have that kind of internal customer service and resources and those kinds of things. But also I think Xenium brings a great role to the table where the HR person does want to get into more of the strategic conversations and just doesn’t always have the time to do it. I see many organizations, I am sure you do too that you can speak to, where they’re using Xenium but they also have an in-house HR person, and that in-house HR person is having those dedicated one-on-one conversations with both employees and executives and they are going to the strategic planning retreat.
Earlier in my career I was in an organization similar to Xenium and I had one client and some of my coworkers had clients as well where we went to the strategic planning retreat. They just really didn’t want to be in the business of running the HR department but they understood the value of bringing people like the people on the Xenium team into the conversations. So I don’t think that they are mutually exclusive anymore, they can become very much a part of the overall organization, if you use them correctly.
Brandon: There is an interesting titbit you talk about concerning vendors, and I never really thought of this point, but under the section “Action Oriented and Accountable” you talk about doing a review of vendors in the marketplace every 3 years or so. I’m a marketing director and I get inundated with sales tools and marketing platforms and I get sort of annoyed by all the sales pitches at times, but you actually make a fantastic point in this book, that we should do a vendor review every 3 years, by putting out an RFP, and you built an awesome table in the book where you outline what each vendor can do. Could you maybe explain that thought process because I think it’s one that where people like myself get kind of annoyed by sales pitches and we should actually be paying attention, I think.
Lori: So here is what I say when I speak publicly, and it is one section of my presentations that I am actually thinking of building out into a presentation in and of itself, because people really like it. I do not believe in changing vendors every 3 years.
Brandon: Just to do it, you make that point too.
Lori: What I do think happens for many of us is that we use the same vendor over and over again and we get, for instance, this email blast that you’ve just come up within a new upgrade or a new product or a new this or a new that and we just ignore it, whatever, we go back to work.
By doing this review every 3 years, you will start to see what your preferred vendors’ competitors are out there doing, it maybe of interest to you, it may not, but it certainly would be a form for conversation between you and your vendor, and more times than not I have had my current vendors say to me, well yeah we do that, don’t you remember we sent out an email about it? And I always say no. I used to have a payroll vendor that happened with so frequently that we started setting up quarterly meetings with their sales person to just remind us of what came out that quarter. But the advantage to doing that kind of a review once every 3 years is really about being able to sit down and look at that and chances are the services you need today are not the services you needed the day that relationship began. Things have evolved, things have changed, your department may have got bigger, it may have got smaller. You may need more services. So I think it’s critical that we do that because especially with smaller organizations that are using a lot of outsourced vendors, we don’t often remember all the different services that they offer.
Brandon: We have been going kind of long, but you are just so darn interesting, and the book is fascinating too, so I want to recommend the book to a lot of people, but can you just sum up the discussions, sum up the book, and tell the listener why they should read this book, what do you hope people will get out of it, and where to go from here?Lori: Well, Brandon, I so appreciate that! Summing up the book is this: an HR person needs to advocate for themselves, they need to take that step up to be noticed, and really be what I have as the tagline, being that strategic executive who is action-oriented and technologically savvy. I think that as Brandon has kindly mentioned, there are lots of tools in the book that will help you do that. For people that are maybe not otherwise comfortable taking that kind of a role, there may be some ideas and some different worksheets and that sort of thing in the book that you can take with you as you go forward, so that’s really what I hope HR people will get out of it and out of this conversation, is just how to be that business person so that you can really have a fascinating HR career that goes far beyond the administrative pieces of HR.
Brandon: And I also wanted to just quickly mention for people listening who aren’t necessarily HR people, maybe they are a CEO or president and they are trying to get a hold of this HR thing and figure out what it is, you also wrote another book, HR You Can Use, and I am hoping we can invite you back and we can talk about that book because I think for this audience I think they need that as well and I would love to be able to discuss that with you.
Lori: Sure I would love to! That’s much more nuts and bolts about human resources for those people that either are business owners that are too small to have a HR department, or office managers that are managing HR, and likely a great book for a lot of Xenium’s clients who just want to learn a little bit more about the services you’re providing for them and making sure that you’re both on the same page. So there maybe some of your clients who would like to read it so they understand why some of the process you put in place are important as well.
Brandon: Lori, if people want to connect with you or buy the book or see what you’re up to, what’s the best way to reach out?
Lori: Well the best way, in a big way, is to just go to my website which is www.hrtopics.com. Of course I am on LinkedIn and Twitter and my Twitter is just Lori Kleiman I am easy to find there. Certainly if you want to buy the book you can buy it from my website or you can go to Amazon. All 3 books are actually available out on Amazon, so either one, whichever you prefer.
Brandon: Well, Lori Kleiman, thank you so much for joining the podcast! I learned a lot from it and I know that listeners will get a lot from this as well.
Lori: Great thanks Brandon, and I appreciate you guys having me here.