Source: hcamag.com
HR leaders from Porter Airlines, TIFF, KPMG share insights at HRD Canada’s HR Leaders Summit
The role of human resources is transforming from a reactive support function to a proactive, strategic partner. That was a key theme at a recent panel discussion at this week’s HR Leaders Summit in Toronto — a session attended by leaders from companies in many sectors looking at how HR can deepen their influence within their organizations.
Senior HR leaders shared candid insights while presenting their experiences as a guide for HR professionals seeking to build trust, foster resilience, and align people strategies with business goals. And a key part to strengthening HR’s influence is listening to and understanding their business partners, according to Natalie Witiuk, Director in KPMG’s People and Change Management Consulting Practice and the panel’s moderator.
“I find that particularly with groups of HR practitioners, they’re often the only ones that talk about the importance of actually listening and hearing about the business from the people that are running it. It certainly resonates,” said Witiuk.
The panel’s discussion emphasized that deepening HR’s influence requires a blend of business understanding, relationship building, empathy, and a relentless focus on aligning people strategies with organizational goals. By speaking the language of business, supporting leaders, and demonstrating the tangible value of HR initiatives, HR leaders can secure their place as trusted advisors and architects of organizational success.
Understanding the business to anticipate needs
For Marsha John-Greenwood, VP of People and Culture at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), the journey to greater HR influence began with a shift in mindset from being reactive to proactive, which means building relationships across the business and anticipating needs before they arise.
“It’s always critical to understand the business regardless of the work that you’re doing — we know that HR is universal, but your approach can depend on the organization and on the industry,” she said. “So it’s really important to understand and then to be I think the days of us being reactive is in the past. We need to be proactive. We need to be five steps ahead.”
Lawrence Hughes, Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at Porter Airlines, agreed with the high value of relationships in influencing organizational leaders.
“I think if you’re trying to influence, whether it’s your peers or people more senior than you, you have to have a relationship with them, work with your peers, and ensure that you’re listening to exactly the challenge they’re trying to solve,” he said. “And you want to make certain that you’re not internalizing and taking it personally if the advice that you’re giving isn’t necessarily resonating.”
Hughes shared a practical model for framing HR advice in terms that resonate with business leaders featuring three things — culture, compliance, and risk.
“When dealing with your CFO, they’re very much about compliance, so when you’re talking about people or an employee relations issue, think about the compliance piece, whether it’s ESA or the Canada Labour Code, there’s always a compliance piece,” he said. “Culture resonates with people that are in other areas, and with risk, it’s always about identifying the risk.”
Speaking the language of business leaders to build relationships
Witiuk agreed. “If I meet with specific business leads, I want to play back to them in their own language, and that’s where you start to build those relationships and get that trust. Ultimately, you’re HR, but you want everyone else to echo what you’re saying, and the only way you can do that is by building that trust and then them understanding that you understand them, they then become the advocate.”
John-Greenwood believes a top leadership skill is empathy, citing the COVID-19 pandemic as a crucible for HR leaders that demanded new levels of empathy and resilience.
“We had to position ourselves and almost put ourselves in [employees’] shoes and start to think about, from their perspective, what do they need?” said John-Greenwood, who was the interim Chief People Officer for the City of Toronto and director of a new service hub for for the city’s employees when the pandemic hit. “There was definitely a whole piece for me personally around change resilience, because I was actually brought in to do a three-year project and then it turned around to, ‘Can you do it in four months?’ because the need was a shared service, we didn’t have a way to communicate with our employees, and now we were in this crisis situation where we had to be able to communicate quickly with our employees.”
Establishing HR’s strategic role often requires patience and a tailored approach. John-Greenwood explained her experience at TIFF, where they just signed off on their people strategy three years after she joined the organization. “Your people strategy has to be aligned to the business strategy, so if you do something mid-flight, it’s quite difficult to get the same kind of buy-in,” she said.
“So I started with a delivery plan, which was to make sure that the fundamentals were there and then sort out anything that was on fire. But it really works as part of the business strategy as we were building that out.”
Investment in leadership development
At Porter, Hughes described how data-driven leadership development underpins their people strategy and their heavy investment on developing leaders: “We monitor and track team member engagement on an annual basis, and key to our strategy is leadership effectiveness,” he said. “Within our annual survey it’s programmed to ask key leadership questions of that next level leader, so at the end of the survey we have a leadership effectiveness score for all 150 leaders, providing they have more than five direct reports.”
“That was another thing coming out of COVID,” said John-Greenwood. “I think we recognized that we had to lean more into management because they had to build more resilience — our management development was around how can we support you support the team.”
The panelists agreed that HR’s seat at the table is earned through business acumen and demonstrating value.
“I think from an HR perspective, you have to understand the business you work in and how people influence results — and when a business decision is being made, it always impacts people,” Hughes said. “And I think that’s certainly why I’ve been invited to the table, to have a voice for the team members and the people but also to help guide because everything that’s done in business impacts people.”
Making HR essential to business strategies
“Our role is really to be able to present that in such a way that it’s nonsensical for them not to have you there, because you understand the business, you’re talking their language, but you’re presenting it in a way that’s talking about what we may need to do or things you may need to consider,” John-Greenwood said. “It’s business first, always, but people as an asset, and that’s what you bring to the table.”
It’s also something HR leaders have to continuously work at by providing the business partners with information on people, John-Greenwood added. “Sometimes it’s not always you that’s there initially, but I believe that that’s really what we have that no one else has in the business — we have that lens already, and it’s how we present it.”