Human resources professionals are an essential part of every successful business. Understanding how to properly lead and engage your employees will improve your company culture and your team’s overall performance.
Both leaders and team members can benefit from learning the people-centric skills common to HR professionals—especially during challenging times such as the current pandemic. To that end, 15 experts from Forbes Human Resources Council share some key HR skills that all leaders and professionals should work on and why.
Members of Forbes Human Resources Council share skills commonly found among HR team members that leaders and professionals in any specialty would do well to learn.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.1. Helping People Succeed
In my view, HR is not about making people happy. It is about helping them succeed in helping the business succeed. With this at the core, the HR skill everyone in the organization must learn is the ability to translate the objectives of the business into individual missions for each team member. The purposefulness leads to passion, discretionary efforts, and pride in one’s contribution and inclusion. - Sudhir Singh, Silicon Valley HR Network
2. Leading With Empathy
Everyone should learn how to lead with empathy, which is the ability to understand another person’s experience, perspective and feelings. While you do not need to agree with how someone views things, empathy allows you to better appreciate what they may be going through. Empathy allows you to see people as humans, cultivate trusting relationships and create more meaningful interactions. - Sherry Martin, Colorado Department of Human Services (CDHS)
3. Managing Organizational Change
With business strategies and priorities shifting, managing the change itself can often make or break the strategy. HR can go far beyond the project and/or product management side and focus more attention on the “people impact” side, communicating the “why” of the change and how it will directly impact the employee. - Brett Wells, Perceptyx
4. Active Listening
Active listening is a great skill for all leaders to learn and use when managing and communicating with employees. Honing in on what an employee is really saying and understanding the complete picture, then giving feedback as to what you are hearing from them—or what you think you’re hearing—helps enhance trust and fosters future positive communication among team members. - Laura Spawn, Virtual Vocations, Inc.
5. Resilience And Change Versatility
Turbulent-Uncertain-Novel-Ambiguous (TUNA) times demand resilience and change versatility in a successful leader. HR leaders are well versed in leading change and driving a culture of resilience. This skill is mandatory for any modern leader who needs to drive optimism, energy and engagement among team members. Change versatility enhances both the shelf life and influence of leaders. - Kumar Abhishek, S&P Global
6. Coaching
Leaders can benefit from coaching skills. Providing coaching puts the onus on the employee to take action and improves learning, development and engagement. - Jenna Hinrichsen, Advanced RPO
7. Creating Strong Cultures
Leaders often look to HR to set and execute agendas around culture and change. Often when engagement surveys come back, leaders heavily rely on HR to create a response and strategy. While HR should play a key partnership role, leaders who have a core skillset in creating strong cultures and driving change—with the partnership of HR—typically see better overall results. - Robin Kirby, Benefitfocus
Forbes Human Resources Council is an invitation-only organization for HR executives across all industries. Do I qualify?
8. Employee Advocacy
HR should not be the only voice advocating for the employee. All leaders and professionals should focus on how they can help their teams and support them better. They will feel that support and will rise to the level of faith you place in them. If an employee feels that they have supporters all around them and that they are cared about as a person, it will be a great place to work! - Ben DeSpain, Velocity, a Managed Services Company
9. Urgency And Accountability
All HR leaders should practice active listening and developing a sense of urgency and accountability when it comes to follow-up actions. Most HR leaders listen but are slow to follow up and act. As a result, most employees see HR leaders as not being accountable for their actions. HR leaders often only move with a sense of urgency on matters that have legal consequences and are not as fast about meeting people’s true, empathetic needs. They need to “manage down” better. - Madhukar Govindaraju, Numly™, Inc.
10. Understanding The Business And Its Customers
Understanding your business is critical. Too often, HR leaders think their only job involves being empathetic, but that will only get you so far. In business, how the company makes money and who your customers are matters—a lot. The best HR professionals understand the business they’re in and find ways to leverage that knowledge to hire and nurture the best talent for their company. - Tracy Cote, StockX
11. Key Business Skills
HR leaders are business leaders, and any opportunity to build business skills in other functional areas makes sense. Operations, finance and technology are all areas that overlap with HR, and having a greater understanding of these areas can make HR better at interdisciplinary communication and strategy. - Marcia F. Robinson, Raye Martin Group LLC
12. Data Analytics
HR teams work a lot with data. They’re great at looking at and analyzing large amounts of information about job seekers, employees and the market, then distilling that information into something useful and powerful. As big data and artificial intelligence become even more pervasive drivers of all facets of business, it behooves all professionals to become comfortable with understanding and analyzing data. - Rick Hammell, Elements Global Services
13. Seeking Out Multiple Perspectives
HR professionals must understand there are two sides to every story. When things are going really right or really wrong, it’s HR’s job to hear both sides of the story to figure out how they got there. Greener managers will hear one side of the story and will be quick to jump to conclusions, but you can’t get the whole story from one side alone. - Kristen Fowler, JMJ Phillip Executive Search
14. Developing Trust
There is still a stigma with HR people that they are manager advocates and not employee advocates. HR leaders need to make sure that they develop trust. Employees want to feel that they can approach HR with issues in the same way managers do. HR is a tough role—you are looked upon as everyone’s confidant—but gaining trust is key. - Heather Smith, Flimp Communications
15. Recruiting And Hiring
Leaders who learn any of the individual skills needed for the recruiting or hiring process would benefit from it. However, there are a number of skills recruiting entails, including candidate sourcing, interviewing, background screening, salary negotiation and offer presentation. Therefore, leaders who learn the skill of recruiting would benefit far more than they would by learning only one individual HR skill. - John Feldmann, Insperity
