Rebecca Sinclair is Chief People and Corporate Affairs Officer at American Tire Distributors.
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Forget the traditional image of our role as human resources professionals. The need for business leaders and executives to see our department as a strategic partner—not just a function—is past due. The reality is we're already doing so much more. We've shifted into people enablement, meaning we gather data-led insights and apply them in a way that powers business performance. Our department doesn't just facilitate growth anymore. It drives it.
To stay competitive in today’s evolving business landscape, companies need to be more agile in how they manage talent and guide transformation. This means involving HR in decision making. When we're left out of the strategic loop, executives and team leaders may overlook how methods like targeted upskilling and reskilling can support business goals. This can lead to missed opportunities.
Organizations must adopt a mindset that aligns talent strategies with overall business goals. With strong connections and a positive company culture, talent development is accelerated. When HR is brought into the strategic decision-making processes, we help combine leaders' expertise with data-driven insights to identify areas of improvement and make more informed decisions that drive meaningful change.
The Alchemy Of Transformation
Every organization has its DNA, but it's more than emotional intelligence and analytics. As HR leaders, we can be a strategic partner for defining a more-evolved DNA, both internally and externally. This is because we're at the forefront of understanding and leveraging organizational psychology—the study of employee behaviors, team dynamics and how leaders function. Organizations need these richer insights to identify ways to develop the workforce in a more sophisticated and elevated manner, maximizing potential and performance.
Early in my career as an HR strategist in organizational development and effectiveness, I was fortunate to gain a preview into the benefits of this strategy. Having performed all HR functions, I could assess leaders using a holistic, whole-brain approach and supply them with insights to unlock their full potential. This transparency into how they operated is what elevated teams to the top echelon of performance.
Today, we have the benefit of advanced technology and systems to support this kind of assessments. As the HR field becomes more sophisticated, almost every product we use now is highly intelligent and specialized. The data they produce can inform every discipline of people enablement, from learning, development and compliance to talent, recruiting and business performance. Combined with the support of human resources information systems (HRIS), we can help make targeted decisions that steer companies' direction and create a more powerful predictor of success by tying everything together.
Cultivating Mental Agility
With the support of HR's recruiting, development and organizational structures and designs, leaders have the integrated ecosystem needed to build better teams. While leaders manage operational excellence, we enable deeper understanding of team members as individuals. This cultivates greater mental agility. We bring in people with the drive to deliver excellence, as well as create experiences to help them develop new skills and become more well-rounded.
The days of leaders simply managing their teams and providing minimal development and training are over. Businesses that maintain yesterday’s perspective on HR will be left behind. It's time to foster the agility and nimbleness required to adapt to changing demands.
3 Ways To Build Agility
As HR leaders, we have several avenues for achieving greater organizational agility.
• Candidate Selection: Hiring quality is crucial to ensure the best employee-role fit. Data analytics and psychometrics can help identify the key competencies and skills required for success in specific roles. This allows your HR team to create targeted job descriptions for roles at all levels. Recruiters and hiring managers can then ensure better alignment between candidates’ competencies and the traits required for success. These insights also create synergy with the company culture and values.
• Employee Development: Leveraging assessment and performance metrics helps identify individual employees' areas for improvement. Then, you can provide targeted training and development opportunities.
• Performance management: By analyzing metrics like employee engagement, turnover rates and productivity, you can assess the effectiveness of HR strategies and programs and make data-driven adjustments as needed. From an organizational development perspective, you can use data to understand your organization's DNA and make critical people-enablement strategies that drive business transformation.
Next-Gen HR: Not Just A People Function Anymore
We've come a long way from traditional HR. Now, our field has a new, holistic and data-driven face. What does this mean for our day-to-day work? We can now understand people at a macro level. This allows us to support our organizations in building a culture that capitalizes on each person’s competencies, knowledge and traits. The result? We're developing the next generation of talent at the speed of business.
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