DONT PUBLISH: TEST B

Leadership transitions are challenging. When making the leap to a new position, almost half (46%) of executives across functions — HR included — underperform. For CHROs, the struggle doesn’t stem from a lack of skills; it’s due to factors ranging from limited support networks to temporary support for the first few months. But executives who effectively plan and execute their transitions reach full productivity nine months before less-prepared peers.

Gartner analysis reveals nine critical moments that CHROs face in their transition and ways to manage these moments to speed their path to efficacy.

Moment No. 1: Set a clear strategy for your listening tour

Many CHROs begin their tenure with a listening tour — a series of first-time meetings with various stakeholders throughout the organization. Without a clear strategy, these meetings can become exhausting and yield little information.

As a new CHRO, leverage the knowledge of the CEO and HR leadership team to identify obvious and less-obvious stakeholders to engage. The list should include key clients and partners who are most critical to business objectives, end users of talent processes, such as managers and employees, and even relevant regulatory and legal bodies, industry associations and customers.

Focus questions on the most pressing concerns right now, anticipated challenges coming over the next 12 to 36 months, priorities for the CHRO role, and how the effectiveness of senior managers and the CHRO is evaluated.

Moment No. 2: Solidify your working relationship with your CEO

Most new CHROs talk with the CEO about talent priorities during the interview process. During the transition, shift this conversation to building a working relationship with the CEO — as both a direct report and a confidant.

To navigate this potentially complex relationship, map out the key responsibilities that come with each role. As the CEO’s direct report, key responsibilities include setting and executing the HR function’s mandate and assisting with organizational planning and decisions. In the role of the CEO’s confidant, the focus is on coaching and counseling the executive leadership team and providing informal feedback on the CEO’s performance.

Moment No. 5: Align HR leaders to a new HR strategy

Transitioning and new CHROs must gauge team effectiveness and determine how best to align HR staff to their vision and strategy. To evaluate your HR function’s maturity, identify what the team thinks are the function’s critical priorities and ensure consensus and engagement around the vision for the HR function. 

Next, evaluate the capabilities of HR leadership team members in different business-driven scenarios the function will face in the future. The goal is to build a bench that can execute the new or existing strategy but is also flexible enough to adapt to strategy changes.

Moment No. 6: Connect HR staff to the new vision and strategy

Instead of communicating strategy top down, solicit input from HR staff to test the assumptions that inform the new strategy. Invite staff to stress-test the assumptions behind the new HR strategy and give them permission to identify where underlying assumptions are flawed. 

Also empower HR staff by communicating relevant functional and business data and establishing the link between business data and the HR staff’s day-to-day work. This enables members of the HR function to prioritize their work based on organizational needs.

The CHRO can also make their HR staff more autonomous by creating a more flexible, employee-focused goal-setting process, based on linking organizational goals to individual HR staff goals and enabling HR staff to take ownership of their own goals.

Example SubHeading

Outsourcing tasks can have an impact on customer loyalty, so service leaders must set and communicate CX expectations to their providers. Typical contracts contain service targets, such as average handle time (AHT), average speed of answer (ASA) and abandon rate (ABN), but too singular a focus on these metrics can be misleading. While it’s true that outsourcers deliver cost savings by prioritizing efficiency, too much emphasis on managing “numbers” instead of people leaders can promote the wrong behaviors. 

To avoid focusing solely on efficiency, for example, contracts should also define qualitative behavioral expectations for the service center. Leaders and business process outsourcers should align on the CX vision to meet customer expectations and ensure that all staff have a customer-centric mindset. 

To realize benefits from customer service outsourcing, service and support leaders responsible planning and operations must:

• Maintain brand equity by keeping service center activities that are critical to CX in-house (for example, loyalty programs, top advocate support and escalation care).
• Mitigate risk to CX and fully realize cost savings by defining CX priorities and “what good looks like” with the business process outsourcer (for example, defining specific customer-centric behaviors expected of the agents during transactions).
• Engage internal frontline employees through growth and developmental opportunities to achieve maximum CX benefits from high-value activities kept in-house.