Leadership: investment in human capital

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infuse best practices and bring a critical external world-view.

A good HR practitioner understands not just the cost of action but equally possesses the knowledge of value addition that every initiative creates, as well as the inter-linkages that harness desired goals.

The vital elements of the HR value chain start assuming significance as soon as an organisation is formed with a vision and works out its strategy and business plan. The first critical element thereafter is the creation of an organisational structure, which serves as the bridge between strategy and execution. The aspects of enabling role clarity and evaluation of relative job worth help people to own the process. The hiring of talent ensures that all the defined positions are manned with the right people. Creating a robust compensation system helps attract talent, and a well thought-through performance management system well-aligned with business goals sets the tone and tenor desired. The whole cycle of attracting, motivating and retaining talent forms the crux of talent management. A focus on training and development is vital to ensure that people are continuously trained, re-skilled, both on technical areas as well as in soft skills. Each of these steps require specialist expertise.

Even in organisations that are not being created anew, most of these HR elements could necessitate a serious evaluation and review to enable that they achieve organisational goals in changing times. An important and growing field is the need to define a set of universal competencies that people must possess to enable organisational success into the future.

Mature organisations are, indeed, investing heavily in defining a competency mode, conducting leadership assessments quite often through external HR cons-ultants, and then weaving integrated leadership capability development programmes to develop talent. Pouring resources into nurturing human capital is akin to planting a Chinese bamboo; it requires two years of patient watering every single day and when the shoot breaks through, it grows 50 feet tall in less than two months—an investment, not an expense.

Unleash the latent people potential of your organisation now to reap rich rewards by being a people CEO. Call your head of HR over and spend today to rediscover the untapped wealth. The pop group Eagles remind us in their song: So often time it happens, we all live our life in chains, and we never even know we have the key.