Effective leaders understand the broad operations and processes that drive growth. However, to be a successful leader, it’s important to understand not only operations and business best practices, but to be proactive in developing influence in your organisation.
Here are the eight standout skills and traits today’s influential HR and talent leaders have in common.
1. Maintain a growth mindset
Great HR and talent leaders never stop learning! Deepening your knowledge of the ever-expanding field of talent will help you to better manage, support, and lead your team and organisation. Putting this knowledge into practice can serve to encourage the growth and development of your team and the larger workforce.
Refine your knowledge by reading articles, following other leaders in the talent space on social media, attending webinars and events, and listen to podcasts; you can take this even further by pursuing a degree or professional certification to continue to refine your knowledge.
Successful talent and HR leaders display a thirst for understanding the benefits of new trends and staying connected to the latest industry updates. By incorporating your knowledge of best HR practices into your daily life, you can more effectively support your organisation’s strategic goals and direction.
2. Listen deeply (for what people “say” beyond words)
Communication coaches and authors constantly talk about the critical role of active listening – that is, listening more, and talking less. We know this already! But listening deeply goes beyond words and just hearing what people are saying.
True leaders listen for what others don’t express in words. They probe to discover and analyse what their team members are truly saying, their wants and needs, sometimes before they even know what they mean themselves. (Some consider that ability either intuition or psychological perception, but whatever the skill, they’re able to “hear” what’s not said and translate the message.)
This type of leader often sits quietly at the periphery of a conversation, encouraging others to speak up with ideas or opinions.
3. Communicate effectively
Clear, effective messages can boost morale, increase loyalty and even save on your organisation’s bottom line. Research reveals that organisations that use highly effective communication practices are more than twice as likely to significantly outperform competitors that do not.
Many opportunities exist for talent and HR leaders to develop effective communication skills; for example, strong writing skills can translate into clearly understood policies and procedures that drive organisational results. Great verbal communication skills can help your workforce to understand better their roles in securing effective outcomes and motivate them to perform at their best.
4. Live your organisation’s values
Do your values align with your organisation’s values? You can demonstrate your personal commitment to your organisation’s values in different ways. Great leaders lead by example. Take the lead in advancing your organisation’s values to all employees. You are uniquely positioned to build a community of employees who want to internalise and demonstrate your organisation’s values and ethical behaviours.
5. Plan and think strategically
We know. It’s tempting to get caught up in your day to day, narrowly focusing your attention to build the most effective and productive workforce. On the surface, this concentration seems to make sense, but today, HR and talent leaders need to take a step back to assess the bigger picture.
To be an effective leader, you must think strategically and connect recruitment and talent processes with wider business strategies – doing so requires an understanding of your organisation’s values, mission, goals and aspirations.
6. Measure and understand your metrics
Many HR professionals recognise the value of developing outstanding practices that attract, leverage, and retain the best employees for their organisations. Determining the value of those practices on the organization’s bottom line requires you to be able to understand and use data, metrics and key business statistics. There are many metrics you can choose to track (turnover, quality of applications, quality of hire, etc); ensure you’re selecting the right ones to assess ROI. (For example, preparing a cost/benefit analysis for offering a wellness program.) Metrics matter!
7. Be prepared to ask the tough questions
Great communicators are prepared to ask questions they don’t know the answers to; that is, those that open rather than close doors.
Of course, questions can be used to gather information, but influential HR and talent leaders also ask questions to make others reflect, generate creative thinking, provoke caution and guide people.
Note though, they don’t ask questions to sidetrack meetings or conversations. Instead, they use questions to discover opportunities and raise broader considerations.
Strong HR and talent leaders become known for the tough questions they ask — those questions that can’t be answered quickly. Hard questions result in hard thinking and sometimes even harder work.
8. Summarise for the benefit of the group
This final skill links back to good communication. Sometimes you need to be able to synthesise key points from a discussion and communicate them clearly to that audience or a larger group, and be clear on action steps.
Listening is not enough. Analysing is not enough. Guiding and challenging is not enough. Influential leaders lead from the front. They communicate well with clear, concise courses of action to move people and their organisations forward.