Seven Key Skills Every HR Manager Needs
If helping people to succeed in their professional life gives you a sense of satisfaction, a career in human resources is ideal. But even if you’re a people person, you’ll need to demonstrate key skills if you’re going to excel in your role.
A productive HR manager who achieves their career goals while helping others to do the same must draw on many different attributes and skills — here are seven of the most important.
1. The Ability to Compartmentalize
Human resources can be a highly emotional area of business. One day you could be overseeing a major recruitment drive, and telling candidates that they’ve just landed a new job. The next day, however, you could be managing a disciplinary process, and telling someone you know that they’ve lost the job they love.
An HR manager has to switch between these two very different roles regularly, which is a very difficult to do. You have to be professional and, at times, ruthless. But you also need to demonstrate empathy and compassion.
The unique demands of an HR manager’s job require the ability to compartmentalize. Business is business; if this means making employees redundant, you need to leave your personal feelings at home. All of your decisions have to be made with your head, and not your heart. If you can deal with the issues without letting your personal feelings about the person cloud your judgment, you might make a great HR manager.
2. Legal Expertise
While HR managers don’t perform the job of employment lawyers, they do have to make business decisions that comply with local legislation. Employment law is always a complex area, and it’s often open to interpretation. You should therefore have a grasp of the main legal principles that govern your role.
There’s knowing the law, and knowing the spirit of the law. In many cases, you’ll need to apply your knowledge to make decisions in very different contexts. For example, you might need to take action against two individuals who are guilty of the same transgression. But one individual’s extenuating circumstances may be more compelling than the other’s. You’ll need to make a judgment call, which requires a “feel” for the law — and not just knowing the law.
3. The Ability to Multitask
The job of an HR manager is a highly complex and varied one. You might have a team of HR personnel to manage, as well as the rest of the company’s employees. You have to steer the entire ship in the right direction, but also get involved in some of the day-to-day aspects of HR.
There’s no typical day for an HR manager. You might start your day with a bullying allegation, and finish it by delivering a new training program. You have to take control of certain issues, and delegate others. HR managers do a lot of plate-spinning, which means you’ll need a natural aptitude for multitasking to succeed in the profession.
4. People Skills
While you have to follow procedure, legislation and company guidelines as an HR manager, you can never lose sight of the fact that you’re dealing with people — and all of their emotional traits.
Everyone is different; we all react to certain situations in our own way. A great HR manager understands and empathizes with the person behind the problem. In order to engineer the best possible outcome, an HR manager changes their approach accordingly. This ability relies on natural instinct and intuition, and that’s something you can’t teach.
Working in human resources often involves communicating with people from a wide range of social, economic and educational backgrounds. If conversing effectively with many different types of individual comes naturally to you, there’s a chance that you might make a fantastic HR manager.
5. Talent Spotting
An HR manager is usually the person ultimately responsible for an organization’s recruitment strategy. But recruiting isn’t just a matter of hiring people; it’s about spotting talent, identifying the right characteristics public relations.
Not only do you need to identify the right skills for your organization, you need to find the right personalities. And once you’ve done that, you must work towards nurturing talent in order to maximize potential.
6. The Ability to Deal with Change
To succeed as an HR manager, simply being able to adapt to change isn’t enough — you need to manage change. A lot of people become stressed and intimidated when major change occurs at work, and it’s usually down to the HR team to manage this.
Imagine your company is restructuring through the removal an entire layer of management. Not only do you need to drive change through a series of practical steps, you need to help those affected continue to perform during what could be a challenging time.
7. Commercial Awareness
HR managers tend to struggle in their positions when they can’t see or understand the bigger picture. A lot of the job involves viewing situations in context. If you can’t do this, you won’t be able to give the organization the human resources it needs.
HR departments are often detached from the rest of the organizations they serve — which is always a mistake. In order to help your company achieve its commercial goals, you need to be involved in them. How much profit did the company make last year? Where are the opportunities for sales growth? What are the most important trends within the industry? These issues, and countless more like them, must be understood if you’re going to deliver the workforce required for commercial success.
As an HR manager, you need to understand both the organization and the people who serve it. If you can do that, you’re well on your way to achieving success in the role.