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The rise of the HR Director

February 12, 2010 by · 3 Comments 

Has the time come for the HR Director to become the CEOs’ best friend?

A colleague of mine shared an interesting perspective the other day: “20 years ago, the CEO favorite tended to be the Marketing Director. Lately, for some reason, it is the CFO. In five years time it will be the HR Dirfriendsector”

And CEOs seem to agree. In the PricewaterhouseCoopers Global CEO survey for 2009 the Number One challenge turned out to be “access to, and retention of, key talent”.

Even the newspapers are picking up on the growing importance of the HR Director, exemplified in this Wall Street Journal article.

Are you friends with your HR Director?

Filed under Observation, Studies and reports · Tagged with , ,

About Henrik Martin
Henrik is one of our founders. He has been working as a consultant since 1994. His previous work experience includes McKinsey&Co, the Adera Group, and Intellectual Capital Sweden. He holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from M.I.T. Currently, Henrik is living in Stockholm with his family and two hamsters.

Comments

3 Responses to “The rise of the HR Director”
  1. Peder Hofman-Bang says:
    February 12, 2010 at 11:15

    Added your RSS feed to my Google Reader. You’ve got talent!

  2. Jarek Soltys says:
    February 12, 2010 at 11:38

    Henrik,
    actually, being a President and Managing Director of KEMA Quality Polska, an accredited body in management systems certification, I am also a HR Director.
    The nature of this business is auditing, which means checking the conformity of the management systems with the set of specific requirements (e.g. legal, corporate, international standards) by asking “good” questions.
    Therefore the quality of our service depends directly on the competence niveau of our broadly experienced auditors as well as of the dedicated project management teams. So, both in daily business and strategic decisions, the question how the competence of the assigned personnel matches/will match the customer’s expectations profile, requires careful consideration.
    This is a hard, but inevitable way to build your brand and maintain it for decades, no matter how sophisticated are your customers’ needs.
    Kind regards
    Jaroslaw Soltys

  3. Henrik Martin says:
    February 12, 2010 at 14:36

    Jarek,
    Thanks for your reflection. I think you are very right in that most CEOs are actually HR Directors as well, for most companies today it is so obviously connected with future suceess. But very few CEOs would refer to themselves as an HR-person. Is this because the term HR still is commensurate with the old Personell Admininstration in many peoples’ minds?

    .Henrik

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