Perhaps the single most telling challenge that managers face as they advance along a table of organization is that they will find more and more of their time spent managing people who have hands-on skills and expertise that they do not personally have themselves. A new lower level manager is probably going to be working primarily with people who share similar skills and experience to their own and on issues for which they have direct hands-on experience and all the requisite technical expertise. As they advance, and with time as their areas of expertise advance beyond the state of the art they have direct experience with, they begin to find themselves working with people who know things and do things, and who have crucial work experience they do not share. This is where the management challenge comes in – knowing how best to evaluate the people reporting to them, and the quality of their work, both in setting goals and priorities and in measuring progress and identifying problems and issues in the work done.

Some managers handle this shift smoothly and effectively, learning how to work with a progressively wider range of experience and prospective, and how to judge both employee performance and project and program accomplishment. Some managers on the other hand limit both their own career potential and those of their team members, and limit the capabilities of their team’s performance by never effectively taking that growth step in their own professional development.

What does this have to do with HR? Unfortunately, that is an all too valid question, and particularly as managers in an organization’s varied functional areas and departments seek to manage their teams as an ongoing process with stages like project/program requirements gathering, staffing requirements gathering and the pinpointing and prioritization of new staff hiring requirements, job requirements development and posting, job applications gathering and interviewing, and onboarding for those hired – all this simply prelude to what happens on the job and in the manager’s team.

Much is made of whether HR is a strategic function as now practiced, and what the word “strategic” means in this context, but in a real sense that does not matter if the non-HR managers at all levels in an organization do not have the skills and direct, ongoing human resources support they would need to carry out their crucial employment and project/program management responsibilities. How many mangers are trained in how to read a resume or in how to interview job candidates with anything approaching real expertise in the performance management side of this?

And this comes back to the basic challenge this note really begins with in the second paragraph. How many managers in an average organization are given systematic training and guidance in how to write an effective job description? A departmental manager who does not know how to interview or hire, or how to really effectively manage the human management skills needed for that, but who does know the technical requirements of the job, sitting down with someone from HR who has a perhaps abstract, generalized knowledge of HR and performance management and who knows nothing about the skills or experience requirements needed for this job being interviewed for, can cobble together a job description, etc and muddle through to hire someone. This is often what happens. But it is not going to be all that effective as a basic process with all these disconnects built into it. And this shows as managers make hiring decisions based on what may be flawed processes, as projects and programs are carried out and perhaps more tellingly this shows in how employees view their workplace and the management they report to.

That set of gaps between HR and other departments can lead to the types of disconnects cited in my opening challenge statement, and especially when the hiring manager does not have a full understanding of the technical skills and experience either, only knowing that some particular skill is needed to address specific and perhaps pressing issues and priorities. What they do not fully know themselves, they cannot explain to their HR counterpart even when attempt is made to bridge the gaps there, in making effective hiring and employee management decisions.

Much of my experience is in Information Technology. No CIO knows with a detailed hands-on level of expertise every specialty needed by their IT department and with technology continuing to advance at a rapid rate, they do not generally even know what skills and experience are needed for every area their department is responsible for, at least in detail. So they rely on managers who report to them, and perhaps on managers who report to those managers to handle that level of detail.

What is strategic HR? It is possible to argue the definition in a variety of ways but one point I would cite is that any valid definition has to functionally connect HR and performance management skills of a high order outside of the HR department and into the departments and offices of managers in general throughout the organization. If HR with its skills is functionally disconnected from the side of other departments with their understanding of the technical skills, HR cannot be strategic because it cannot begin to grasp let alone address strategic plans, processes or priorities of the organization as a whole. And I write this with an awareness of the limitations of what both RH and hiring managers can know about hiring requirements and certainly for rapidly evolving technologies and skill sets.

Where are the key gaps in this much needed connection within organizations? HR generally vets job descriptions for wording as to non-discrimination and related issues and HR generally posts job descriptions and serves as gatekeepers for gathering incoming resumes and cover letters for initial screening. If a candidate is hired they generally own the onboarding process, at least for basic, organization-wide onboarding requirements. The hiring department and hiring manager own the technical details of the job description and that side of the resume filtering and selecting, and the interviewing processes. On the face of it, it sounds like most everything is included and covered. But some of the questions raised above keep coming back. How many managers even know what behavioral interviewing is, let along how to do it or why? How many HR departments train managers in performance management as a basic, core aspect of their career development? How many HR departments see really understanding the departments they serve as crucial enough to their own performance to even consider sending some of their best people into other departments to learn something of what they do and the languages and metrics they speak? And somewhere in this is that initial challenge and an awareness that even the professionals within a department cannot know everything about their departmental specialties and areas of expertise so this has to be done with an acute awareness of the need to judge where you do not always have the hands-on experience to know all the right answers, or sometimes even the right questions.

Welcome to the second quarterly roundup of the latest thinking and developments around leadership, HR, innovation, talent management and organisational development. I have tried to pick out the most interesting or thought provoking of the high volume o…