What builds a great HR leader?

It takes a village to grow great leaders. How can today's aspiring HR leaders shape themselves to lead for the next decade?

I recently was in a conversation with a class of aspiring HR professionals. I wanted to provide them a series of practical things that are actionable for their learning. As much as I looked far and beyond for all things that would help them prepare, I realized more that the answer is closer. I decided to look within my own career path, tell them a story of how it panned out for me and give them a learning path that I crafted for myself.

My career path wasn’t as planned as it should be and my education was rather spur of moment decisions. The underlying belief was that I was extremely sure of not ending up doing something I won’t enjoy. So, at about every point of my education, I was probably the last to decide in any given group. And always, I would not end up in premier institutions as I would not have enough time to apply or prepare for their gating tests.

I graduated specializing in Computer Science, not because I wanted to be employed in that area, but because of a natural curiosity of how computers work. I was one of the few people in my cohort who could write good code and problem solve areas that were not part of the curriculum. And again, it was not centered around my passion to code, but my ability to have understanding of how products work and how they benefitted users. This inclination led me to my MBA. I was clear about only one thing – I wanted to learn and not be taught. So, I ended signing up to be part of the first batch of MBAs from a traditional engineering college instead of premier schools with gating tests. But, I started a lot of things that helped me be self-taught. Your daily habits are what define you. You need to stack up your day with small actions that compound to building the right skills over a long term.

The Skillset

When I did an introspection to provide aspiring students an actionable learning path, I found that I regularly flex a set of skills through different stages of my career. These skills apply to a majority of contexts, across industries and organizations at different stages of maturity and sizes.

I also charted out which of these skills are aspiring professionals expected to flex at different stages of their career, so that we can visualize the ones that can be built in student life. Read this as a set of skills that you will “flex” or extensively lean on at each career stage.

Practical to-dos

In every subject pick 5 topics that inspired you and add them to a Practice Backlog. Your goal is to apply these concepts somewhere and learn from it. Even today, I have a practice backlog, where I have a list of things that I learnt and need to find an application for.

Build Business Understanding

For any career, you need to understand how the business machinery works. You need to have a mental model of how value gets added and work passes from one point to the other. Ever wonder why there is friction between two teams? Understanding of the basic machinery helps you identify points of leverage, friction and vulnerability in the flow of work. There are many ways to build understanding, but one that has worked well for me is Strategyzer’s Business Model Canvas. Once you map the key components of a business, learn to derive value maps (learn more about value maps here) that will help you build your ability to deep dive into problems. You will not get it right the first few times. Your effort is compounded by debating in class and inviting point of views from others.

Practical to-dos

You need to exercise this skill to build it. Try building the business model canvas for multiple industries. Make assumptions about points of friction, high leverage activities, etc. Connect your assumptions with publicly available financial/market data. Find an ally who works in the industry and debate your assumptions.

Build Contextual Understanding

Leaders make choices basis assumptions that they derive from years of context. You have years to solidify your own assumptions and context, it is challenging to replicate this. The best way to learn as a student is to follow important decisions leaders have made and place yourself in those shoes. Stay close to business news that bring you major decisions, then play out the decisions and develop your point of view by reasoning these decisions and plotting the fallout. Normally, in due course, the outcome and effect of high impact decisions is often covered in news and it provides a way to validate your thinking. You can learn a lot this way! Am still learning from my plotting of the effects of Gates stepping away from Microsoft. I am still trying to systemize my learning and understanding what happens when a founder CEO steps away.

Practical to-dos

Identify 3 large scale events that you think has high impact to how an organization functions. Typically, these events could range from leadership exits, a new product launching to even a stock split. Develop a point of view on why it happened and what are the difficult choices that were made. Find an ally who you could debate with and make a log of potential fallouts.

Accelerate your Learning

Form your opinion and learn to be open to change them. Your learning accelerates by presenting your point of view and being open to debate them. You need to establish a set of allies (peers & mentors) whose perspectives you value and at least two mentors who can build clarity into your thinking. Your support network undergoes changes as you progress in your career, but what does not change is that you have allies who challenge your thinking.

The key accelerator to your development is doing these things habitually and constantly. You can further learn to program your habits to your advantage with “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. The essence though is learning early what works for you and doing that every single day, compounding your way to accelerating your development.

These ideas worked well for me. But, it has been years since I was a student. I hope that these ideas are actionable even in today’s context. I owe this article to the set of students I had a conversation with as it inspired a lot of thinking and retrospection. Do you have more ideas?