Execution Excellence: Core HR Competency To Develop
Over the last few years, the role of HR professionals has changed dramatically due to market labor changes, generative AI, and global skills shortages. Successfully executing the HR strategy has become more important than ever, which requires HR professionals to develop a new set of competencies to meet the business needs.
This article introduces Execution Excellence, a Core Competency of AIHR’s T-Shaped HR Competency Model. We also propose tactics for you to adopt when developing this competency.
Contents
What is Execution Excellence?
1. Action Orientation
2. Problem Solving
3. Interpersonal Skills
What is Execution Excellence?
Execution Excellence refers to “how HR gets the job done.” It describes a set of behaviors that underpin the additional four Core Competencies of the T-Shaped HR Competency Model (Business Acumen, Data Literacy, Digital Ability, and People Advocacy). It is also key to enabling the Specialist and Leadership Competencies.
Put simply, Execution Excellence guides HR professionals in how to execute and ensure that HR drives meaningful impact for all stakeholders.
With increasing workplace complexity, it’s important for HR to become master problem-solvers and find new solutions to address organizational needs — all this while balancing long-term strategy with short-term operational responsibilities. Increasingly, we see HR professionals being asked to apply analytical thinking to drive informed and decisive action.
Execution Excellence is divided into three key dimensions that relate to the ability to work with different people, solve problems, and carry out plans to achieve desired results. These are:
- Action Orientation
- Problem Solving
- Interpersonal Skills
Mastering these skills can help you to be effective in your role and help your organization succeed.
For example:
- Action Orientation skills are key to developing effective strategies or implementing change programs.
- Problem Solving capabilities enable you to tackle complex challenges, such as how to adapt employee value propositions to the hybrid workforce.
- Strong Interpersonal Skills are vital for communicating and building relationships to drive effective HR partnering.
Below, we explore each of these dimensions and how you can develop these behaviors.
1. Action Orientation
The first dimension is called Action Orientation. Here, the focus is on managing resources and planning, adapting, and organizing activities to get the desired results. Being action-oriented helps HR drive the implementation of new projects, processes, and practices. In addition, it also enables you to be more resilient in dealing with changes and ambiguity in the environment.
Action-oriented behaviors include:
- Setting clear goals, planning tasks, and using time well
- Being responsible for reaching goals on time
- Adapting to and embracing changes
- Organizing and using resources well to achieve results.
Betty is an HR manager who wants to implement a new HR service technology platform over the next 12 months. She starts by setting clear goals for the new platform and creating a step-by-step plan for the whole project. She involves her team in selecting the platform, ensuring it does what they need. She also sets up regular meetings with the IT department and vendor to track how things are going and ensure they stick to the plan.
During the testing phase, there are technical issues, and some employees are unhappy with changing to this new system. To address this, Betty allocates more team members to the training and performance coaching team to help with the implementation and upskilling.
In the final stages, she puts ongoing support for system users in place and implements a maintenance review process to ensure new system enhancements are implemented responsibly.
The project is delivered on time, within budget, and achieves the objectives that were initially promised in the business case.
Developing Action Orientation: Strategies and techniques
You can use the following strategies and techniques to develop your Action Orientation:
- Scenario planning: This entails thinking about different possible future situations and planning for them. Scenario planning helps to prepare for changes and surprises.
- Project management methods: Methods like Agile, Scrum, or Waterfall can help improve the planning and execution of projects.
- RACI charts: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed charts can help clarify who is responsible for what in a project and set clear deadlines. Several software options are available, as well as a free template from AIHR to help you create a RACI matrix for your projects.
- SMART goals: Using SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timebound) goals can help professionals turn vague goals into clear and achievable ones. Digital tools like Trello or Asana can help organize and keep track of these goals.
- Change management: Developing your change management skills can help in becoming more adaptable when dealing with ambiguity. A good model to master is the Cynefin change model, which serves as a helpful guide when dealing with complex changes.
2. Problem Solving
The second dimension is Problem Solving. This refers to how an HR professional thinks about different issues to handle complex problems and situations. Solving problems is important for any job, but for HR professionals, this is really critical. You often have to deal with complicated and conflicting issues involving many different viewpoints and needs.
Behaviors related to the problem-solving dimension include:
- Thinking analytically about situations or information to create a clear idea or plan
- Bringing people with different and often conflicting priorities together and moving them towards action
- Making smart, timely decisions based on facts and the situation.
Desmond is an Organizational Development Specialist working at a Technology company. He recently completed a project analyzing the performance and employee engagement survey data for the past three years.
His analysis found that the company needs to improve how they collaborate virtually and to ensure that more regular feedback is provided on performance.
The challenge is that some employees still prefer in-person meetings and emails, especially those in senior management positions. Many employees have been pushing to use quicker online collaboration tools, yet they have received a very low level of adoption by senior management.
To solve this, Desmond organizes workshops with different groups in the company. In these workshops, he wants to understand why some employees are hesitant and what benefits others see in these new tools. Based on this input, he presents a business case to the senior leadership team and convinces them to champion the adoption of new digital tools and to start working more virtually themselves going forward.
Developing Problem Solving: Methods and techniques
Solving problems is not new for HR professionals, but the challenges are becoming more complex and nuanced.
You can adopt the following methods and techniques to develop this dimension:
- Consensus-building techniques: These techniques include the Delphi method, Nominal Group, or Six Thinking Hats, which help groups work together to solve problems and meet goals.
- Problem analysis techniques: Problem solving techniques and digital tools like Miro or LucidSpark can help break down big ideas into smaller parts and see how they connect.
- Decision-making frameworks: There are many decision-making frameworks available, such as the SWOT analysis technique for strategy These frameworks help make balanced and strategic decisions, even when things are complex.
3. Interpersonal Skills
The third dimension is Interpersonal Skills. HR has always required strong interpersonal skills, especially in communicating effectively, building relationships, and collaborating with others. Given the increasingly complex nature of the HR stakeholders landscape, HR is expected to apply these behaviors more frequently as they deal with internal and external stakeholders.
Behaviors included in the Interpersonal Skills dimension are:
- Building and maintaining good relationships with others and building effective networks
- Clearly and effectively sharing information to ensure a shared understanding
- Working with others to improve ideas and find solutions by collaborating effectively.
Thembi is the HR Operations Manager for a global hospitality group. She deals with various stakeholders across various hotels and countries, each with its own culture and diverse leadership team.
An important stakeholder group for her is the General Managers of each Hotel. She wants to build good relationships with them to ensure they have open conversations and find solutions to challenges together.
To do so, she regularly engages with them and sets up frequent interactions according to the different needs of the managers. Gerald, the General Manager at Hotel A, is different than Nonto, the manager at Hotel B. Thembi meets with Gerald weekly as he prefers a more formal way of engagement, while Thembi touches base with Nonto on a more ad-hoc basis and visits their property once a quarter to meet Nonto face to face.
Thembi has already seen the benefit of investing in these relationships and networks. When a crisis arises, she has an established relationship to speak directly to these stakeholders, find a solution together, and can depend on them to ensure that the solutions put in place are implemented successfully.
Developing Interpersonal Skills: Tips and techniques
As AI and technology change our workplaces, good people skills become the cornerstone of what makes humans unique and indispensable.
Here are some ways you can get better at these skills:
- Regular check-ins: These can help to keep relationships strong and to understand others’ ongoing needs and challenges. Being consistent, reliable, and open can help to create and maintain trusting relationships. You can use a stakeholder playbook as a starting point to understand your stakeholder requirements.
- Impactful communication: Communicating with impact and using specific techniques to adopt different communication styles.
- Group problem-solving: Using methods like brainstorming, mind mapping, and group agreement techniques helps set the stage for working well with others.
To wrap up
In today’s fast-changing workplaces, the role of HR goes far beyond traditional tasks. As businesses move towards a more digital and varied world, HR professionals need a strong mix of different skills and knowledge. That’s why it is so important for them to become T-shaped.
In the modern workplace, it is not just about doing your job well but also about positively impacting employees and the organization. Skills like understanding business and being able to understand data are non-negotiable, not just nice to have. But to make a difference in the company and its employees, HR professionals must master Execution Excellence. As the people who look after the company’s most important part—its employees—HR professionals should always strive to improve these skills.
How T-shaped are you?
You can complete our T-Shaped HR Competency Assessment to gain deeper insight into your current strengths and development areas. This will also help you identify the right AIHR courses and resources to equip yourself with the tools you need to excel.
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