Summarizing the Pivotal Ideas

Create a coherent approach to the HR organization that CEOs understand.

The motivation for this book began with a belief that the companies I worked for needed to compete on the basis of talent. They needed people who were better than the competition, doing their best ever work, in a way that aligned with the needs of the business. Not all companies are like this—if yours is I hope the book has been valuable.

The second belief is that the way to deliver this talent-based business strategy is through a different type of HR organization. The HR organization has to be elevated: a driver of strategy, not a deliverer of services. Not all CEOs want this kind of HR organization; it can be a headache because HR doesn’t sit back and take orders. An elevated CHRO asks uncomfortable questions that the C-suite perhaps would rather not answer. An elevated HR organization demands the CEO’s attention. If your CEO is willing to take on this challenge, they can look forward to different talent outcomes.

The approach I developed to elevate the HR function is what I call the CMO of People model. I like this approach because CEOs get it right away—they know what a CMO delivers, and they can translate that to HR. Furthermore, there are a lot of Marketing ideas that translate easily into the HR realm, such as the sales funnel (talent funnel), customer experience (employee experience), and market analytics (people analytics). There are other models for elevating HR—this is just the one I know. While it might not be right for your organization, it is a fully implemented model that’s been proven in business; it’s not just a theory.

The talent-based competitive strategy can be summarized in the figure I presented in the introduction. The scope of what’s packed into it should be clearer now that you’ve read this book.

The diagram starts with channels and efficacy of channels pulling talent into the funnel, followed by the various stages of funnel management down to the transaction (Tx), i.e., the offer to hire.

Once the employee is hired, it’s about building the employee’s lifetime value (eLTV) based on leadership, communications, competition, and social responsibility.

The whole diagram is underpinned—from the top of the funnel to the end of the employee’s time with the company—by the employee experience. The concept of the employee experience provides a guiding set of principles that direct the design and operation of all the HR processes needed to deliver on this business strategy.

The value of putting this in one simple “back of the envelope” picture is that it shows that it’s all integrated—it needs to be created, curated, and managed very deliberately where each step is measurable. It also introduces a well-defined vernacular from Marketing and Sales into a function that has traditionally been “hard to measure.”

The CMO of People model believes that the organization has to create a predictable, immersive employee experience that drives performance. That slightly awkward phrase is not just a lot of nice words—each word matters.

Too often companies think about the employee experience as a kind of window-dressing—something that looks nice, a bit of frosting on the cake. In the CMO of People model, the predictive, immersive employee experience is the cake. We take it seriously. We put in unending efforts to make it real.

When you start to unpack what it takes to make the employment brand real, the many implications just roll out. You need an unconventional CHRO; they need an unconventional team; HR must be unusually collaborative both within the department and with other departments; functions that impact the employee experience—such as CSR, Communications and Real Estate/ Workplace Services—need to be folded into HR; people analytics must be a top priority; and a granular understanding of the employee experience from the very start to the very end must guide all HR processes. That’s a painfully long sentence for making the point that the CMO of People has a lot of implications. The good news is that these implications can be spelled out and acted upon. There is clarity to the model.

It’s evident that the model’s major goal is to drive growth and profits. That’s fair enough. However, if you are a CEO or CHRO, there’s more to it than that. This model is fun and energizing; it’s wonderful to see how it brings the best out in people. Personally, I could never go back to the old model of a service-oriented HR organization that simply does what the business asks.

Four Ways to Move Things Forward

Here is how you might get started.

How These Ideas Will Unfold in the Marketplace

CEO, HR leaders, and consultants who are inspired by the CMO of People approach will drive it forward.

There are three different forces that will help these ideas spread into the marketplace. The first is CEOs who know they are competing on talent and want to do things differently to get an edge. This is the easiest way forward—a CEO can run the HR organization any way they see fit.

The second force will be HR leaders and the professional bodies that support them. HR leaders will need to get buy-in from the CEO (as I’ve said more than once). However, from its inception, this model was built on what made sense from a CEO’s perspective, so for once HR might find that getting buy-in is easier than expected. I hope that the community of HR leaders will share their experiences in implementing this model and share their refinements as they gain experience using the ideas discussed in the book. Feel free to connect with the authors on LinkedIn.

The third force for bringing these ideas to the world will be consultants. Consultants have a long history of playing a critical role in bringing innovative ideas into business. The CMO of People model has enough elements that companies will appreciate an expert hand to guide them. I hope that business consultants who understand the model in all its depth will work with companies to help them put it in place successfully.

It can take a surprisingly long time for ideas to gain common acceptance, and the traditional HR model has tremendous inertia. The one thing I hope is that people come back to the full scope of the ideas outlined in this book—without question, we’ll see people touting “the employee experience” while seeing it as simply a way to re-brand engagement. So, let’s demand that CEOs, the HR community and consultants build these ideas up rather than taking the easy route of watering them down into something inconsequential.

Closing Advice

I hope you found some takeaways that will help.

Adopting a new approach for a major function is not for the faint of heart. It wasn’t easy for Marketing to shift from a world of traditional media to digital media. It wasn’t easy for Manufacturing to adopt lean methodologies. It wasn’t easy for IT to move from mainframes to banks of servers and networks of PCs. If you are just looking to tweak HR, then the CMO of People model isn’t the way to go.

However, if the model makes sense to you, you aren’t happy with the way that traditional HR organizations work, or you feel the need to get much more leverage out of people, then you could adopt this proven model.

If you have a reasonable appetite for risk, adopting the CMO of People model will be a lot of fun for you and will bring a lot of value to your organization.