HC spoke to the CHRO of one of Australia's biggest insurance companies about the ingredients of great HR leadership.
As all good HR directors know, leadership transformation starts at the top.
And having a leadership development program can help support the development of a strong and coherent company culture that supports the strategic direction of the business.
Paul Landy, Chief Officer Human Resources & Internal Communications at QSuper talks about what transformational leadership means to him and the importance to organisations.
“Transformational Leadership to me is about enabling people to achieve a purpose,” Landy told HC Online.
“Transformational Leaders create positive organisations where they set high expectations for people to achieve, they walk the walk and demonstrate to their people that they can achieve great things and get satisfaction from their work,” he says.
Landy says a great resource for leaders is the book Systems Leadership: Creating Positive Organisations
I have encouraged many others in my HR team and Executive team to read this book, which describes how people come together to achieve a productive purpose and how to design organisational systems to allow for this,” Landy says.
“The book helped me map out how to create systems within the organisation that allows this transformation,” he says.
HR has a key role to play by providing the backbone and organisational structure to encouraging and facilitate strong leadership within the business.
“HR facilitates the creation and setup of systems in the organisation that allows transformational leadership to take place,” Landy says.
“Similarly, transformational leadership enables the creation of effective systems that influence how an organisation is designed.
When HR is not a clearly established and mutually supportive partner with others in the transformation, organizations tend to struggle, Landy says.
The key to garnering support from business leaders for a transformation program is to demonstrate the benefits from an employee and company perspective, he says.
“For HR teams, they need to spend time working in the business with the Leaders to better understand their individual operations and drivers,”
“You need to listen broadly and take time to understand the playing field at all levels - understanding the connectivity points across the business and the big levers to pull will result in not only great results for an organisation but also our people.”
Paul Landy is a guest speaker at the upcoming National HR Summit on 6-7 April 2016.
