Duncan Cotterill's Guy Ellis says smaller teams demand broader HR skills – and sharper judgement about what matters
After 36 years leading human resources (HR) functions across the United Kingdom, Europe and the Middle East, Guy Ellis has returned to New Zealand and found an industry shaped less by philosophy than by size.
Ellis is now head of people and culture at law firm Duncan Cotterill in Christchurch, covering the role on a fixed-term basis while the substantive leader is on parental leave.
He says the smaller scale of New Zealand organisations, rather than a different management theory, is the single biggest structural difference he has found compared with the larger markets he left behind.
"Scale is probably the biggest structural difference, and it drives quite a lot of everything else," Ellis said. In larger UK and European organisations, he explains, HR tends to be more specialised, with dedicated centres of expertise in reward, organisational development, talent and workforce analytics sitting alongside business partners.
"In New Zealand, functions are generally smaller, so people need to operate much more broadly. A senior P&C practitioner may move in the same day from an individual employee issue to remuneration, organisational design, leadership development and a conversation with the CEO."
That breadth carries a warning, not just an advantage. "I have also had to remind myself that smaller organisations don't have smaller people problems," Ellis said. "The underlying issues around behaviour, power, motivation, capability, leadership and performance can be every bit as complex. You simply have fewer specialist resources with which to address them."
He said the opportunity is to pair New Zealand's pragmatism and accessibility with the specialist depth larger markets can support.
The "people and culture" label is a distraction
New Zealand and Australia have largely dropped "human resources" in favour of "people and culture" – a shift Ellis views with open scepticism. "I'm deeply cynical about changing the name of the function," he said, noting the profession has cycled through personnel, human resources, human capital and now people and culture without a matching leap in credibility.
"One reason managers roll their eyes is that they have seen the function rebrand itself every few years while continuing to do much the same things."
His advice to leaders redesigning a function: "Change the behaviour before changing the brand. Become more commercial. Become more responsive. Understand the business better. Help leaders solve problems they actually care about. Once people are saying the function feels different, then you can decide what to call it."
It's a pointed line for a market where several of New Zealand's best-recognised HR leaders increasingly carry the "people and culture" title.
Generalist pathways build breadth and blind spots
Ellis also pointed to career pathways as a source of difference. Senior HR leaders in New Zealand and Australia commonly rise through recruitment – uncommon in Europe and the UK, where the traditional route runs through HR business partnering.
"The potential risk is not recruitment itself, but moving into broader leadership without enough exposure to some of the less visible disciplines of the profession: employee relations, organisational design, reward, workforce economics, change," he said.
Equally, the European generalist path "can become quite insular," prone to mistaking process efficiency for commercial value.
Asked what each market could learn from the other, Ellis landed on pragmatism as New Zealand's export and enterprise-level workforce disciplines – organisational design, strategic workforce planning, analytics, reward – as its import.
He added a broader challenge that applies on both sides of the world: HR still under-invests in psychology itself. "We can be very sophisticated about HR processes and surprisingly unsophisticated about human behaviour. As data and AI become more important, I think that imbalance matters more, not less" – a caution worth weighing against how several Kiwi companies now rank among the world's best HR teams.
