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risks and professional standards extremely well and along the way may well have developed excellent interpersonal skills. We wouldn’t expect a finance professional to have worked in HR before becoming a CFO, nor would we expect a lawyer to have worked in manufacturing. On that basis, HR would appear to have a reasonable argument that specialist expertise has value, although the two examples I give here are tasked with narrowly based activities with very specific results, something that the very scope of HR has made difficult to do. Additionally, Law and Finance are less likely to be loaded with extraneous (and one might say out of scope) activities the way HR has allowed itself to be. An additional benefit could be that someone from outside of an operational department may actually bring an independent perspective, being immune to the internal politics of that group, and more and more focused on organisational fairness and consistency. As we will see, this could be a double-edged sword.
We wouldn’t expect a finance professional to have worked in HR before becoming a CFO, nor would we expect a lawyer to have worked in manufacturing.
spend their entire working lives within the function. They may become highly experienced HR practitioners, but they will never have experienced work in other parts of the business. Does This Matter? Let me start with the case for the career HR professional. The apparent advantages are clear: Years of experience will build considerable professional expertise, comprising of deep knowledge of the function’s components, from employment law to recruitment and reward. Such practitioners understand HR processes,
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GLOBAL PAYROLL MAGAZINE ISSUE 28
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