📣 Maleea Meden, HR Director @ World Centric:
This is a tough question to answer without knowing a bit more. Is this an HR Consulting firm, so the VP of people would be providing consulting services, or is this role for the team of 15? It's challenging for me to envision a team of 15 people needing a VP of People unless there are immediate plans to scale the business rapidly. In that case, I think it's valuable to have scaled HR in a fast-growing org. If you're operating as a VP-level consultant, then I think it depends on the types of clients and what their needs are.
📣 Kayla Lopez, Head of People @ American Financial Resources, LLC:
It's a great question- but my answer will be a little less great (sorry!). It is largely dependent on the organization, including its business strategy, and what skills you currently have/had as a director. There could be skills I would list that you may never utilize due to size or strategy, or even some that you are already acing.
📣 Sondra Norris, OD/OE Consulting:
Deceptively hard question to answer with only a little context and because "skills and experience" are not sufficient to describe how to successfully progress in leadership levels. So a generic answer is in order. As Kayla Lopez mentioned, there are many different applications of the titles "Director" and "VP" depending on many factors.
Charan, Drotter, and Noel do an EXCELLENT job of describing The Leadership Pipeline in their series of books which allows for planning and skill development outside of the notion of titles and more in line with what the role is designed to accomplish in the organization.
What follows is directly from their book, “The Leadership Pipeline: Developing Leaders in the Digital Age” and should help clarify what a VP, functional leaders should be able to do.
They talk about the three primary elements to consider in transitioning through the passages in the leadership pipeline:
1. Work values: What people believe is important and so becomes the focus of their effort and gets the highest priority. These need to be spelled out and differentiated clearly.
2. Time application: The new job to be done requires time to be allocated to these requirements and not to the old ones.
3. Skills: The capabilities required to execute new responsibilities.
Let’s assume what we’re talking about here is that the VP is the Leader of the HR FUNCTION. Functional leaders are responsible for setting the function’s direction, for producing function strategy, and for building the function’s capability. Because they report directly to the business leader or the enterprise leader, they provide function expertise to the business team. Accordingly, their peers are now other function heads.
Accordingly, the job to be done includes:
1. Helping the business team succeed (participate actively in defining and executing the overall business strategy)
2. Developing and executing functional strategy (includes pushing the functional agenda into the future, seeking short- and long-term competitive advantages)
3. Driving functional excellence
4. Building the function (includes establishing an organizational structure that allows function-wide initiatives to reach the rest of the organization at the desired speed)
5. Taking ownership of developing functional talent (includes creating space within the function for talents to develop)
6. Developing leaders (includes taking a structure approach to support leaders becoming better leaders)
7. Following through on performance of leaders
8. Select leaders
Underneath each of those ⬆️ 8 things is a whole mess of skills and experience.
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