What Leaders Should Expect From Their HR Departments

by Gary Rossio, Associate

What should a leadership team expect from its Human Relations staff and leadership—and what should HR staff be able to deliver?  That’s the question I recently attempted to answer as a guest speaker at a leadership conference for Veterans Health Administration (VHA) HR managers and supervisors.  I thought my response might be interesting to others, as well.

HR employees need to be, and to perceive themselves as being, an important part of their organization’s mission—in VHA’s case, as members of their facility’s patient care team. Their vital mission is to find and keep the kinds of people who will build a successful patient care culture throughout the organization on behalf of the patients they help serve.  

They can best do this by helping organization leaders create a consistent culture in which successful employees are rewarded, and appropriate accountability is provided for those who do poor work. Fairness in these daily efforts helps build morale, which has a direct impact on patient care and on an organization’s best asset, its people, who can then not only contribute, but thrive.

Too often in the past, I have felt that senior HR employees believed their role was to “protect” their directors and other supervisors from unions and lawsuits and difficult situations leading to inaction by supervisors and management.  Conversely, exceptional HR work and sound professional advice led to successful patient care goal accomplishment.   

In my experience, “protection” was never necessary--but balance and fairness always is. As a VA Medical Center CEO for sixteen years, I always wanted—and needed—to know which options, retrainings, systems improvements, Douglas factors, and innovative solutions could come to bear in each case.   Good leaders need sound advice and expertise: not protection.

This is a time of great pressure on all Federal employees, especially those who are entrusted with leadership responsibilities.  Demands for performance and accountability are rising, while resources are shrinking.  Add to that an increasingly litigious workforce and the accelerated pace of retirement among those with the kind of experience that is invaluable in dealing with complicated HR issues, and it is clear that managers and patient care teams who do not have a solid and savvy HR advisors are in deep trouble.

Sound advice, technical support, and the ability to spot, hire and help retain talented people—that’s what a good HR department, at the Department of Veterans Affairs or in any organization, should be able to provide.  Not only should VA HR departments see themselves as part of the patient care team, but they should also understand that they are key to any good organization’s patient care success.  For despite all the technological advances that have been made in the world recently, no one has yet found a way to create or maintain a successful organization without good people, a workforce in which everyone makes meaningful contributions to accomplishing the mission, and a winning culture.

This may sound like “new age” thinking, but it’s not.  It’s just a request for exceptional leadership in an important area at a time when it is most needed.  Having a strong HR staff and dynamic HR leadership is the surest way to obtain the ingredients for the kind of up-tempo patient care team VA patients have earned and of which VA staff can be proud.