HR practitioners are in an exciting position to make a meaningful impact on businesses from beyond the HR function. Experienced leader Chris Lamb FCPHR shares key lessons from his transition to non-HR C-suite leadership.

In the latest episode of AHRI’s podcast Let’s Take This Offline, host Tani Jacobi CPHR speaks with Chris Lamb FCPHR, former Deputy Commissioner of the New South Wales Public Service Commission, on how his HR expertise has supported his executive journey. 

Having occupied global HR leadership roles at organisations such as Lendlease, Westpac and American Express, Lamb brings unique insights on how to successfully translate HR strengths to help solve complex business and operational challenges.

Listeners will gain practical tools to step into broader executive leadership positions, from enhancing their commercial acumen to effectively engaging with board-level executives as trusted strategic partners. Below is a snippet of their conversation, edited for clarity. You can listen to the full episode here:

Advice for HR moving into non-HR roles

Tani Jacobi CPHR: Some HR practitioners might have ambitions to follow a similar pathway to you that isn’t necessarily up the people chain, but instead into broader leadership positions. Looking back on your own experience, is there any advice you would give to these people?

Chris Lamb FCPHR: As an HR business partner early in my career, I’d only ever led two or three people. But in my first leadership role outside of HR, I was leading a team of 15 people. I didn’t have anywhere near as developed leadership skills as I needed to make that transition. My advice to HR is take whatever opportunities you can to lead teams of people, as early in your career as possible. 

The second thing for me was that I had underestimated the challenge of building credibility in a team of people that you’re leading where you don’t know the work that they do. What I wish I’d done is spend more time early on listening to each of them in detail around not only what they did, but why they’d chosen that type of work, what career path they were on, what they were trying to achieve, what type of work they enjoyed, etc. That would have helped me build that credibility a lot quicker.

Developing a strategic mindset

Tani Jacobi CPHR: One of the skills that comes back in conversations about effectively partnering in business is having a strategic mindset or strategic thinking. How do you define having a strategic mindset for an HR practitioner?

Chris Lamb FCPHR: Strategic thinking and strategy are terms that are thrown around a lot and there isn’t a consistent definition when people use those terms. When I think of an HR practitioner taking a strategic mindset, the first thing is that you’re looking for the underlying issues to resolve, whatever it is. 

Let’s say it’s a turnover issue in a team you’re supporting. A line manager might come to you and say, ‘I need to fill this job. Can I talk to you about that?’ That’s a very operational piece of work that absolutely needs to be done. A strategic way of thinking about that would include asking things like, why is the turnover high in this team? Are there underlying reasons that might be causing a high level of turnover?’ 

You can ask questions like: do we need the same skills in this team going forward as we’ve had in the past? Are there different business challenges that we’re expecting to face that we haven’t faced in the past? Is the team growing or shrinking? What other things are impacting from outside?  That doesn’t mean you’re expected to have all the answers as an HR practitioner. But being able to look beyond the initial question that you’re faced with to the future considerations that this team needs to be taking into mind, turns it from a tactical conversation into a strategic conversation.

“You want to be an executive in the room who just happens to be responsible for HR, not the HR person in the room.” – Chris Lamb FCPHR

Demonstrating HR expertise across the broader organisation

Tani Jacobi CPHR: Thinking about the unique blend of experiences that we often have as HR practitioners, can you share some examples of when your broad HR experience has helped you address a complex business or operational challenge as an executive?

Chris Lamb FCPHR: The answer to that is every week. But I think the value you bring as a HR practitioner is that you always understand other perspectives. So if I’m in a meeting as an HR business partner and the meeting drifts into organisational change or into executive remuneration, then I have enough expertise that I can still bring some value to that conversation. 

It also means that I can help make the link between the conversation I’m in and the experts in the organisation. The way I describe it is that you want to be an executive in the room who just happens to be responsible for HR, not the HR person in the room.

Bridging the gap between business and leadership

Tani Jacobi CPHR: Do you have any thoughts around how HR practitioners can start to develop that business acumen?

Chris Lamb FCPHR: So much. I’ve taken opportunities throughout my career to do things that are not normally what an HR practitioner would do. For example, at a different organisation I worked for, HR was responsible for running the employee induction program. There was a section of that program where we invited one of the executive team in to talk about the business. 

I just took my turn in doing that. But an HR person had never done that before. It was thought that if you were the CFO, you could come in and do that …. but we wouldn’t ask HR to do that. Well, I wanted to be just as capable of talking about the organisation overall as any other executive. I’ve taken a number of those opportunities through my career to be the one who talks about the organisation.

In HR, you need to be just as curious and take as many opportunities to ask questions as you can. One of the things I think is a really unique opportunity for HR is that we are often called in to have conversations with line managers about difficult issues, whether it’s organisational change, restructuring, performance issues, whatever it might be. All of those meetings are opportunities to ask questions of the business leader about things that are going on. 

If you take even a few minutes of those conversations to understand what’s going on for them, what are their challenges, what are the issues they’re seeing, what are the emerging problems, then you will build up that acumen over time. 

This is an edited excerpt from an episode of AHRI’s podcast Let’s Take This Offline. Subscribe today to ensure you never miss a future episode.