Even with the highest quality of HR policies and practices, the application of these is open to subjectivity and bias. Organisational change, recruitment, performance management and employment termination are all very important areas where objectivity is crucial to the right outcome for your business.
Why Is Objectivity Important In Leadership?
The reason objectivity is important in leadership is to ensure decisions concerning employees or organisational issues are made fairly, based on informed and balanced facts. This means decisions aren’t biased by historical practices, personal opinions, relationships or conscious or subconscious biases.
Leaders have a powerful role as they routinely make decisions about recruitment, remuneration, bonuses, performance management and organisational change. If these decisions aren’t made transparently and without bias it can lead to diminished employee morale and productivity, resulting in employee attrition, potential legal action and the wrong decisions being made for your business.
How Do You Ensure Objectivity In Your Leadership Decisions?
A good option to ensure the best possible objectivity in HR practices is to engage an external HR Consultant or Contractor to undertake specific activities, for example:
1 – Organisational Restructure
Strategic HR consultants work with Boards and CEOs to align the organisational structure with strategy and develop the implementation plan of the new structure including communication, change management, position descriptions, selection and redundancies.
2 – Remuneration Review
HR specialists provide external remuneration benchmarking services and development of remuneration and incentive policies, which are often useful for Boards and CEOs for objectivity of this sensitive information and decision making.
3 – Management of Complex Situations
Having a neutral external person providing human resources consulting to manage sometimes complex situations can be the best solution in businesses where there isn’t a dedicated HR Manager, but Managers taking on the role. It can also be useful when in-house HR Managers are connected to a situation and perceived as having a bias or when difficult issues arise like workplace investigations, mediation or serious misconduct issues.
4 – External review of HR Team, Strategy and Framework
This helps identify any areas for improvement in your HR function in an unbiased way, which will lead to increased effectiveness, commercial focus and legal compliance.
5 – Executive Selection
Utilising the services of an external selection specialist to run the selection process or just to provide advice will give you an objective view on the important decision of executive team selection.
6 – Leadership Coaching
Providing yourself and your managers with coaching to help with decision making on key people issues will lead to better business outcomes.
Need Further Advice? Talk To Harrison Human Resources
With our HR Consulting service, we can provide practical advice and guidance on how to achieve objective leadership in your workplace.
Simply click here to request an obligation-free 15 minute phone consult to get some initial advice on your HR needs.
Claire Harrison is the Founder and Managing Director of Harrisons, a flourishing HR consulting business that sprouted in 2009 from Claire’s passionate belief that inspiring leaders and superstar employees are the key success factor to any business. With over 20 years’ experience, Claire has worked as a HR Director of multi-national organisations, as a Non-Executive Board Director, and a small business owner. Claire’s corporate career includes working with companies such as BHP, Westpac, Fonterra and Mayne Nickless.
