Consulting: What are clients demanding?

Clark: What's interesting is I'm not sure clients are always demanding what they should be demanding. Right now I think there's a focus on leadership development. Organizations know they need to have the right structure and leadership skills in order to create a successful organization. They get that, but I think they're thinking about that more in the short term than the long term. I don't know that they're really thinking about how do we develop leadership skills that will help lead people to that future and then be able to create it. We're just coming out of a tough time, many leaders are still focused on short-term results, and there's a strong balance you have to manage between short- and long-term.

Consulting: What are some ways HR leaders can be more effective within organizations?

Clark: They really need to understand the organization's business strategy. They need to be provocative and push the agenda, not wait for the organization to say they need something, but rather get out there in front to really just take a leadership role, not wait for someone to give it to them, but to provocatively push the agenda. To help leaders think about people in a different way and think about how people can be leveraged in order to help the organization achieve greater success. They also need to really be conscious of building relationships and networks with their peers and with the leader of the organization. The CEO of an organization wants a trusted advisor, they want someone to talk to, they need to talk about people issues, they're probably the biggest issues most CEOs have. They know in order to achieve what they want to achieve that people are doing things differently than they are doing now. To make that happen, leaders have to do something different too. I think they want a trusted advisor in their HR leader to help figure all of that out. In order to get that trusted advisor relationship, the language is business: having the right business acumen, knowing the strategy of the organization, it's feeling the passion and the vision the way the CEO might feel it, and then it's building a really strong relationship with the other business leaders in the organization to gain an understanding of who they are and what they need.

One on One with BPI Group's Robyn Clark

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