Is this the most important characteristic of HRDs?

What’s the most important skill a senior HR practitioner needs to have right now?

While there are many that could be listed, curiosity is an increasingly important trait for HR professionals, according to Nada George, VP, HR - Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia & the Philippines, at AMEX.

George told HRD that as simple as that sounds, it’s about more than just demonstrating a keen interest in learning and asking a couple of questions.

“As confidantes, as coaches and as people leaders ourselves, we solve problems every day and it’s easy to get comfortable with how we do that and comfortable with the credibility we already have with the relationships in the business,” said George.

“But issues are becoming increasingly complex and asking more questions and better quality questions I think helps us better scope the problem and also get much clearer on the context.

“That means we have better information about data to help us make decisions. We understand the context and relationships better and ultimately, we hold ourselves to bringing an objective lens to the matters that we are involved in.”

So looking back over the past twelve months, what does she think her best personal work achievement has been?

One of the things George is most proud of is actively partnering with one of their sales GMs to understand the organisation holistically and identify opportunities for HR to go in and optimise it.

“Ultimately, we set out to improve the return on investment of new hires and that meant that we had to build a competency and behaviour level framework and better assess the capabilities of his current team and new team members,” said George.

“We implemented the model this year. It will lead to reducing our time to hire and it will accelerate the performance of our new hires. It allows us to design targeted development solutions for them.

“I think HR can build a lot of credibility when we can demonstrate tangible outcomes that drive business results.”