Having a management background myself one thing I hear quite often when I express that I use Change Management principles in my job is if Change Management isn’t simply part of human resources. This is what I usually reply:
Change Management experts are part of every department, which enables them to encourage business growth across the organization. However, in HR, Change Management skills become a must-have when applying for advanced HR positions due to HR certifications, which require Change management skills.
Now in practice, since Change Management is still a rather new discipline, change management experts are assigned to various departments including HR.
Let me explain why this is necessary, what the relationship between change management and human resources is, and why HR employees need change management skills.
Change Management Experts Should be in Every Department
The reason for change management experts to be a part of every department in an organization is so that they can directly affect on any change which is being decided upon by for example upper management.
This becomes incredibly important when upper management decided to incorporate new software for example or a new policy.
Incorporating a new software and encouraging employees to use it when they’ve used a different tool for the past X years is incredibly difficult.
Just think of something which you use regularly (hair wax, hair shampoo, a brush etc.) but you’re now forced to use something else instead.
Personally I would be certainly skeptical and a little resistant at first if I for example wasn’t included in the decision. Which is where Change Management principles come.
The change management agent can then, if included in the decision process from the upper management, make suggestions and predict to some degree how his or her department colleagues will react.
Which gives the upper management insights on how the planned change should be implemented to keep their employees happy and engaged.
However the other way (bottom-up) is also important to consider. If a department is having their own best-practices for how a process for example should be executed because it is more efficient for example then the change management expert can and should report this directly to the upper management.
Due to the experience of the change management expert, he or she can then help in optimizing the processes and affect the change process across the organization if the best-practice from his or her department will be for example rolled out across the entire company.
However, just looking at the Human Resources department why does it makes sense to have change Management experts in there?
Alignment of Human Resources and Change Management
Consider the objective of an Human Resources department. The HR depeartment is about recurting, training and monitoring employee performance.
Their job is to find the best people, who match the vision, the culuture and have the right skill set to bring the organization forward.
Now looking at change management which has it’s main priority laying on suporting people in going through change. Meaning change management cares highly about peoples capacity to adapt to change and how they can manage the change process so that the people are still on board and don’t resist change, or even worse leave the corporation.
Now, this seems to align in part with the core goals and skills of the HR department, which in turn suggest that it is highly crucial to the organization’s change management strategy for example to include the HR department as well.
The same way goes the other way around if the HR department is deciding to change a process or has affect on a persons employment status, having change management skills seem vital.
In fact, if you want to move the ranks as an HR expert you need to actually have Change Management knowledge as well.
Change Management is necessary when going for advanced HR Roles.
In the early years of a Human Resources employee change management is not part of a necessary skill to have. I know that because I asked my colleagues who work in the Human Resources department.
In addition, I checked several job descriptions on the web such as this one here for a basic hiring manager role.
As you can see the major competencies are not listing any change management skills. At this stage what’s more important are great communication skills, customer service knoweldge and ethical conduct.
Now when we move up though towards a more senior role we can see that this is not listing any change management skills either.
However, it is listing several human resources certifications as a prefered hiring criteria such as the HRCI or SHRM certification. .
Now I went ahead and looked at the respective certifications such as the HRCI certifications. There are several different levels of human resources certification which test different depthness of the applications knowledge.
- Associate Professional
- Professional in Human Resources
- Senior Professional in Human Resources
- Global Professional in Human Resources
As an associate you learn the more operational side of human resources, how you manage and find people who match to the company vision and culutre for eample. How you manage databases and much more, you can read more about that here.
No requirements for having change management knowledge at this stage at all.
What becomes interesting is that as soon as you try to receive the professional in Human Resources certification, knowledge of change management will be tested for.
Here is the example of the certification outline (look at the bottom):
So if you want to move up the ranks in an HR department it certainly is needed to have knowledge about Change Management skills.