Before Elizabeth Derby started her career in HR, she was a Public Finance Banker, dedicated to creating access to affordable housing for people in underserved communities. While she enjoyed the business and strategy aspect of that work, she gravitated to the people side and was ultimately tapped by leadership to assume several high-profile HR roles.
Today, she serves as a Managing Director at Kincentric where she utilizes a business-aligned and integrated approach to solve people, talent, and culture challenges, with a focus on talent, leadership, DE&I and HR. She appreciates the interdependencies and linkages of these focus areas, because in her words, rarely does an organization have just one issue they need to solve to achieve their business goals.
In our latest Faces, meet Elizabeth Derby.
How did you get your start in the field?
Clients and colleagues will often say to me “You’re not the typical HR person.” I think of myself as a businessperson first and an HR specialist second. I sometimes say that I became the very statistic that I was trying to prevent by moving out of a line role into an HR role. A sponsor of mine tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I’d build out the firm’s nascent Global Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) practice. I jumped at the chance, as I have always been open to new opportunities and like to re-invent myself every 7-10 years.
What’s your favorite part about working in the industry? What’s your least favorite part, and how would you change it?
My favorite part about working in HR is the change you can inspire and the impact you can have on organizations and individuals. When I first moved into HR in the mid-1990s, I was Head of Campus Recruiting for Investment Banking. We created new fellowships and scholarships that provided access for under-represented talent to opportunities in banking that participants would not have thought possible. Fast forward to today and those same individuals are now in c-suite roles creating opportunities for other under-represented talent. I like seeing that multiplier effect.
I enjoy working to solve challenging people-related issues that may be negatively impacting the business. I’ve also been fortunate in HR roles to both directly and indirectly bring in new business for the company. While this may not be typical in internal HR roles, if you align yourselves with the business and bring a needed specialty, you’re able to have a broader impact. In my case, my DE&I expertise and ability to leverage my external network enabled me to contribute in this way.
Today, as a consultant, I get to work with CEOs, CHROs and other executives to develop their leaders, people strategy, talent practices, and DE&I approaches to drive meaningful change. I start off by understanding my client’s business as well as their challenges and needs so I can provide more holistic solutions. It is extremely rewarding to know you’re a part of enabling, and in some instances accelerating, their business success.
My least favorite aspect is that some HR teams continue to work in silos and create activity over impact. I would change that by having cross-functional agile teams aligned against a specific issue the organization is trying to solve. I saw this work effectively at one organization when we needed to decrease unwanted attrition, as it was costing the firm thousands of dollars, draining institutional knowledge, and negatively impacting our ability to serve clients well.
How can HR most effectively demonstrate its value to the leadership team?
HR is critical to enabling organizational performance. To optimize its impact, HR should directly align its strategic planning process and goal setting to the business strategic planning process and timeline. In doing so, HR can more effectively demonstrate its value by linking its work and quantifying its impact to the organization’s key business objectives. That’s why my guidance for HR professionals is to start with an understanding of the business, including key objectives, strategic priorities, and any areas where the organization might need to mitigate risk. By fully understanding the challenges that the business is facing and knowing where it wants to go, you can provide more effective guidance and tailor solutions that align with the business strategy to drive desired outcomes. There’s an opportunity for HR to increase its data fluency and storytelling capabilities to influence the business to make more objective, data-informed decisions and to tell the story more effectively about how HR adds value.
Where do you see the industry heading in five years? Or are you seeing any current trends?
While the pandemic was incredibly stressful for HR departments, one silver lining is that many of them had to come together quickly to solve very challenging issues. This has helped HR teams develop a collaborative, strategic problem-solving approach that they may not have used previously. I hope this agile, cross-functional approach continues as a trend as companies grapple with ongoing and future challenges.
In terms of key trends, I recently led some research with CHROs and Heads of Talent at leading organizations globally to gain deeper insights around the critical importance of people and talent in driving business outcomes. We identified five key “game changers” that should guide HR teams into the future:
1. Make culture your competitive edge for attracting and retaining talent.
2. Transform the talent you have into the talent you need.
3. Realize that future-ready talent will need future-ready leaders.
4. Integrate DEI across all facets of talent and leadership.
5. Stay ahead of the curve with talent insights and analytics.
Additionally, people analytics is an emerging focus for many HR teams and is a critical skill for HR practitioners and teams. I expect to see an uptick here over the next five years in terms of the investment in and sophistication of people analytics.
One thing that has the potential for transformative impact is AI and its multiple constructive use cases across HR. But there are clearly risk factors that must be addressed, and HR should play a pivotal role in determining their organization’s approach to and usage of AI. However, no matter what is in the works, there will always be a need for transformation and new ways of working, making this such an exciting time to be in HR!
Do you have any advice for people entering the profession?
It’s important for people entering the HR function to not only understand the business strategies and priorities but also appreciate the organizational context as well. You’ll soon learn that you cannot simply “lift and shift” best practices. Something that has worked well in another organization may not work in yours. Invest the time upfront to analyze what’s working well/what isn’t and get to the root cause. Examine your context, organizational maturity or readiness or missing foundational elements in your approach. My other advice would be to take a data-driven approach and understand the metrics that matter. Determine how you can translate people metrics into language that resonates with the business. For example, if retention is a pain point, you could quantify the amount of cost savings for each one percentage point decrease in unwanted attrition.
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