Rethinking HR: Competencies for Strategic Custodianship

Rethinking HR: Competencies for Strategic Custodianship

For decades, HR has asked for a seat at the table. The refrain is familiar, but the ambition is misdirected. The real challenge is not access; it is capability.
HR remains woefully defined by transactional work, while organizations need a function that is consultative, strategic, and indispensable.

To get there, HR must evolve into new areas of practice and acquire competencies that shift its role from administration to stewardship. Five domains stand out.

1. Translating People Value Maps

Area to evolve into: Understanding the expressed and unconscious values that people hold within the organization.
Competency to acquire: The ability to translate those values into actionable intelligence that informs policies, practices, and systems.

This is not about surveys or slogans. It is about decoding what people truly value and ensuring organizational concepts are acceptable, credible, and motivating. HR must become fluent in values translation.

2. Managing Clock Speed

Area to evolve into: Calibrating the pace of innovation in people‑related concepts.
Competency to acquire: The ability to calibrate the internal speed of change in engagement, learning, and reward systems with the reality of change in the people value maps.

Clock speed is the tempo at which requisite concepts must evolve to remain relevant. HR must learn to manage this rhythm; too slow and concepts stagnate, too fast and people disengage. Strategic HR is about understanding and translating this speed of innovation intelligently.

3. Custodianship of Culture

Area to evolve into: Assisting in the management and maintenance of organizational culture.
Competency to acquire: The ability to assess cultural parameters and assist in adjusting culture as a living structure that remains relevant and effective.

Culture is the underlying structure of an organization that determines performance
and behavior. HR must move beyond compliance to become the custodian of culture, providing assistance so culture adapts, endures, and continues to drive requisite behavior and performance.

4. Custodianship of Organizational Learning

Area to evolve into: Ensuring the organization learns at multiple levels and avoids the traps of past successes.
Competency to acquire: The ability to design frameworks and activate learning across three dimensions:

• Single‑loop learning: Correcting errors within existing frameworks. HR must ensure resources and processes are in place to make this routine and efficient.
• Double‑loop learning: Challenging and revising the underlying assumptions behind decisions. HR must enable and embed frameworks that encourage reflection and adaptation, not just correction.
• Deutero‑learning: Learning how and when to learn. HR must activate this meta‑learning capability and guard against the success trap, the tendency to repeat past formulas instead of evolving.

Custodianship of organizational learning means HR is taking a lead role in assisting to keep the organization relevant, adaptive, and resilient.

5. Ethical Stewardship

Area to evolve into: Embedding ethics into all people concepts and practices.
Competency to acquire: The ability to understand and facilitate multidimensional purpose orientation to optimize ‘SEE’ outcomes across social, ethical, and economic dimensions.

From AI adoption to performance management, HR must take a lead role in guarding the ethical compass of the organization, ensuring fairness, transparency, and social responsibility are not afterthoughts but design principles.

Closing Provocation

HR does not need another plea for a seat at the table.
It needs to evolve into a function defined by translation, pacing, custodianship of culture, custodianship of organizational learning, and ethics.
These are the competencies that will make HR indispensable.

The question is not whether HR deserves influence. The question is whether HR is ready to earn it by becoming the strategic custodian of people value, clock speed, culture, and learning. and in doing so, redefine the very agenda of the table itself