When the CEO says, “But I’m not a ‘people person’.”

June 18th, 2014
Written by: Elizabeth Richards

When talking with CEOs of businesses and non-profits, we sometimes hear, “Well, I’m not really a ‘people person’.” In my experience, what the CEO may really mean is one or more of the following:

• “I’m an introvert.”
• “This HR stuff doesn’t come naturally to me.”
• “I’m not sure why HR is that important, other than for recruiting and paperwork.”
• “I think HR is important but I don’t know where to start.”
• “I’m a self-starter, and I don’t understand why other people need to be led and motivated. Why can’t they just do their jobs?”

The good news is that they are opening up about a huge challenge so that it can be addressed. Our job is not to make a CEO into a “people person,” but rather to help them translate their business priorities into their people priorities. Once we establish the importance of that connection, it becomes clearer to the “non people person” CEO that his or her role is not to transform into a gregarious extrovert; it is to consider the people implications of business decisions early in the planning process.

One of TPO’s clients says it best:

“I was a numbers guy, so HR was a soft, nebulous area and hard to define. Not a science. Nor was it very exciting. I thought it was kind of wimpy. Then, when I got my MBA I took a class called “Managing in the Workplace,” and thought I was signing up for softball HR class. But it ended up being the coolest class I ever took. It was so much fun getting into new concepts about how to develop and incent people and how different types of people are attracted to different companies. I still refer back to that frequently. And today, the people aspect is the most important part of our business—every decision I make is an HR decision.”

I love that last line because it represents a positive trend. For many years, our research showed that HR was often brought into the loop towards the end of the business planning process. Now we see that changing as more CEOs–whether or not they consider themselves a “people person”–understand how integral a good HR strategy is to driving the business forward.