“Trying to change your business’ performance can be like turning an oil tanker; you can’t always do things quickly, and putting plasters over problems doesn’t always fix them.” – Craig Oddy, Head of HR for Consumer Finance at Hitachi Capital (UK) PLC, speaks to us about developing a career in HR Leadership.
As part of our commitment to supporting candidates to develop fulfilling careers, we’ve invited some HR Leaders to share the secrets of their success.
This week, we had a great conversation with Craig Oddy at Hitachi Capital UK, who began his HR Leadership career as a Learning & Development Manager at National Australia Group/Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank. After ascending to the role of Regional Manager for Retail and Wealth Distribution, Craig joined the team at TD as Senior Manager for Learning & Organisational Development. In September 2013, Craig took the opportunity to move to Toronto and spent 5 years in a variety of Learning and Talent based roles
In July 2018, Craig moved backed to the UK and joined Hitachi Capital UK as Group Organisational Development Manager, transitioning to his current role in December 2019.
Can you tell us how you got into HR and why?
I’ve always described myself as someone who’s not really an ‘HR professional’ because that wasn’t ever my intent, and it certainly wasn’t the starting point of my career. I worked in Retail and Sales Leadership roles for 18 years before moving into HR. My time in Retail and Sales taught me the realities of the commercial side of organisations. It was where I also first experienced how great HR people influenced and guided senior leaders but as a senior leader the final decision was always yours. I didn’t knowingly take on Sales Leadership roles to prepare for HR, but looking back it equipped me with some great skills I was able to apply when I made the switch and began to support senior leaders to run their organisations.
Towards the end of my time in Retail and Sales I had a brilliant mentor who was part of the board, and I remember calling her when I was having a particularly tough week. She asked me some great coaching questions that made me realise I needed to make a change.
I cannot stress enough the importance of mentorship and sponsorship, as well as how it can come from a huge range of sources. In fact, my first experience of true sponsorship came from a recruiter that was in my brother’s network who managed to introduce me to my first true HR role as Learning & Development Manager.
I took my CIPD while I was in that role as a gateway to other opportunities, and although the role itself meant I had to accept a step back in terms of seniority level and pay, it was really rewarding. It definitely taught me that money and status aren’t everything, and that as long as you’re credible and reliable and foster a good relationship with your senior leaders, the money and seniority may well follow anyway.
After three years in that role, I relocated to Toronto to become Senior Manager for Talent & Learning for TD Bank. The North American bank employed around 90,000 people versus the 800 people working in the UK, so it was a real eye opener in terms of learning how to apply my trade to such a vast organisation, but also a hugely valuable experience that stood me in good stead to progress my career. It taught me skills around deploying HR in complex organisations.
Moving back to the UK provide the opportunity to shift from the specialist side of HR to the generalist space when I took the ‘Head of’ role. This is not always the path that people take on their journey to Head of HR – but one that I would showcase as a possibility.
All the skills I’ve picked up across my HR career have influenced the kind of HR Leader I am today, whether they’re specialist or generalist.
Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?
I think that the HR sector can be a little bit prejudiced towards qualifications. Back when I was doing my CIPD, I was learning with a lot of people who were just at the start of their HR careers and the discussions were very theoretical as they didn’t have experience to draw upon.
HR can be seen as blockers to progress and I believe that could be true of HR professionals who can only draw on a laborious education process that doesn’t help their judgement at all. Giving someone a case study of a business so they can pretend to offer advice is nothing like the real thing—I’d rather somebody put themselves out there and make mistakes in a real business context. I’m not anti-qualification at all, but I think we should be aiming for valuing a blend of education and experience.
When it comes to doing a CIPD qualification, there is an inherent separation between HR development and HR management, but in truth, the two sides aren’t separate at all. People are in everything we do, and you need both sides. The really credible HR people can do both, which helps businesses to run HR in a much leaner way and achieve more
The COVID pandemic has been very unique to work through in terms of building credibility and making sure a People consideration is threaded through everything, but our biggest challenge will be in ensuring that we stay interweaved in the business when the crisis is over. Employee wellbeing and safety has always been important for us at Hitachi, but particularly within the last 12 months, it’s been our primary concern. We’ve also taken quite a strong stance on retention. We have faith that our strategy will enable us to survive, and as part of that, we didnt furlough anyone and dont believe that cost cutting is a wise business strategy.
Returning people back to physical spaces and what that will evolve to look will be interesting work. We’ve worked tirelessly to engage with our people in the hope of defining what they’re looking for, and we’re constantly doing pulse checks to see whether that opinion is changing over time. When we operationalised remote working initially, everyone thought it was fantastic, but we’ve gradually seen more and more people craving collaboration time.
We’re trying to make sure that we’re listening to the employee voice throughout the transition process without rushing to a definitive answer, but things are leaning towards a hybrid model between office-based and remote working. Within HR, we’re really going to target supporting connections, creativity, careers and culture as we continue to adjust to working life in the wake of the pandemic.
What career advice would you offer to someone either working towards a career like yours, or someone just getting started in their HR career?
In HR, you have to learn how to become a trusted advisor really quickly, and a big part of that is having credibility. When you’re in an HR role, there is an expectation for you to be close to the subject matter and understand it well, but that understanding doesn’t necessarily have to be gained through qualifications. To me, having experience is equally valid. Knowing and understanding the context of your business is critical for building trust, but you only really learn that when you’re part of it.
As long as you stay smart and curious and always remember to ask questions rather than assume, you can do anything. Don’t worry about not having the same education or background as everyone else; you’ll figure it out as long as you can use initiative. Mentorship and networking can be really useful for broadening your knowledge, as can being open to opportunities and taking risks. Don’t be the HR professional that doesn’t understand the specialists in your business or know how levers are pulled to make money—look beyond qualifications when it comes to learning.
I would encourage anybody looking to come into HR to try and build their performance consulting capability. Learn how to influence business leaders, be curious, and really understand the data rather than just targeting the first thing a business leader says is a problem. That’s what differentiates brilliant HR professionals from very average ones—they tend to be more focused on problems than what appear to be easy solutions in front of them
For those looking to transition into a ‘Head of’ role, make sure that you spend more time obsessing about problems than you do solutions, and that your solutions are sustainable. The true test of any senior HR Leader is how the business performs over the course of the years after you have implemented your end solutions, not the quick wins that don’t last. Trying to change your business’ performance can be like turning an oil tanker; you can’t always do things quickly, and putting plasters over problems doesn’t always fix them.
Whether you work in HR or not, it’s also important to make sure you’re focused on reliability. Always do what you say you’re going to do in order to be as authentic as possible, as we have to be good role models in HR. At the same time, make sure you are honest about your vulnerabilities, as that can really feed into your authenticity and credibility.
If you are credible and reliable and you know your business intimately, senior leaders will notice you and want to bring you to the leadership table, so to be that trusted advisor and make your voice count, you need to make sure all of those qualities are present in you. We don’t always hold the ultimate decision, but we can definitely sway the vote with our voices and make the decisions on the table more developed than they were when they first came to us.
Craig has been working as Head of HR for Consumer Finance since December 2019, and leads Hitachi Capital UK’s HR function to continue to promote engagement, diversity and development across all levels of the organisation’s People space.
If you are interested in having a confidential conversation about your career or would like support growing your team, please get in touch today.