“When you become a leader in HR you have to remember doubly that it’s all about people: the people who are your customers and the people you are leading. It’s your responsibility to make sure that the people who are working for you are being treated as fairly and well as the people who need to have dealings with HR.” – Paul Buckland-White, Director of Learning Solutions at Smith & Nephew, 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 Paul Buckland-White at Smith & Nephew, who began his career as a trainer before transitioning to L&D. Paul worked as a Systems Trainer at Buck and Hickman and BSS Group before becoming the Learning and Development Manager at Residential Lettings for Countrywide in 2009.
In 2015, he was promoted to Head of Learning and Development. He remained in that role for two years before becoming Head of Learning and Development, B2B and Learning Technology. In 2019, Paul added Interim Head of Recruitment to his responsibilities and from June 2020 to April 2021 he held the role of Head of Learning Support and Digital Learning. Paul left Countrywide and transitioned to his current role as Director of Learning Solutions at Smith & Nephew in May 2021.
Can you tell us how you got into HR and why?
Like a lot of people in L&D, I fell into the work by accident. I was working in a call center and used to be involved in coaching new starters. From there I moved into a training role which was an epiphany for me in terms of career opportunities. At the time, in my late twenties, it really appealed to me both because my inner entertainer had the chance to perform and because of the serious undertones of making sure people could do their jobs well. That was my starting point and from then onwards I always wanted to be in roles that supported and helped people.
As I moved around different businesses I transitioned from operational to strategic training, which was when the HR aspects kicked in. That’s when I came to understand that training wasn’t just a transactional relationship, it was much more strategic, as part of workforce planning, talent, succession and other categories of success within a business. That was my career defining moment, when I understood the value that HR provides to a business. I knew I wanted to be part of the journey that the business and the people within the business go on.
Since then I’ve worked my way through different roles, always trying to improve and develop myself and my career. In my previous L&D role at Countrywide Plc I had the opportunity to do my CIPD Level 5 using the company’s apprenticeship levy funding. That was such an eye opening experience and fundamentally changed my approach. I learnt more about the different disciplines in HR and understood deeply the part that L&D plays across the people’s life cycle. L&D is more than talent and succession, it’s about empowering people and giving them incentives to stay within the business.
Shortly after my CIPD, I was fortunate to be able to take on the Head of Recruitment role as a secondment in addition to my existing role. That gave me hands-on experience of recruitment which further built my appreciation for what happens across the whole of the human resources function.
Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?
There’s an age-old challenge in L&D where people view it as traditional training that requires someone to be taken away from their day job to attend. Particularly if you’re working in a sales based industry where people are trying to generate revenue, there can be a reluctance to allow people to take time to learn. That view is missing the point. Training is an investment in people that enables them to be able to perform better. Additionally, smaller interventions, rather than multi-day training, are becoming more common and they often have a longer term impact on the bottom line.
A general HR challenge I see is the siloed nature of HR. While it’s more broken down than it used to be, there can still be a tendency to hand people off to different parts of the HR team. From an employee perspective, perhaps your recruitment partner doesn’t want to interact with you once you’ve joined and you’re now meant to talk to your business partner. That lack of continuity is a challenge. At the end of the day, we have to remember that people are at an organisation to do a job, but they’re also there because it’s a significant part of their life. The more we silo in HR, the more difficult it is to improve the experience for our people.
What career advice would you offer to someone either working towards a career like yours, or someone just getting started in their HR career?
Firstly, go and work in other parts of HR – I can’t stress that enough. Professional qualifications are great, but you can’t beat the experience you get first hand from being part of a disciplinary hearing or a recruitment process. The different aspects will broaden your understanding and give you a contextual approach that will then allow you to choose to specialise in a preferred discipline, if indeed you have one. If you are career focussed, don’t think that a sideways move is a bad thing. If you want to go into management, give yourself flexibility to see how people operate in other teams and other roles. They may all be people focussed but there are many different approaches.
When you step up into a leadership role for the first time, my advice is to seek out development, mentors and support so you learn how to lead others. L&D is continuous, there is no magic bullet. Going on a course won’t be a panacea that teaches you everything you need to know. Rather, becoming a good manager or leader is analogous to learning to drive, where you pass your test and then you develop your driving skills on the road. Remember that you’re still learning after you’ve been on a course, you’ll make mistakes, don’t beat yourself up about them but learn from them.
Thirdly, when you become a leader in HR you have to remember doubly that it’s all about people: the people who are your customers and the people you are leading. It’s your responsibility to make sure that the people who are working for you are being treated as fairly and well as the people who need to have dealings with HR.
My final piece of advice is to use the power of stories. Humans evolved to learn and develop through storytelling, it goes right back to tribes of people sitting around a campfire telling stories. If you’re working in HR, particularly when it comes to your data, think how you can go beyond sharing facts and figures to telling a story with the data. What does the data tell you about the people who work in the business? Our brains learn through stories. It’s what makes us human and it’s a way we can make an impact on people’s lives.
Paul has been in his current role as Director of Learning Solutions with Smith & Nephew since May 2021. He has almost twenty years’ experience within L&D and specialises in streamlining processes.