Merely employing large numbers of HR staff who eventually move on is not enough to leave this kind of legacy. So what exactly is it that turns these companies HR departments into centres of excellence?
Of all these three businesses, Guinness boasts arguably the longest list of high-profile ex-employees. Alex Wilson, group HR director at BT, Stephen Dando at the BBC, Mike Pemberton at Aviva (previously CGNU), Sue Taylor at Penguin Books, Alan Wild at the International Labour Office in Geneva all of these worked at Guinness in the 1980s and 1990s.
Phil Radcliffe, currently director of strategic change and organisational development at Diageo (which resulted from the merger of Guinness and Grand Metropolitan in 1998), joined the Guinness group in 1990. He remembers the set-up at the original Guinness HR department that fostered this talent. In some ways it was the nature of the business we were in at the time, he muses. We had strong brands and a fast-changing business and we never had to battle to have HR recognised, it was always seen as an important business partner.
Guinness HR was always very ahead of its time too, he adds. In the early 90s, we were working on things like the change agenda, the talent agenda and global HR well before most other businesses.
I think there was a policy of recruiting talented, business focused people into the department, he continues. Once they were in, they were stretched by the roles they were given.
Another big key was the collaborative culture. The HR team worked in close support of each other, and networks were endemic to the Guinness culture. But that doesnt mean we were soft on each other, Radcliffe adds. We were ruthless in our appraisal of each others strengths and weaknesses.
Group HR director at Dunlop Slazenger Jeremy Nordberg joined Guinness in 1989, and worked as compensation and benefits director and as HR director for Latin America during his nine years with the company. He agrees that a key factor in the departments success was the involvement that HR had in running the business. There was no debate about it, HR was an equal partner with the line in making business decisions, Nordberg says.
There was no specific development programme for HR staff at the time. But all the senior management had a clear definition of what made a good HR professional, and development was based around that, Nordberg says. They would even create opportunities that would allow someone to develop if they thought it would be beneficial.
The atmosphere created is something he remembers vividly. We met as a global HR team four times a year and there was great chemistry within the department we enjoyed each others company and sparked off each other a lot.
So good was the camaraderie that 50 ex-staff from that time still meet as part of a network called the Guinness United International Distillers Executive. Organised by now retired ex-United Distillers HR director Mike Root, it meets four times a year.
As well as employing established talent like Nordberg and Radcliffe, Guinness also grew its own staff from scratch. Now working as HR director for Apple UK, Ishbel Morrison started her career at Guinness in 1988, working first at United Distillers. After a number of operational and head office positions, she was promoted to employee relations manager in 1996.
What was great was that they were willing to give that opportunity to someone like me, she says. It was a big risk for them the trade union officials were all men, I was female and relatively young at 29. But no one ever said, Youre too young, youre too inexperienced to anybody.
Guinness invested in her development, sponsoring both her IPD and an MA in HR management as well as the graduate scheme she was initially recruited to join. Because there were so many good people in the department, I also developed just by working with them, she adds.
The man behind the creation of the Guinness HR department of the time was Colin George. Now retired, George joined Guinness in 1984, two years after the arrival of Ernest Saunders as chief executive. Saunders is now infamous for his involvement in the Guinness fraud scandal that hit the headlines in 1990.
A hard-edged businessman by reputation, Saunders was nevertheless a big fan of organisational development and people. For three years before the trial I used to go to his house every Sunday evening to talk about organisational and people issues, George says.
Organisational development was at the heart of the Guinness HR department. Ernest recruited me to help him transform the core beer business into an FMCG business, he adds. My job was to build the new culture.
Across the business, George set out to recruit great people from FMCG companies to help create the new vision. In HR, the challenge was also change. Id inherited a department that was very industrial relations led, very administration based, he remembers. I had to build a function that could meet the demands of a business in transformation.
Recruitment of new staff was vital. George wanted to attract people who had strong functional HR skills but who also had experience of organisational development, culture building and management development and who had a strategic approach to HR.
He also had to ensure that HR was involved in the business.When I started the job, the core process I used to ensure that HR would have the right opportunity to influence was an organisational management review, says George. It was a review of our stock of talent throughout the business and of attitudes and skills gaps. HR sat with every business unit as part of the review and the results went to the group chief executive so everyone took the process seriously.
In 1998, Guinness merged with brewery rivals GrandMet. Before the merger, a number of Guinnesss HR stars had been poached from that stable. But GrandMet HR people didnt just end up at Guinness Alex Wilson at BT, Tony Ward at BAA, Chris Bones at Cadbury Schweppes and Dick Etches at GKN are also ex-employees.
Like the Guinness story, GrandMets culture owed a lot to a high-profile business leader, in this case Allen Sheppard, who was hired in 1976 with the remit of turning a group of family-run breweries into a professional business. His first move was to hire an HR and a finance director these, he thought, would be the most influential for change and were given powerful roles at the start.
Dick Etches, now HR director at GKN, worked at GrandMet between 1980 and 1996. Key to the success of the department, he says, was the influence it had within the business.
HR was an early strategic partner for change, says Etches, and had a real involvement in the business this was unusual for UK HR departments of the time. This attracted good people and, once there, they were able to move easily between staff and line jobs, which developed their own skills.
Salaries were competitive too. Allen never saw HR as less important so HR staff were very well paid, Etches adds. It was a growing business and people grew with it, they were given responsibility for taking business-style decisions which equipped them well for the future.
Both Sheppard and his HR director David Tagg came from the motor industry. And it was within the car industry that Tagg went to look for his senior GrandMet HR team including Malcolm Greenslade, now HR director of Ricardo, Norman Walker, now HR head at Kraft in Geneva, and Clive Grundy, now group HR director at the Compass Group.
Many of Guinnesss HR stars came from similar backgrounds, as ex-HR director George points out. Most of my senior HR team came from tough environments, he says. Mike Pemberton from BOC and Stephen Dando from Austin Morris and British Leyland, for example.
Manufacturing and automotive backgrounds are in fact common to many of todays top HR people. A grounding in industrial relations and employee relations furnish HR people with skills that act as a base for strategic HR thinking like handling people, change and negotiation.
Of all the manufacturing and engineering businesses, Ford has consistently produced great HR people since the 1970s. As well as Gareth Williams, Diageos group HR director, and Alex Wilson, group HR director at BT, ex-Ford people now run the HR departments at Scottish Water, Canon Europe, GSK, Charles Schwab, Fidelity Investments and Nomura.
Ford HR director Maria Antoniou has been at the company since 1986, when she joined as a graduate trainee. Its no coincidence, she says, that a large number of UK HR departments have ex-Ford staff in influential positions. I joined because of the reputation Ford has for developing people, she adds. People are given real jobs from day one.
The variety and depth of assignments that are made available within just two or three years play a big part too. If youve always worked in manufacturing and you move into Ford Financial, its almost like moving to a different company, she says. Theres a global focus to the work international assignments, especially to Germany and the US are becoming more and more common. And were not a tea and sympathy function were really involved in the business.
Paul Pagliari, HR director at Scottish Water, also joined Ford as a graduate trainee and stayed for six years. Ford, he says, is the best grounding in HR you can get. I moved around a lot and was constantly challenged at a very young age.
It was not an easy place to work though, he recalls. You couldnt survive unless you did a very good job. People can coast a bit at lots of companies, but not at Ford. There was a focused career path that didnt give much opportunity for treading water.
But Ford paid well for that progression. At one point, Pagliari says, he was receiving three pay rises per year, which he found very motivational.
Companies like Ford that have a strong industrial relations presence develop HR skills that though once unfashionable are now very much back in vogue. Staff from these same companies are therefore becoming sought-after commodities once again.
But experience of industrial relations is not enough in itself to create an HR department populated by future HR stars. The HR departments of Guinness, GrandMet and Ford provided training, opportunities for development and challenge, global experience, team dynamic and perhaps most importantly influence on business decision-making.
It is this requirement that HR be taken seriously as a business partner that has prompted a new focus on professional development of HR staff at Rolls Royce. Ken Boyle, director of HR (operations) at Rolls Royce, says professionalism is the key word. As an engineering resource company, our employees have a strong view of what professional behaviour is and should be, he says. If HR wants standing within the business then it needs to demonstrate that it is a professional discipline like any other.
The Rolls Royce approach is multi-faceted. First, HR staff are put through an exacting educational programme which covers functional skills but also contains a strategic masterclass. Most of the training programmes lead to CIPD accreditation We have four levels of HR professional here administration, HR officer, HR manager and HR director, says Boyle. There is opportunity to develop from administrative level upwards and each level has its own skill requirements, linked to the CIPDs.
Over 50% of Rolls Royce HR staff are now CIPD qualified. The scheme makes the department more attractive to prospective employees, says Boyle, but has also made a difference throughout Rolls Royce.
Now we are ensuring that we recruit the right people and develop them properly, our customers are really noticing the effect, he says. They are getting improved service and we have a raised profile and greater influence. Its worth it for everyone.
