Richard Billingham on transitioning from HR to a board role

When Richard Billingham moved from executive director of HR and organisational development to chief operating officer (COO) at Aston University his chief challenge was to understand precisely what his new position meant.

At Aston, based in the UK’s second city Birmingham, the COO role covers buildings, facilities management and digital in all of its areas.

Billingham recalls: “ As the chief people officer I was obviously calling on 20 years of experience working with people and within that function. Now, I'm managing a group of services where I don't have a deep history and a deep professional background in any of those services. My number one challenge has been thinking about what my purpose is and what the role is and how I can bring my skill set and deploy it most effectively across a much, much wider remit.”

He has found his HR background to be invaluable when transitioning to the role of COO and notes that HR directors now often have the skill sets and focus needed to take on wider organisational leadership roles in ways that perhaps they didn’t in the past.

“Just thinking about employee experience, the digital piece is so important to not just enable different ways of working but also curate the people experience now. So I feel it is a logical step and I am seeing more and more people take that step, whereas perhaps previously HR directors hit a bit of a glass ceiling in organisational terms.”

In this video Billingham talks about transitioning to the COO role, the three biggest challenges he faced and offers three pieces of advice to HR leaders looking to step into a board role.

About Richard Billingham

Richard Billingham is chief operating officer at Aston University. He was previously executive director of HR and organisational development. He has extensive experience working with leaders and organisations, across public and private sectors, both in the UK and internationally, to bring about change.

He has previously held a number of executive level roles focusing on leading complex workforce and culture change. He joined Aston in January 2017 from Bristol City Council where he was director of human resources and change.

Billingham is a governor of the Aston University Engineering Academy, chairing its Leadership and Finance Forum. In addition he holds a number of roles with local community organisations.

Transcript

Why HR experience translates to board leadership

Here at Aston University the conception of the COO [chief operating officer] role is that I effectively runall of the functions that are operational here.

So that would embrace our estate, our buildings, our facilities management. It embraces digital in all of its myriad parts. So the provision of digital services, the creation of the digital architecture, but also the move of the organisation to a digital organisation. It involves data and the building out of a data function. But also a change and transformation unit as well.

As an HR director I was already thinking about collaboration with colleagues in digital, colleagues, in my case, in estates because for instance how have we tackled the challenges post COVID of creating flexibility, creating a place where people can work in different ways. That's not just a people challenge. That's a challenge of how do we create the spaces that allow people to work in those different ways? How do we create the environment that provides for greater flexibility but a better employeeexperience?

And then thinking about employee experience, the digital piece is so important to not just enabling different ways of working but also curating the people experience now.

So I feel it is a logical step and I am seeing more and more people take that step, whereas perhaps previously HR directors hit a bit of a glass ceiling in organisational terms. I think the skillsets and the way in which as a profession we've focused over the last few years probably makes it more likely that there are steps beyond HR director and HR functional leadership into wider organisational leadershiproles.

What HR leaders bring to enterprise-wide roles

I suppose part of my transition anyway as the HR director on to the board was partly driven by my approach which is what's the art of the possible, what is the challenge here and how can we best serve that enterprise purpose? And how do we deliver solutions which meet the needs of the organisation?

In a sense, I don't think there's anything different in the COO role in that respect. It is about actually understanding the direction of travel. What's our ambition and how can we best leverage and focus a wider group of services in the service of the enterprise? So I do think my time as chief people officer has really helped me in that transition. It has really prepared me in a sense.

How the COO role is evolving

I'd also reflect that I think there is a point in time here that the chief operating officer's role haschanged. And I think it makes it more likely that people who have experience as an HR director are probably much more capable of stepping up into a COO role than perhaps historically they have been.

It's not unusual to see a lot of finance professionals having taken on COO roles. And really now the COO role has moved from being a compliance role and perhaps a risk-based role much more to a role whereby those central services in any organisation as seen as the engine of change.

And of course for a long time, as an HR director, that has been the world that I've immersed myself in. And I think having a set of lenses which is about people and about culture and about how to change and evolve the organisation is massively helpful in terms of thinking about a much wider set of services.

So while obviously I'd like to think that moving to a COO is based purely on my own personal brilliance I think it's probably not. It's probably more based upon the fact that this is an evolution rather than a step change. A lot of the way that certainly I think about the organisation doesn't change but what I do is bring that to a slightly different context. And ultimately it is about how do we create a more agile and purposeful organisation and how do we create the conditions for people to thrive and to deliver.

The biggest challenges when moving beyond HR

The number one challenge has been thinking about what my purpose is and what the role is and how I can bring my skillset and deploy it most effectively across a much, much wider remit. So that's beenthe number one challenge.

I would say connected with that has been, as the chief people officer I was obviously calling on 20 years of experience working with people and within that function. And so I suppose my seniority was underpinned by a deep understanding of workforce, of change and policy, process and procedure interms of HR.

Now, I'm managing a group of services where I don't have a deep history and a deep professional background in any of those services. What, however, I do bring is the experience of leadership – ofleadership of function but also leadership in a strategic context, actually how to leverage that leadership. So that's been a challenge, I suppose, thinking about how I do that in a context which brings digital and space and data and change and transformation which is much wider than just the workforce parts of it.
 

And then I suppose the third challenge is probably a more prosaic challenge, which is getting used to the acronyms which are used in all of those functions. And suddenly I'm immersed in a property world and in a digital world, and I'm learning a whole new language in a sense but a lot of the challenges are very familiar.

Practical advice for HR leaders stepping up

The first piece of advice would be the same advice that I give to people who aspire to be an HR director, which is be clear on your purpose. Why do you want the role and what would you do with it if you got it? There has to be a real purpose to that and for individuals clarifying actually why they want it; it has to bemore than because it's the next role up.

I think my second piece of advice would be to immerse yourself in the enterprise as a whole and getinterested in other aspects of running a business. You have to really step into the shoes of the CIO. What keeps them awake at night? How can you help them? Not just in an HR sense, but that starts to open up different ways of viewing problems, or marketing or data or operations.

And then I think the third piece of advice I suppose would be, for me, about personal resilience as well. It's very easy to get consumed into these big roles and having the ability, I suppose, to compartmentalise is how I might describe it. The ability to maintain your own energy and your own wellbeing while taking on some really big hairy challenges I think is critical for anyone who's aspiring to take on large leadershiproles.