How To Be a Great Human Resources Manager (Advice From a Leadership Expert)

Modern human resources is about so much more than reviewing resumes, filling out compliance forms, or managing payroll and leave requests. It’s about building genuine connections with the people your company employs—and connecting them with the resources that will help them thrive at your workplace.

Great HR leadership requires focus on building and managing a strong company culture your team can trust. Globally, 83% of employees who rate their company culture highly say they’re committed to delivering superior work, compared to just 45% in companies with poor workplace cultures.

A toxic workplace culture can have a hugely negative impact on both your workers’ mental health and their performance: Over 22% of employees have experienced work-related mental health challenges, leading to 37% higher absenteeism, 18% lower productivity, and 60% more errors at work. Altogether, this leads to more than $300 billion in losses caused by absenteeism, turnover, and medical costs due to employee stress.

As an HR leader, it’s your responsibility to set the gold standard for your company culture. By building a culture that your entire organization can thrive in, you’ll be able to set your business up for long-term, sustainable growth with engaged employees who’ll give the company their best work.

In this guide, we’ll learn from Chris Woody, formerly a Leadership Development Consultant at Southwest Airlines, now serving as Sr. Director of Leadership Development and New Hire Experience at U.S. Renal Care, and discover his insights for building a best-in-class company culture through strong and empathetic HR leadership. Our playbook will give you the tools for driving higher engagement rates across the business, resulting in higher productivity, lower absenteeism, higher retention, and increased business profitability.

Great HR isn’t about processes—it’s about people.

How to Become a Great HR Leader

Let’s start out by defining leadership in human resources.

A great HR leader goes beyond policy and procedure to support employees as whole people. They care deeply about each employee’s experience in the workplace and are committed to developing resources that can help them on a holistic level.

Job satisfaction often boils down to people wanting to feel seen, heard, and valued—not just for what they do, but for who they are. That sense of connection plays a major role in retention and engagement.

Your approach should focus on emotional intelligence, authenticity, and visibility throughout the organization. Your employees should know that they’re welcome to speak to you about more sensitive concerns, such as mental health or family issues, and that you’ll treat them with the consideration they deserve. This will help you remove barriers to achievement and ensure that struggling workers get the support they need to continue in their roles.

Elements of a great leader, says Woody, include “having a kind of radical candor, a radical sense of being able to tackle those topics that are going on in people's lives, and… creating an environment where people see their purpose. They see how their work aligns with the mission, vision, and values, and get reminded of that regularly, and get celebrated for that.”

“I think the people that will stop by to drop a handwritten card on your desk and say, ‘Hey, welcome to the team,’ or ‘Hey, happy service anniversary,’—those small things make an HR leader stand out more than others.”

At the same time, be sure to prioritize and spotlight achievement. By acknowledging and rewarding employees who are performing at the top of their game, and ensuring that all team members have a clear path for professional advancement, you’ll be able to motivate your team members to commit more deeply to their roles.

By building an approach that celebrates each employee as an individual, you’ll be able to enhance trust in the company and drive higher employee morale, resulting in increased productivity and retention rates.

Common Challenges in HR Leadership

HR leaders need to overcome numerous barriers to build a thriving employee culture, including both structural challenges and interpersonal challenges.

1. Structural Challenges

Oftentimes, company leadership places an overemphasis on transactional HR functions (benefits, compliance, payroll) rather than prioritizing a holistic focus on the whole employee. While it’s important to ensure that these functions are running smoothly, HR leaders should have the space and freedom to step back from day-to-day workflows and hone their focus around building a rewarding company culture.

Many organizations also adhere to rigid performance review processes that don’t look at the big picture. When measuring employee performance, it’s important to look at organizational trends as a whole, so that you can see the impact of a new training protocol or a new manager on a certain team’s performance overall. And on an individual level, you should take factors such as illnesses, family obligations, and injuries into account, ensuring that you’re assessing each employee’s contributions fairly.

2. Interpersonal Challenges

HR leaders may also find it difficult to connect on a personal level with their team members. Employees have likely been burned in the past by toxic managers, and may be reluctant to open up to leadership to share their issues or feedback.

It’s vital to show them immediately that you’re committed to supporting them at the workplace, and that no issues are off-limits. By building a rapport with employees at an individual level, you’ll be able to create trust and develop strong relationships with your workers, opening the door for meaningful feedback.

Best Practices for Human-Centered Leadership

So, how can HR managers break through these barriers to become more impactful leaders? Build an integrated strategy that ensures consistent values and actions across every team, focusing on human-centered leadership.

Human-centered leadership is about focusing on people rather than profits. That might make some traditional leaders cringe, but the practice is extremely profitable. By combining emotional intelligence with strategic guidance, you’ll be able to implement a culture that helps every employee feel seen and valued.

Job satisfaction often boils down to people wanting to feel seen, heard, and valued—not just for what they do, but for who they are. That sense of connection plays a major role in retention and engagement, which affects your bottom line.

1. Align with Core Values

Most likely, your company already has a set of corporate values. But do they actually mean anything to your managers and employees? If they’re seen as nothing more than a slogan, their impact on the company culture will be negligible at best.

“At Southwest, our values were everywhere—on every wall. But that visibility only matters if you actively use those values as a guide,” says Woody. “Ask: Does this decision align with our values? And when something doesn’t, speak up and course-correct. It’s not just about what’s written—it’s about how you apply it to your daily work.”

Pay attention to the company values, and continually interrogate yourself and your team members whether the actions you’re taking are in alignment with them. By thoughtfully considering even small actions and applying them to your values statement, you’ll be able to create a company culture that employees will trust.

2. Build Microcultures

Don’t just think of the organization as a whole: Encourage team managers to set up their own customs and practices that showcase their team’s unique values, fostering a greater sense of unity.

“Leaders also need to create ‘microcultures’ within their teams—subcultures that align with company values but reflect the team's specific dynamics,” says Woody. “When teams define how they want to work together, it builds stronger bonds and clarity.”

“You can tailor the values in your microculture to represent the kind of work that your team does, whether it's consultative, whether it's output-based reporting, or whether it's servicing clients. You can take that big picture vision and values and really pull it down and word it in a way that it's digestible for the people in your team.”

3. Coach with Empathy

A good manager takes a personalized approach to each employee. That means it’s important to understand how each team member prefers to be led, coached, and recognized. Some thrive on public recognition, while others shy away from it. By choosing the types of coaching and incentives that each employee responds to, you’ll be able to encourage each team member to achieve greater results.

While performance reviews can offer helpful feedback, don’t rely on annual appraisals, which often miss the mark and don’t give accurate indications of an employee’s work.

Instead, says Woody, “we need more frequent, informal check-ins and clear definitions of what high performance looks like.”

Genuinely care about your people. Know their goals, fears, and needs. Listen, even if you don’t have the perfect response. That builds trust. People don’t leave companies—they leave leaders.

How to Grow Your Career in HR

For HR managers, it’s important to maintain a growth-focused mindset, no matter how far you advance in your career. By prioritizing opportunities to learn from others in your company, you’ll be a more empathetic and versatile manager, with access to different viewpoints that can help you develop innovative solutions.

1. Focus on Cross-Collaboration

To grow in your role, actively seek out opportunities for experiential learning in other departments. This will help you broaden your perspective and deepen your network across the organization. “Can you take on a short-term project in another department?” asks Woody. “Even a 10-hour gig can expose you to new skills, broaden your knowledge, and show initiative to your leader.”

2. Build Advisory Networks

It’s also important to build a trusted team of advisors, both within and outside of the company, who you can rely on for honest feedback and insights. 

Maintain a "personal board of directors" for ongoing mentorship and perspective. “Often, people say they're stuck without tapping into their network,” says Woody.

“I tend to believe if you have five people in your life, that you trust their advice and guidance and perspective, that one of those 5 people… can make thoughtful recommendations, like ‘Well, have you tried this?’”

By leaning on a trusted team of mentors and peers, you’ll be better equipped to solve problems, and can tap into each of their resource networks for additional support.

Earlier in his career, Woody found a key mentor in Elle Clark, Director of Leadership and Employee Development at Southwest Airlines. “She helped me realize I didn’t need to prove myself with performance alone. I could lead with authenticity. She was there for me when I was struggling with anxiety and encouraged me to be open about it. Her support and belief in me made a lasting impact.”

How HR Leaders Support Frontline Workers

Great HR managers are able to facilitate strong connections with all employees—not just the ones in the corporate office, but the ones in the field or the factory, too.

Frontline workers don’t sit at desks, and they may not have easy access to email or an intranet. As a result, they may be more difficult to connect with than your in-office workers. To engage with them effectively, you’ll need to build a tactical communication strategy that meets them where they are.

Have One-Question Conversations

Rather than send a detailed email requesting feedback to your frontline team, “Is there one question that you can ask?” asks Woody.

“A great example of it is, ‘What's one thing that when you come to work every day, makes your work more difficult?’ And a leader went and asked that question of roughly 30 [Southwest airlines employees] over the course of a week… They saw that there were two or three pain points that were being identified frequently across this sample size of 30 people. And then they, as leaders, could say, ‘Okay, we need to go and do something about this.’”

After implementing the change, the leaders followed up with each of the workers and said, “Hey, thank you so much for your feedback. Thank you so much for making five minutes in your day to talk to us about this. Here's the change we made. Let us know if this works or not.”

“Those are the pebbles that you throw in the glass jar that eventually help that glass jar to overflow, and for that person to feel cared about for that, to drive them through that tough day when it's 7 degrees and snowing and there's bags everywhere, and the other side of that being again having the information that you need as a leader to be able to say, ‘Okay, we need to go and fix these two or three things, because there's just no way that people are gonna want to stay… if we don’t correct these things.”

Address Cultural Sensitivity

It’s also important to acknowledge time, access, and language barriers for frontline teams. By employing text-based communication tools like TeamSense, they’ll be able to read and respond to communications on their own mobile devices, ensuring seamless adoption. Messages can instantly be translated between English and more than 20 other languages, facilitating clear communication even when a language gap exists.

Using AI to Enable Better HR Leadership

HR leaders see great potential in artificial intelligence tools, with 53% already using AI tools in their work, and another 35% who aren’t yet, but would like to explore them.

But it’s important to leverage AI tools as a way to automate today’s manual processes to help HR employees operate on a more strategic level, rather than to replace HR workers.

“I think, as leaders, we have to look at AI and say, ‘Are there things that we spend significant amounts of time doing that AI could give us a great 1st draft?’” asks Woody. “I think that is a great way to save time in places where then I can invest that time into my people, I can invest it into their development. I can invest it into building those relationships, which ultimately feeds back into what makes people stay.”

Measuring the ROI of HR

How will you know if you’ve done your job effectively as an HR leader? Many HR teams struggle to prove their value—but Woody recommends looking beyond the bottom line and focusing on more impactful metrics.

“What if I can stop 10% of year one attrition at a company by having not just the right tools to provide the information when people need, but having more faces in the field to be able to have these kinds of conversations about growth and development and support and getting that information?” asks Woody.

“The productivity changes, the performance changes—all of those things are worth far more probably, than what you ever spent on that AI solution. And it's just about trusting the fact that if you are a good leader with great strategy, you can reappropriate those resources in a way that they will pay double and triple their dividends by putting them in a different place than simply by taking them out.”

Leveraging the Right Technology for Better HR Management

As Woody’s insights show, you’ll be able to drive key impacts throughout your organization by taking a human approach to your HR leadership strategy. But developing that personalized level of support can be impossible to scale effectively without the right HR technology tools at hand.

That’s where TeamSense can help. Our HR solution is equipped to help HR leaders engage with frontline teams, ensuring that they feel seen and valued. TeamSense’s communications platform promotes transparency and trust, with features including:

• Employee Assistant
  Our AI-based policy assistant tool enables frontline workers to easily get the answers to their policy questions in real-time, without waiting for live support. That helps them stay informed, while empowering your HR team to keep its focus on high-impact work.

• Text-Based Communications Platform
  Connect with your frontline team through their own mobile devices, ensuring that your messages get seen: 95% of text messages are read within 3 minutes of being sent. You’ll be able to segment your messages, whether to specific teams or employees, ensuring that everyone gets the information they need instantly.

• Seamless Absence Management
  Bring transparency and accountability into your absence management process with TeamSense’s streamlined text-based absence reporting. When employees send an absence notification to their managers, the data instantly syncs with HR tools, ensuring company-wide visibility to support better operations planning and minimize payroll errors.

• Employee Engagement Surveys
  Get feedback from your frontline teams with simple, one-question surveys conducted through TeamSense’s text-based platform. You’ll be able to use this data to gain key insights on employee sentiment and engagement levels, and identify problem areas that you can solve to drive higher retention rates.

By pairing human-centered leadership with technology that facilitates effortless communication with your frontline team, you’ll be able to build a thriving company culture where everyone feels valued.