"A New Mandate for Human Resources
- A Call for Change"

Kathleen McComber, MA, SPHR

Should we do away with human resources? Abolish the department and those providing that function? This debate arises out of serious and widespread doubts about HR’s contribution to organizational performance. It is often ineffective, incompetent, and costly;  Dave Ulrich use the words “it is value sapping.”  Indeed, if HR were to remain configured as it is today in many organizations the answer would be a resounding YES!…abolish the thing!

But the truth is, HR has never been more necessary. The competitive forces that managers face today and will continue to confront in the future demand organizational excellence.  The efforts to achieve such excellence—1.  through a focus on learning, 2.  quality, 3. teamwork, and 4.  reengineering—are driven by the way organization get things done and how they treat their people.  Those are fundamental HR issues.  To state it plainly: achieving organizational excellence must be the work of HR.  Come to this session and learn a valuable set of tools to take back and implement in your HR department.

Why is this subject significant to the HR profession?

It is about HR being a strategic partner in the organization

Bio
Kathleen is currently the Senior Director of Human Resource for the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, Arkansas she joined UAMS in June, 2002. Prior to that, she was Corporate Vice President of Human Resources for Edgewater in Fayetteville, AR. for five years, prior to this position she held various executive human resources positions in retail, information technology and human resource consulting.

In her current position, she is responsible for the human resource function in the UAMS Medical Center, which employs over 2600, as well as campus responsibility for compensation, recruitment, training, diversity, and performance management for over 9000 employees.

Ms. McComber has over 25 years experience in the human resource profession and has done extensive work in the areas of compensation, benefits, employee relations, performance leadership, diversity and organizational development twenty of those at the senior level in the organization.  She holds certifications from Achieve Global, Wilson Learning and Birkman profiles. 

She is a member of the Central Arkansas Human Resource Association and currently a director on the board and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), where she was on the national board for seven years, having served as Chair in 1998. Kathleen holds a lifetime certification from the Human Resource Certification Institute as a Senior Professional in Human Resources and has served a four-year term on their national board.  She is now serving her sixth year on the SHRM Foundation Board where she served as Chair in 2003.

She holds a B.S. in Education from the University of Arkansas and an M.A. in Management from Webster University.  She is on the faculty of John Brown University and Webster University teaching leadership and human resource classes including a graduate class on Violence in the Workplace.