Years ago, when many of his peers were focusing on marketing or finance at McGill University’s MBA program, a 25-year-old Alex Gallacher opted for HR—a decision shaped by what he saw early on as a lack of business insight being applied to human resources.
“I saw HR as a real growth opportunity and knew if I built my career around that, it would serve me well, and let me make a difference” says Gallacher.
Corporate life
Gallacher started his career at Mintz and Partners (a Toronto accounting firm that has since merged with Deloitte) as an HR administrator. He was soon bumped up to HR manager and found himself responsible for traditional HR functions like campus recruiting, compensation and benefits, employee relations—“I even ran the company picnic in partnership with our Office Manager,” he says.
“But by my third year at Mintz, having learned a ton from a very talented leadership group, I realized we could be selling HR services to clients. Pay equity was becoming a big deal. It was something a lot of our clients didn’t understand and they came to us for help. We started providing HR consulting to the point where before I left in year five, I got us up to about 20 per cent chargeable in the HR function.
“That`s where I got the consulting bug.”
After a two-year stint as Canadian HR director for the retail division of Thorn EMI, Gallacher was recruited to BMO Nesbitt Burns as a senior HR consultant supporting investment banking, fixed income, research, economics and finance divisions.
Big break
On the strength of his time at Mintz, Gallacher was asked by BMO’s head of executive resourcing to assist the bank’s CFO with a complex reporting project that linked people, process and technology. “The real goal was to create a kind of leading finance organization within a financial institution. We created linkages between the three pieces so the financial reporting backbone of the bank was robust, connected and transparent in terms of how it all fit together. And this was before Sarbannes-Oxley reporting requirements became mandatory for publicly traded companies in the U.S., so our work was really ahead of the curve,” he says.
Gallacher and his HR team’s role were ensuring people infrastructure connected with processes and technology. “We were tasked with ensuring things like job descriptions, career maps, career support tools and compensation was appropriately tailored to the finance organization.”
He counts the project, which turned into a full-time role, as one of the most significant achievements of his career.
Consulting
After another couple of years in banking, including a vice-president and director role with TD Securities, Gallacher and business partner Michael Bennett (also from Nesbitt and TD) started ENGAGE Human Resources Solutions Inc. in 2004.
ENGAGE is an eight-person, Mississauga-based HR consultancy that provides clients with third-party services like audits, employee surveys, human resources planning, leadership development and 360 feedback; as well as full-service human resources outsourcing.
“We do all the day-to-day HR stuff, all the way up to and including business strategy,” says Gallacher.
A recent example of how Gallacher helps clients align their HR strategy with business goals is his work with TWD Technologies, a medium-sized engineering consultancy in Burlington, Ont.
The firm had started out life as two partners working out of their basement and quickly grew to around 80 employees, “and we realized we needed support to help build our team,” says TWD Technologies co-principal Milt Tsiapalis. “Alex came on board as part-time consultant and helped us get our vision and principles together. He sat down with my partner and I, as well as members of our senior management team, and extracted what kind of organizational culture we wanted for the company. He helped build the foundation of our culture.”
Five years on and the Tsiapalis and his team are still living the vision and principles. “Whenever we’re faced with something new, we always make sure our decisions align with our culture—it always goes back to that,” he says.
Gallacher also surveyed TWD Technologies staff to gauge employee thinking on the direction of the company.
“We shared the data with the firm’s executive, used it to come up with some strategy and came back to staff with concrete plans to drive the firm forward,” Says Gallacher.
Leveraging staff know-how is key to successful strategy, according to Gallacher. “If you can harness that information and commit to using it, employees will be motivated knowing they’re part of the solution. It creates a sense of ownership—you have people with a vested interest in the outcome because they’ve been a party to setting the agenda. And if you’re going to align your human capital in a way that truly supports your business—and get the discretionary effort that’s so critical—you need this kind of engagement.”
When he’s not helping clients, Gallacher spends significant time teaching, including a course on career development and succession planning in Rotman’s Advanced HR Management program, a second-year Rotman MBA course on human capital management and an MBA capstone course in leadership for Wilfrid Laurier University. He recently wrapped up five years of teaching for McGill’s MBA Japan Program in Tokyo.
SHRP at a Glance
Alex Gallacher MBA, CHRP, SHRP
Managing Director, ENGAGE Human Resources Solutions Inc.
Education:
- BA (administrative and commercial studies)—University of Western Ontario
- MBA—McGill University
- Advanced Program in Human Resources Management—Rotman School of Management
- Executive Leadership for HR Professionals—Rotman School of Management
- Certified Human Resources Professional (CHRP)—HRPA
Career history:
- Managing director/co-founder—ENGAGE Human Resources Solutions Inc.
- Senior director-HR, infrastructure groups—CIBC
- VP/director-HR—TD Securities
- Senior relationship manager-HR (finance division)—BMO Financial Group
- Director-HR—Thorn-EMI
- HR manager—Mintz & Partners