Presenting this week to a class of MBAs taking an HR overview course, I had a chance to ask them what they were doing and why. Several mentioned they’d taken HR undergrad, but switched to marketing. I asked why. One said, “HR seemed to be all policies and rules. Marketing is more creative.” I chuckled, but I could see heads nodding around the room. I couldn’t let that go.

HR, done right, means figuring out with people what to do to make them more effective in the varied and challenging situations they encounter daily. It shouldn’t be about consulting the policy manual and telling them what the rules are. If that’s all it is, you can be sure we’ll soon see “Why We Hate HR 2″ written with even more negative accusations that the original.

Nothing, absolutely nothing is more creative than trying to figure out individuals’ idiosyncrasies and what strategies they can pursue to get what they want while ensuring everyone else has a shot at their goals, too. Rules truly are made, if not to be broken, at least bent, stretched, modified, turned to everyone’s advantage. And HR is the primary place that should occur. How else can we keep some sort of logic and balance in the midst of constant surging forward?

I purposely chose HR because I thought it was the greatest creative challenge, not the least and certainly not less than marketing, which always seems to boil down to trial and error based on focus groups and surveys. Sure there’s creativity in the pieces – the art, ideas, copy-writing and so forth, but mostly they evolve from earlier attempts and testing new materials. The elements of HR are often more constrained – union rules, CEOs orders, financial requirements, etc., but being hemmed in makes the challenge of finding a creative solution even greater.

In  most non-HR situations there’s usually time to test. With HR, you rarely have that luxury. You need solutions today or tomorrow. You need a true sense of what makes people tick… and the variations that exist in your particular culture, organization, unit, team and more. Figuring out how to align all that for everyone’s benefit is, to say the least, the most complex sort of challenge we ever face… so much so that many people just ignore it because they can’t face the creative struggle it often requires. So tell me you like marketing because it has rules, concepts or patterns that can evolve and room for new ideas, but don’t tell me it’s more that way than HR. It’s may not be your chosen field; you don’t have an aptitude for it, but not ‘uncreative.’ If that’s what we leave people with as an impression of HR, we deserve all the condemnation we’ve been getting.

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