Let’s Smack Ourselves Again

4 Responses for "Let’s Smack Ourselves Again"

1. Don Taylor April 23rd, 2009 at 5:56 pm 1

   About a year ago, a group of HR professionals presented me with their vision for their group: “we are a professional, strategic and innovative team.” That was the group’s definition of high performance. And there-in lies a big HR problem of “no respect” – what matters is whether those colleagues who work with HR see HR as adding value, professional, strategic, etc. not how HR chooses to describe themselves. A second big HR problem to my mind is that HR generally do not see themselves as leveraging service to clients – by clients, I mean those folks whom the organization serves. So long as HR folks see themselves as providing service to internal clients, the organizations in which they work are seldom likely to see HR as an integral part of the client/customer service delivery team. The problem is us, not “them”

2. Dave Crisp April 23rd, 2009 at 7:55 pm 2

   Don, with all due respect for your experience, I can point to HR teams and individuals who do exactly what you believe they should (with which I agree) in other words, productive, total stakeholder-oriented, strategic activities… and get good results financially and engagement-wise. The fact that some do not does not condemn “HR” (implying ALL HR everywhere). The problem is not all of us and not only us. HR people who continue to do what you saw in your shop didn’t get that way entirely on their own without someone failing to suggest, ask, order or insist they do otherwise.

   Line managers frequently don’t know what to ask or expect of their HR people. Now, is that 100% the fault of HR or the Line – neither… rather some of both. You don’t find a finance team ‘telling’ the CEO what to do. They have a clear point of view based on best practices and a solid, agreed upon set of principles that the experts pretty much agree will get the best result, but every CEO has a clear point of view about what finance should be showing them and doing as well. (And even with all the clarity on both sides apparently finance can get messed up pretty badly.)

   HR doesn’t have the history of agreed opinion about what works to rely on and they’re often taking instructions from line managers who know even less or only a bit more. So in my view the problem is not ‘us’ or ‘them,’ but all of us inside and outside HR who are not paying enough attention to what research is showing us will work.

3. Don Taylor April 24th, 2009 at 4:34 pm 3

   You are absolutely correct that many organizations have good to exceptional HR contributions to the bottom line and to the longer term successful strategy of those organizations. And HR is well respected by their peers in those organizations. For these folks, there is no issue to debate and there is no hand-wringing.

   However, I will bet you a week of lattes that many of our members and/or their teams see their role as serving internal clients and probably are hard pressed to discuss (in a language that their peers can relate to) how their contribution impacts the bottom line. Even when this is not the case at the senior levels of an HR team, it is likely the case in the front ranks of the HR team. What drives me crazy are those who argue for a “seat at the decision-making table” and yet – figuratively speaking – turn their back on the organization’s clients to serve internal clients! This is a really ingrained perception in many organizations fostered by the HR profession itself. While there are no guarantees, the HR profession can do a lot to change this perception by demonstrating the impact of HR on the bottom line and the clients; and by not being shy about talking about the HR contribution.

4. Dave Crisp April 26th, 2009 at 7:45 pm 4

   Thanks for the clarification, Don. We hear similar comments a lot. I often wonder if the same is said of Finance people or if not why not. Surely not every one of them has the insight or skills fully developed to make an understandable contribution to end results either, yet we seem more content to understand they are speaking an arcane language at times. I wonder if it’s like when I taught math – few people were likely to step up and argue with some equation I worked out, but they were always arguing with English teachers’ analyses of books. We don’t question the CFO’s presentation of IRR data on a proposed investment, for instance, nearly as much as HR’s claims that engagement boosts results. In my experience, the latter tend to be actually more reliable regardless that one is all numbers and the latter requires some assumptions.

   I agree that the more numbers HR can pull into the proof, the more digestible it is, but just because IRR is all numbers doesn’t make it 100% reliable, yet it often seems to be accepted as such. Are we underselling the value of HR due to that?