Punk Rock Human Resources

There was a point in my life where I was involved in a spirited conversation about what was right & wrong with Human Resources at my former employer. As an exercise, I mapped out the issues in Excel [because I am a dork] and labeled each concept with a characteristic such as leadership and performance. It didn’t take very long for a pattern to emerge, and the deficiencies within my own HR department were the same deficiencies that I found with previous employers.

I also realized why turnover in the function of Human Resources is so high: the stupid, exhausting issues at my company were the same issues that plagued friends & colleagues at other companies.

It begs the question: What the hell is wrong with Human Resources?

There are brilliant people in the marketplace who write excellent books on redefining Human Resources, and many of those books start with the premise that HR just doesn’t get it. I cannot agree more with that concept, but I think that there is a small subset of people within HR who get it – but we understand that our leaders just don’t get it. That may seem like an easy way out, but it’s true. If you have exhaustive turnover in Human Resources and your leaders aren’t making any changes, there is an implicit message in the lack of action: thank you, but change is not required.

So what the hell is wrong with HR?

For starters, it is clear that Corporate America needs a ‘Human Resources revolution’. At the very least, HR practitioners need to identify what Human Resources means and not wait for someone to tell us what it means. It is very easy for someone in the Finance Department to tell me that HR is all about headcount and payroll. Colleagues in the Office Planning department have told me that HR is all about logistics and design – if you design a better workspace, productivity will rise and employee complaints will decrease.

We need to recognize that everyone thinks that they can do ‘Human Resources’ better than Human Resources. In many cases, they are right. If we want to change our function and become relevant, HR must become thought leaders and define the basic, HR Infrastructure and not let the basics be defined for us.

To illustrate this point:

How many times have you tried to promote someone and gone to HR, only to find that the process has changed? or there is no process? or you missed the promotion cycle? We owe it to our employees and shareholders to get the basics right before we start positioning ourselves as change agents.

Identifying a basic, Human Resources infrastructure starts with good old-fashioned stakeholder management. We need to do a better job identifying the true stakeholders, which means speaking to people who have titles other than Vice President or Senior Director. I’m not saying that power isn’t important; however, I would argue that we spend too much time focused on transitory power — power that doesn’t mean anything in the long run — and not enough time & energy looking at the power structure that moves the business forward.

HR does itself and the Company no favors when we limit ourselves to negotiating with VPs on the look and feel of our services. We need to be less enamored with breaking into the political infrastructure (and surrounding ourselves with executives) and spend more time meeting with employee and shareholder groups to understand the basic set of expectations.

What also concerns me about HR is our focus on developing personal networks. We want to be positioned with so-and-so, and I think that our desire for legitimacy demonstrates our personal lack of credibility. Frankly, we’ll never gain approval if we ask for it, and constantly rushing to the side of a Vice President is a complacent and easy way to operate.

We need to stop asking for a seat at the table and start bringing our own chair. We can do this by training our HR professionals in something more than running headcount and staffing reports. We’ll have a seat at the table, and we will have the opportunity to demonstrate our authenticity, once we deliver against thoughtful and aggressive objectives.

I want to talk about deliverable and objectives, too. It’s not enough for HR to oversee administrative tasks such as an annual review process one time each year & then pat ourselves on the back if the data feeds into payroll’s systems properly. We need to stop getting it done and start getting it right. As an example, our administrative efforts around the compensation cycle are pointless if we aren’t teaching our clients to have the fair and equitable talent review sessions that feed into our compensation decisions.

Once we get the infrastructure right, we will find that our accountability to the organization brings the stature and power that we were seeking as a function; however, we should recognize that HR has a larger burden than most corporate functions. We must recognize that our department needs to be vigilant in ensuring that our behaviors and actions are above reproach. We need to understand that words matter, but that our action matters more. We must be on the forefront of organizational planning, finance, technology, change management, leadership development, and coaching at all levels.

How can we do all of this? We need the HR revolution to come from outside, not from within a pool of talent that has benefited from & been rewarded by the status quo. During the past twelve years, I have worked with HR professionals who are former administrative assistants with no formal HR training – but they are highly organized! I’ve worked with marketing and finance people who also own the title HR Manager. I have a former supervisor who was an actor. Another former supervisor of mine was an art teacher. Changing the function of Human Resources means developing the competencies required to balance the needs of our employees with the expectations of our shareholders. As much as I’ve enjoyed working with many of my former supervisors, nearly all of them reached the pinnacle of their success when they supervised me. That’s not saying much.

If we’re not developing talent to lead a Human Resources department – or even lead an organization itself as a future CEO – our function will be replaced by something else (just as personnel was replaced by HR). It’s scary to write this, but the future of HR may not be much better if we don’t get to work right now.