Don't Compromise!

One of our linked blogs is White Spaces, written by Indian HR consultant Gautam Ghosh. We’ve not spoken, but he’s one of the people I’d like to thank for questions as much as answers. What grabbed my attention is one of his recent blog posts – which he downplays with a charming “Ok, I admit it. I’m being lazy and am just posting some of my tweets”. That’s as maybe, but three of them certainly gave me food for thought and made think about the combination of “HR” and “redundancy” from a new angle.

They’re actually closely related to each other, although they started their digital life separately:

• Line managers should be the real HR people. HR department should be minimal and in the background
• In an ideal world we wouldn’t need a HR dept. Managers would not require guidelines to hire, assess, motivate and develop their people.
• HR should work to make that ideal world a reality. To make themselves redundant.

Without research that is perhaps irrelevant, the birth of HR Departments probably goes back to specialisation. As I’ve just mentioned specialisation, time-honoured traditions indicate I must now mention Adam Smith’s famous example of how 10 people could produce 48,000 pins a day if they specialised, breaking the process into parts, rather 1,000 a day each. There, duly mentioned. Except HR Departments don’t produce pins. And to paraphrase another old chestnut, isn’t it better to keep quiet and be considered superfluous than to bang a drum and prove it?

In the meantime, I ambled indulgently through a few more highly recommended – and highly readable and laudable blogs. Two posts at one of them – www.KnowHR.com – caught my eye. The first is a widely quoted blog post – 10 Tenets for The New HR – written by Frank Roche. The HR profession, judging by the listed comments, have rallied to applaud, and rightly so: it’s a striking declamation of things HR should stop doing.

But existing isn’t one of them, and line managers oddly don’t get mentioned. The author is right that HR is about business first and foremost, but the business’s other managers don’t figure in any meaningful, articulated ‘this will be our new partnership with them’ kind of way. So I searched the blog for ‘line managers’. A month earlier, it seems Frank got served the wrong meal in a restaurant but got a complimentary epiphany as a side order: or, as the post says, “Great HR is about Great Management.”

In a paragraph that talks more to non-HR professionals than his 10 Tenets, he comments:

Here’s a prescription for HR: Toss out those wasted training classes about employee engagement. Stop trying to do management workarounds. Get out there in the trenches and quit making up stupid policies that are designed to rein in the one knucklehead who breaks the rules. Teach managers about great management, and teach them to not lose their humanity doing their job.”

Again, all of this is great, but I thought about some other professions too – VSO volunteers, sexual health outreach educators, social workers. All of them really should be working towards redundancy as far as possible. If they achieve their objectives (by which I mean the business objectives) and their ideal world, they won’t be needed anymore. One final ‘My work here is done’ and they can retire happily: the problems they exist to address will have been solved. So is HR – in terms of driving up performance, increasing motivation, dealing with ‘human capital’ as people rather than abstract entities –a great deal different?

(It’s tempting here to mention Douglas Adams’ “B Ark”, but as personnel officers share the Ark not just with hairdressers and telephone sanitizers but also management consultants, and it crashes in Britain we’ll, er … gloss over that one.)

The people closest to these issues – and to these people – are the line managers. HR may be professional in the subject matter, but they’re as much “another department” as Accounts, or Estates, or Maintenance. Or like war reporters, at least embedded where the ‘action’ is, rather than commenting remotely. Now I’m not saying line managers should mend toilets or fix broken windows, but … how many of them use the existence of HR as a ‘get out clause’ when it comes to developing their staff?

Shouldn’t HR’s strategy be more like “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”? Not just engaging with the business’s top management – a good thing, but there’s always the danger of a faint squeak of trumpet blowing – but with the line managers nearer the ground, enthusing them about developing and encouraging their teams?

Workloads, human nature, professional self-interest – and the reward and recognition schemes that mobilise them – won’t see Gautam’s daydream turn into reality any day soon, but it’s still an interesting thought for an HR consultant to have had.

And after all, the point of learning and development isn’t to produce as many blunt pins as possible, just the right number of sharp ones.

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