Human Resource Strategists.

“Sadly, HR has very little power in an organization, unless the real executives are on vacation, and then watch out, because a lot of *****s are going to get fired. There are three types of people who choose a career in HR: sadistic ******s who were probably all tattletales in school, empathetic (and soon to-be-disillusioned) idealists who think they can make a difference in the lives of others, and those of us who stick around because it gives you the best view of all the most entertaining train wrecks happening in the rest of the company.”
Jenny Lawson: Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir)

I haven’t read Jenny Lawson’s book yet, but the hilarious excerpt from Chapter 15 which gives details Lawson’s bizarre experiences working in a corporate HR department, coping with the terrible behavior of the employees, the awfulness of the corporate bureaucracy and the absurdly bad job applications she received put it in my top ten books to read in 2013. (Needless to say I’m still plowing through my top ten books for 2010, 2011 and 2012 with no end in sight.)

An interesting – and fairly common- view of Human Resources is that it is the department that keeps staff records, processes payroll and files away warning letters, in other words: the archaic “personnel department”.

Some bright spark years ago woke up to the fact that employees in organizations are not just the proverbial bums on seats, but are actually a critical resource to the company, just like working capital or raw materials. So abracadabra, all organizations got into the nomenclature groove, scraped out the old “personnel department” title from the door and replaced it with Human Resources. But as Shakespeare so poetically posed, a rose by any other name smells just as sweet. In many cases there was no paradigm shift, no revving of engines and no mottle to the throttle. HR as it has now widely known still does payroll, files employee records and makes statutory returns. Very rarely does the head of HR sit on the left side of the CEO when the right side is occupied by the CFO. Yet the two seats are the absolutely most critical support roles that a CEO cannot do without. One keeps a keen eye over the financial capital while the other takes watchful care over the human capital that generates those numbers, whether on the revenue or the cost side.

The head of HR is a strategic rather than a transactional role. He designs a growth plan for his assets ensuring that they are well utilized, appropriate for the job they are slated to do and avoids obsolescence by mapping out a well designed machine life that makes the best out of them. He then assigns a business partner from within his department to each of the company’s divisions to act as the dedicated HR support, helping with recruitment, talent and performance management and all that internal HR gobbledygook. But this is the clincher. The HR business partner usually sits – wait for it – in the HR department. Which usually has double glazed glass and security coded doors to pass through. So how does a business partner who doesn’t physically sit at the business he is supposed to be partnering with get to know the business? How do they recruit the best fit of people for their assigned businesses if they don’t observe their internal clients first hand on a daily basis and figure out what are the softer, non-technical qualities required for the job? Ahh, of course, they rely on the job description designed with the input of the head of department right? How would they recommend a talent program or career path for a staff member if they are not aligned to what the specific business needs are based on its current operational reality? Which only comes from a deep understanding of the key performance metrics rather than a cursory hour-long discussion with the relevant department head.

On a recent assignment with banking executives, I shared the challenge of banks creating products that they think customers want rather than immersing themselves into a day in the life of their customers and observing how their customers went about their daily lives with a view to designing products that eased customer pain points. Many banks suffer from a distinct disdain for their customers preferences and a strong predilection for dictating what they think customer needs are. I place a number of HR business partners in this same category. You cannot know what your client requires if you do not immerse yourself in your clients’ business. You can come up with all manner of pie-in-the-sky solutions for their issues, but they tend to be short term in their outlook sort of like placing an Elastoplast on a gashing wound. People management, just like business management is not about moving chess pieces around a square. It requires a wider understanding of what the client business needs are from external customer challenges, the key drivers of the department’s P&L, the department’s sub-culture occasioned by the head of department’s leadership influence, the working habits of the best and the worst performers and a myriad other factors that one can only cotton onto if one is seated within the department he services.

A good HR business partner would have his clients saying: “he knows my business better than I do,” or “she provides a level of objectivity which I lack” or “he is a trusted adviser for my business”. This is rarely the case. But it can happen. I have worked with good business partners in the past. They knew the pain points in managing my business and as a result knew the right incentives to include in the performance contract which would ensure that the right behaviours were driven which reduced the pain points. It is only the HR Head himself who can determine the critical role his department plays in an organization: strategists or mindless paper pushers.

[email protected]
Twitter@carolmusyoka