Here’s a quiz: In my organization HR is/are:
a) A highly professional service provider that partners with managers to maximize shareholder value through effective people management practice.
b) The people who organize our Christmas parties and picnics
c) Where people who couldn’t make it in the core business go to be marginalized to the point where they do a minimum of damage.
OK – maybe HR’s an easy target in many organizations, but if beating up HR is a fun way to relieve some tension mid-day at the water cooler, you really won’t like what comes next:
If your HR group truly sucks, then your organization most likely sucks, too.
Yep, that’s right. I’m suggesting there is a direct correlation between highly effective HR, and a highly effective organization. Furthermore, I’d suggest that organizational managers get the HR departments they deserve. If your HR group is solely administrative in nature, and generally not very high performing, then that is exactly the quality of service you as a manager, or an organization has asked for.
You may like or hate Jack Welch, but it would pretty hard to argue that GE wasn’t a high performing organization when he was running it. Just about any time you heard Welch speak, he would talk about what he was doing, and he’d also talk about Bill Conaty – his HR guy. For GE, the HR portfolio was extremely important. Some other Jack Welch quotes about HR:
“A high quality senior HR person is as critical as the CFO”
HR should “get out of the picnic business”
And his advice to HR people: “Don’t be a victim”
Every organization has its version of the “People are our most important asset” speech, but Welch actually lived it. People will jump all over this, because Welch had an impressive record of firing people. But valuing people necessarily means that you remove barriers to a team’s success, and sometimes this means removing people.
The strongest organizations I have worked with have highly-competent, business-focused HR people. They also insist that every manager in the company is an HR manager. HR is not something that is delegated to a central group – it is actively managed by every leader, every day. The HR group’s role in these high-performing organizations is to set organizational leaders up to be outstanding managers of the human asset.
Picnics and Christmas parties need to be assigned elsewhere – perhaps the marketing department isn’t busy.
