What’s the Matter with Human Resources?

There is another thing I am struggling with. Since I got back in the UK I have had about a dozen chats with senior Human Resource professionals here, who worked for me back in the day and something major seems to have changed.

When I was last in the UK and indeed when I was in the US, HR was an incredibly challenging profession. We were focused on people and creating ways to make business work. We were creating rigorous approaches to selection, to organization change, to labour relations conflict, we were contributing to business strategy and I was on the operating committees of my plants and on the major business divisions I later served.

It was far from perfect but enormous fun and very meaningful. And we looked after are our own people in HR: trained them, developed them and generally made sure they got good feedback and were appreciated and promoted if they worked out. And its these people who are now in senior HR jobs across British business.

But now talking to these people, HR seems to have joined the Administa side of the world. It seems more like BS political games, go fetch rover for senior managers who are not good leaders/good with people, keeping them out of diversity trouble, and providing call centre (your call is very important to us) type support to employees and with limited role in the overall business or people management. The people I talk to seem embarrassed to talk to their former boss about what they are doing and our chat becomes more gossip about what old colleagues are now doing. It’s pretty disheartening.

One of my former colleagues put me onto someone, a consultant apparently working on making HR more effective and we discussed the above and he agreed and seemed interested, gave me some ideas he had written up and I gave him some of my ideas to fix things back. Then silence….clearly he was not really serious about fixing HR or my ideas are so far from current reality as to be unworkable.

There is another angle: almost all the young professionals I mentor suffer in organizations that are useless at people management. Organizations that demoralize people and the research suggests this problem is rampant and much of the current Great Resignation reflects this, the quitting of soul destroying jobs. Most of my mentees actually like their job teaching, in healthcare, IT, retail, non-profits, architecture, social work, business; it’s their bosses and bosses bosses that destroy their motivation. The organizational context.

And yet where is HR in this problem: no where best I can see. So my personal experience seems to have rather wider implications?