HR

Create value

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If you had to rank the professions on their level of creativity, where would you rank the HR profession? Probably somewhere on the continuum between accounting and marketing, probably closer to the former and further from the latter.  Creativity doesn’t figure highly in any core competencies I have ever seen and the nearest that we get is the more “business acceptable” innovation.  Somehow creativity feels soft, it raises images of artists and writers and nebulous concepts, whereas we of course want to look hard and mean and commercial and worthy of the much vaunted “seat at the top table”.

Of course, we deal in a world full of commercial imperatives that cannot be denied.  Most of us work in businesses that either need to make a profit, balance the books, or make savings regardless of the sector.  The question is not the what, but the how and creativity is a much undervalued tool in the drive for commercial solutions.  We need an answer, we look to past experience, to other businesses and to the HR press seldom do we look at our business, look inside ourselves and search for a new or different way. A way that is bespoke to our business and provides a competitive edge.

I’d suggest the first step any HR professional should ever take in considering a solution is to ask what the real problem is and only then to consider whether a solution is actually required and why? What value will it add? Is this driven by business need or by some other force.  What is the least intervention that would solve the problem and how does it fit culturally with the way that the business behaves?

Creativity requires you to be brave. It requires confidence and self belief and a willingness to plot a unique course.  But it also requires a closeness and in-depth understanding of your business and a desire to make a difference. Being creative isn’t the antithesis of being commercial. It is the start.

Performance management – a human approach

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HR people typically over structure. Whether the profession attracts people who need structure, or whether the insecurities of being in HR leads to it is a subject for another day.  But nonetheless, the structure is there and in many cases becomes an incapacitating force against driving business performance.

Nowhere can this more keenly be observed than in the struggle for a performance appraisal or management system that works.  I can’t count the number of times that I have seen and been involved with the redesign, revamp, and yes, restructure of a process that was meant to drive the performance management culture, but ended up being an unpopular, badly used and inhibiting mechanism.  And the reason for this is that the structure that we are trying to apply, in itself is the down fall of the process.

Consider this.  I have two children, both are very different and both are equally as wonderful and as valuable to me.  If you asked me to assess them against a set of criteria, say…academic ability, creativity, helpfulness around the house, sense of humour and ability to pick their pants up off the floor then they would both score very differently (for the record neither would score highly on that last category.  So which is the best child? Well of course, neither is the only answer.

But yet we feel somehow the need to apply such structures to our businesses to try to force “the conversation” normally through a fear that managers aren’t doing it “properly”.  And rather than exploring why that might be and what we can do to facilitate this, instead we structure and apply process neither of which lead to any better conversation.

If you work in HR, you are used to delivering good and bad messages because we spend our time doing both.  If you work in other areas of the business you don’t necessarily have that experience and so it feels like a big deal and no form or rating system in the world is going to help that.  But coaching, support and practice will.  We don’t need a form, we don’t need to compare people with one another and we don’t need a competency framework.  Leave it free form and humanistic and focus your energies on helping people out of their comfort zones.