ulrich

Analyse this…

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Data comes in many forms. Yet our obsession seems to be clearly focused on consolidated numerical information. Often called BIG data, but ultimately more analytics.

Other than the wonderful ability for the profession to follow a trend, I can’t help wondering how much the data argument is a result of the deconstruction of our profession.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against the use of analytics and data in helping to understand and resolve challenges and issues. I’m not against the use of them to help us to identify trends.

I just wonder whether we’re trying to get back, something that we needn’t have lost.

The trend of HR structures has been fragmentation and the repeated calls is for more. Resourcing want to be a stand alone function, learning want to be one too. Talent, leadership, OD, what’s next?

The fragmentation of the HR model is something that I’ve written a lot about before, but is another consequence of it a loss of understanding of the state of an organisation and a need to somehow compensate through apparent “intelligence”?

Evidence starts with what we can see, hear, feel and experience. It starts with our understanding of the environment, when we segment that understanding, we lose knowledge and intelligence that cannot be compensated for.

When I started my HR career we used to know the people that we worked with and supported, we knew who they were, where they came from, what they were paid, how they performed and what they wanted to do. We recruited, trained, supported and developed. We knew which roles were hard to fill, why and what the organisational implications were.

But I fear much of that is now gone.

As we move inevitably forward, we need to ask ourselves how much is really new, how much is really advancement and how much is trying to reclaim the things we’ve thrown away before. Looking back has negative connotations, but sometimes it is the only way we can make sense of the right way to step in to the future.

Insy or outsy?

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I’m hearing it all too often at the moment, “we need to take an outside in approach”. It’s a movement that finds a proponent in the form of one Dave Ulrich, he of the failed HR operating model that encouraged a slavish implementation, that set the profession back the best part of a decade.

But of course, Ulrich wasn’t responsible for our misinterpretation of the model and nor is he responsible for the potential screw up we could make on an outside in approach by assuming we need external expertise and perspectives.

It’s not you, Dave, it’s us.

So let me start by suggesting that what we really need to take is an inside, outside, inside approach.

It doesn’t trip off the tongue as well, admittedly, but stay with me.

You see, everything starts with your employees. I can almost guarantee that any problem that you have, any barrier you need to overcome, any issue that needs improvement, can be better identified by the people within your organisation than anyone outside.

My evidence?

The first thing any external third-party does when you hire them? They suggest carrying out a series of interviews, focus groups, listening groups or some sort of questionnaire to understand the needs of your employees.

It really is the equivalent of giving someone your watch and asking them to tell you the time.

I’m the first person to suggest that HR people need to get their heads up and scan the horizon, but that starts by looking outside the HR function and only then outside of the business.

Yes we need to understand the economic and socio-political context in which we operate, yes we need to focus on the markets and environments in which our businesses exist. But that only has any relevance if we know where the skills, capabilities, weaknesses and opportunities exist within our own enterprises.

Look outside by all means, but first work out what it means to be inside. Because that’s is where your organisational value lies.

Power, control, HR and Ulrich

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As I write this, I’m heading off over the Atlantic. So I know it is normally de rigueur to mention the number of feet….but I’ve never been the most spatially aware and, let’s be honest, you really don’t care. It’s ok….we can be honest….we’re amongst friends.

Whilst working on the subject, of which we must not speak, which occupies most of my waking and sleeping hours, I’ll also be spending some time with someone who divides my world, our profession, more than most. Someone we could maybe describe as the Marmite of the HR world. Revered by many, loathed by others and the subject of more column inches than even the Rave Pony. I’ll be meeting and spending time with a certain Dave Ulrich.

I’ve been pretty open about the Ulrich model in the past. I firmly believe it has been responsible for down skilling the HR profession. I believe it has made building a career in HR harder than ever. The model has been snatched by the profession with the blind eagerness of an addled addict spying a wrap of crack down the back of a well worn and somewhat putrid smelling sofa.

I also don’t believe that you can blame Ulrich for this any more than you can blame Smith and Wesson for the ridiculous levels of gun deaths in the country that likes to consider itself the most advanced in the world. Yeah…I’m posting this after I’ve got through immigration.

But that isn’t it. The issue isn’t the model.

The issue is about power and control. And no model has, or will, deal with the issue that is at the heart of the problem.

We see the power tension in the EU, in the United Nations, in our health care system, local and central government.

In any organisation with central and devolved functions, with local and global functions will always have tensions. The thing about the Ulrich model is that it did nothing to tackle them and instead went a long way to creating significant additional issues by highlighting and emphasising them.

Centres of Excellence looked down on Business Partners. Business Partners looked down on Centres of Excellence. And everybody looked down on the Shared Service guys. If they could find them….somewhere between here and Bangalore.

The creation of an additional power struggle within an already fragile and uncertain profession was as welcome as the proverbial fart in a space suit. And as parts of the HR function set about fighting in and amongst themselves, in a comedic HR turf war. The people that really matter, the employees, the managers, the customers and consumers, became increasingly disenfranchised from the department that couldn’t even speak highly of themselves.

Confusing. Baffling. Conflicting. Debilitating.

I don’t think any “model” is going to work unless you can deal with this issue of power and control. Throwaway statements about collegiate working and cooperative solutions are excrement coated feathers in the breeze. Easy to throw out there, seemingly light and appealing, but ultimately stained, stinking and ineffective.

So let’s get this elephant on the table, this walrus on a rock, this ostrich egg on a giant sized egg cup. And let’s crack this thing once and for all. The power struggle within HR is all pervasive and crippling. No model that separates, that divides will work unless it deals with this, the very essence of our identity crisis:

Who has the power and who has the contol?

Metrics are a false idol

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The following posts build on the guest post at XpertHR about Commercial HR and looks at some of the themes in a bit more detail.

There was a time when I was pretty hung up on HR metrics. I’d read Huselid, Becker and Beatty, I’d read Ulrich…well some of it….and I was pretty convinced that all we needed to do was to be able to measure what we did in HR and then the world was ours for the taking.

The pattern that I, and I imagine many others, went through was this,

–       Measure stuff

–       Get criticism of measured stuff being inconclusive

–       Decide you’re measuring the wrong stuff

–       Try and measure some other stuff

–       Fail because that stuff is too hard to measure

–       Go back to measuring original stuff because it is simpler

I wrote about a specific example last week, when you look at “Time to fill”, a simple measure that tells you very little. And within that pot you can add a whole host of traditional HR measures. But, unfortunately, the “better” measures either don’t actually exist or require so many different pull or push sub measures that they become and industry in themselves.

So in the end we stop doing and start measuring…..Genius!

Thinking of it another way around.  What if I asked you the following questions?

How fit are you? Have are you feeling today?

In order to answer this do you need to check your BMI, your blood pressure, your recovery time, your heart rate and a red blood cell count?

Or can you intuitively answer the question because of a number of micro observations that you have made throughout the day, how quickly you got out of bed in the morning, how your trousers felt when you put them on, how you felt when you had to run for the bus or climb the stairs because the lift was broken?

Now I’m not saying that the measures aren’t important to do every now and then – in the same way you go for a medical – but if we spent more time in our businesses being observant, being intuitive, asking questions, listening and feeling, my guess is we would come to better conclusions than we would by measuring a whole load of HR process.

And in the meantime we’d learn a whole lot of things and build a whole heap of relationships that would add more value than sitting in our department crunching meaningless numbers.

Surely that’s got to be the elusive win-win?