HR is Broken

After spending 17+ years as a Human Resources Executive with firms like Deloitte, Navigant Consutling, and Baker Tilly, I figured out that the HR function as we know it is quite simply irrelevant.

The company says it wants its HR people to partner more closely with the business, to be more strategic, to drive change. Guess what. It doesn't. It's all window dressing. They've been told that in order to create the next generation of talent management, they need their HR professionals to "sit at the table." But then when those pros show up and sit down, the rest of the company realizes one of two things.

1.) The HR professionals have no idea what they're talking about.
2.) The HR professionals know so much about which they are talking that it scares the bejeezus out of them.

The first fix is easy: you find better HR professionals. The second fix is harder: it's institutional. And it's scary because most really good HR pros will want to focus on the core of your business: your culture, your ethos, your community. They'll start to point out things that are fundamentally screwed up with them all; they'll help you realize that if those things aren't fixed, any competitive advantage your business holds in attracting and engaging the best people will slowly but surely evaporate. It's hard for you to talk about - it's squishy, personal, emotional. And that culture...it's probably the only thing you know.

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity. ~ Charles Mingus

Create and Protect the Community Carbon

I help companies, their executives, and their HR teams come to terms with the only way we're going to change the way we work.

1) Get rid of anything in your Human Resources function that is transactional, process-driven, and adds no direct value to your revenue generating high-potential high-performing assets. Find someone(s) - whether a better equipped group on the inside (e.g. Finance) or an expert on the outside (e.g. third party alliance) who can do all that crap much cheaper, faster, and stronger for you. And then (mostly) forget about it.

2) Design and implement a next-generation people-strategy that is going to be laser focused on optimizing the performance of your best people and creating the environment - the experience - that becomes their purpose...their Community Carbon. Share the responsibility of nurturing that community. Empower your best HR people to the stewards, but orient them to do their great work through others throughout the organization. And hold others accountable to the strength of that community.

3) Identify, attract, and then deploy the right people to remove complexity from, add value to, and protect the Community Carbon you've now created.

Want to learn more? Email me.