What many love to hate in my profession

People love deriding things they don’t like. That’s natural. And we all know one negative experience can dilute twenty positive experiences. With time, through word of mouth, even if a sad event or unfortunate experience has not happened to you, you start hating, avoiding, and maligning it. It’s just like fear factor. No one has seen a ghost. But we all hate and fear them!

With the pre-poll accusations, campaign hate speeches, post-poll exit number crunching and impending election results, it got me thinking. And I started realizing it happens with most things in life. Personal relationships or professional perspectives. Most things depend on how our immediate environment makes us believe it.

When it comes to my profession, I believe I am in the most precarious profession – Human Resources (HR). Companies need them but they don’t want them! There are people outside of HR who hate HR, naturally. But now, I see more and more HR professionals who are disturbed with the profession. They start innocently, perhaps, saying the title of the function needs to change and then go on to bigger misfortunes, challenges and accusations. In fact, and not surprisingly, it came into my recent attention, wherein, some companies do not have an HR function! And rightly so, what is in HR that actually cannot be outsourced? You name it and there is a more specialized, proficient, competitive and may be more economical option available.

The biggest issue that I believe facing HR is, HR is seen as a bunch of people advising people what “to avoid, first” at work rather than “what to do, right”.

In my limited years of experience I have come across some very smart, intuitive and competent HR professionals. They exhibited enormous amount of breadth and depth of information about their profession, industry they belong to or have worked in, appreciation of latest technologies that can be utilized in the profession and an overall impressive perspective to life.

HR leaders and managers are supposed to add value to an organisation by understanding and evaluating implications of inorganic versus organic growth strategy. Some are given the responsibility of leadership development while some are named “change agents” and bring in culture change. And yet, most voices of dissent we hear is HR does not understand business, is not adding any value, and most HR staff do not possess enough skills or intelligence to appreciate strategy, business objectives, technology, project and product management innovations, etc. According to most employees, HR is just a mouth piece of top management, good at doing what is ordered and great at misleading employees into unachievable horizons. At best, HR is decent at executional processes and basic statutory compliances. Of course, HR has to work on laws and regulations, labour issues, payroll and many other operational areas.

The real meat for HR, according to me, is in talent identification, developing such talent and make them culture ready for their organisations. They are responsible for creating leaders for tomorrow. And to do, what we are supposed to do, we need to break some of our own glorified assumptions. We are not and cannot be good at everything. If we really have a false belief on self, I fear, we will be outsourced, sooner than later. We have to leave our “Generalist” Garb and become Skill “Specialist”. We may know and practice basic HR operations on a daily basis, but we will need to learn, explore, incorporate and execute work as experts of certain specific domains. We will need to take best practices of organisation development, organisation behaviour, individual psychology, consumer behaviour, branding, learning and training and create our own customised models to help business and business managers perform. They need to sit and evaluate what is it that is required of them by business? They need to listen and understand business challenges, pick up the shovel and make things happen.

But before that, HR leaders need to realise that before making learning/development and training as their next big launch initiative, they need to train their HR teams for skills they are supposed to perform. HR folks need to be nominated for formal skill development programs. HR professionals are supposed to design, develop and implement some of the most critical and strategic frameworks in the organisation such as staffing objectives and manpower strategies, performance management, pay philosophy, employee and leadership develop programs. They need to be made professionally capable of shouldering such organisational initiatives!

And HR folks, need to wake up to the fact that no organisation, business leader or HR leader wants a “I love interacting with people” personality. They are looking for a highly business oriented, data-based, analytical and yet a psychologically soft-skilled person. They need someone who is a smart juggler, very adept at handling balls of business, technology, analytics and functional acumen. A smiling face is only the cherry on the cake now; not the cake anymore.

HR folks need to stop basing their thoughts on tried and tested, safe measures. They need to start thinking on their feet, fresh and quick. HR has to be equally creative like any advertising agency. HR has to think and act like product companies – conceptualise, test, implement, work out the rough edges and go live! Based on data, post implementation, they need to then work on improvements, impact areas and further innovation. Newer and better assessment models, bigger and brighter performance management systems highly scientific but evolving operational processes is the need of the minute. If it takes an hour, it is too late! As HR professionals, we need to start taking our profession seriously. If we value our profession and make it grow, our careers will blossom.

It is not hate, but ignorance which damages personalities. Let us not avoid our own self.

                        **********END OF DOCUMENT*********