A good man-up is hard to find
If everyone else 'manned up', we'd have a better life, says The VillainI met an old friend for a coffee yesterday. He worked as an HRM for years, then gave it up to start a consultancy. (Something to do with HR software: dunno what precisely; I switch off whenever he talks about it.) But he’s still an astute observer of HR, and in our regular meetings never fails to present a new and usually hilarious theory of how the profession could be improved.
‘I’ll tell you something else I never quite got about HR,’ he said, between slurps of his black Americano. (Seems like we’re all on diets nowadays.) ‘Why on earth do we own recruitment, and not the line? They know the job they’re hiring into, they know the culture of the team, and they’re the ones having to manage the bloomin’ recruits once they’re in.’
My defence of the recruitment function’s current locus was interrupted by another of my friend’s breathless assertions. ‘HR owning line recruitment,’ he opined, ‘makes about as much sense as Rugby coach Stuart Lancaster owning recruitment for the National Ballet.’
He continued in much the same vein. Basically, his ongoing gist was that in the cases of recruitment and most forms of compliance, HR should get the line to ‘man up’ and own tasks that should be really be line-owned. I didn’t particularly agree with him, but it was a refreshing alternative to hearing the ‘Marketing should own Attraction’ spiel for the thousandth time and it did get me thinking.
A lot of what HR does – one might almost say was its core organisational purpose – is getting the rest of the business to ‘man up’ and take its responsibilities seriously. Rather than being a repository for the trickier forms of people management – and thereby absolving the line from any requirement to actually try – we should concentrate on being a catalyst that drives good performance organisation-wide, and then spend the time we save working on genuinely useful strategic interventions.
(Allow me to point out at this stage that the phrase ‘man up’ is being used in inverted commas as a distancing technique. I’m as thoroughly disquieted by its implicit sexism as you are, so please don’t send angry emails.)
Anyway, besides recruitment and compliance, one might argue that learning and development, reward, internal communications and industrial relations would all be better embedded within operations, rather than stuck out on a limb in HR.
So maybe that’s a future of HR to which we should all aspire. Background boffins dreaming up ways in which organisations should be structured, talents honed and engagement heightened, whilst out on the floor Business Partners in black rubber suits roam around with big sticks clobbering deficient line managers.
The latter’s the job I’d like. ‘What’s that, Quentin? Forgotten to deliver your staff induction? And Lucy – you failed to follow best practice in performance management? Well, then, the pair of you – over my knee!’ Smack smack, cackle cackle.
Come on, you’ve got to admit that’s a winner.
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