Newsmakers: Lucy Adams

So that’s that, then. Lucy Adams has gone, and with her departure an entire profession has been reduced to rubble. At least if the Telegraph is to believed: their article, much reported in the HR press and hardly deserving of yet another link here, is so blatantly controversialist that it makes one suspect that the journalist was being paid by the page view.

Now, we don’t necessarily want to defend the business with the Select Committee, or even the practice of paying out redundancy money above the odds. (Although let’s not forget, this was hardly a unilateral decision on Adams’ part.) But we do think it’s important to look at a career in total, and not just judge it by what conceivably be an unrepresentative incident.

After all, is David Beckham’s career judged by sending off against Argentina in 1998? Is Churchill only judged by the Gallipoli campaign of 1915? Is the oeuvre of Steps definable by 2-4-6-8, rather than their later and greater successes? Of course not.

Lucy Adams has been an asset to HR. Admittedly, she doesn’t see herself as HR – she cites the key reason for her success as ‘not being an HR person’ and chooses to network with leaders outside of the HR profession. Her background was not a decade as a HRBP, but a series of change management challenges at Serco. But all the same, she was arguably HR’s poster girl for a number of years. (Not necessarily a sexist comment, that: we’ll happily call Neil Morrison the poster boy of today, if it helps.)

‘Magical’ creation

What about the rollout of the BBC re-engineering agenda Delivering Quality First, when its instigator, Mark Thompson, had left for a glamorous job in New York? What about the creation of the ‘magical’ new 2400-strong BBC community in Salford? What about the shoulder-crushing responsibility of running a team of 475 HR, Training and Safety professionals? Of overseeing 50,000 workers at Serco? Or of being one of the few habitués of the HR press prepared to say things that are actually quite fresh and entertaining?

Naturally, the future must look bleak through Adams’ eyes today. One comment on the Personnel Today website is particularly damning: ‘It would be good to learn why people end up behaving like her,’ it says, as one might say of that woman who stuffed that cat in the wheelie bin, or Lucrezia Borgia.

But in many cases, talented individuals reinvent themselves and earn a deserved second act in public life. Our bet is that this won’t be the last we hear of Lucy Adams.

About the author

Andrew Baird

Andrew is the CEO of HRville. He is also Employer Brand Director of Blackbridge Communications, Editorial Director of Professionals in Law and an associate of The Smarty Train. Previously, he was the MD of TCS Advertising.