Backhanded compliment

The Harvard Business Review (or the HBR, to its adherents) likes HR. And why shouldn’t it? Human Resources is a theme that appeals to practically all of its global readership, and you can’t say that of everything.

A marketing theory born in Hong Kong doesn’t necessarily interest readers in Boulder, Colorado; technology that’s revolutionising the potato chip market probably won’t enthral the CEO of a leisure business in Northampton. But almost everyone has to manage people, and that means HR stories are practically universal currency.

So you’d probably expect it to be a bit more respectful to the profession, right? Well, you might. But then you’d be wrong.

This month, HBR has run a three-page piece on how Chief HR Officers make great Chief Executive Officers. It’s essentially a report on research conducted by Dave Ulrich and a Korn Ferry recruitment consultant in Switzerland called Ellie Filler. (Isn’t ‘Filler’ the best name for a recruitment consultant you’ve ever heard?) According to the article, Filler has recently seen the brief for organisations recruiting CHROs change in the last few years. She says:

This role is gaining importance like never before… It’s moved away from a support or administrative function to become much more of a game changer and the person who enables the business strategy.

Probably not the first time you’ve heard the sentiment expressed. But what Ms Filler lacks in prescience, she more than makes up for in enthusiasm. Working with the mighty Ulrich, the two diligently mapped leadership styles across a range of C-suite high performers and discovered that with the exception of COOs, the CHRO is the one who most closely matches the CEO.

In theory, this similarity of profile means more CHROs are in the running to get the big job.

There are two important qualifications to this theory, however. The first is that even Ulrich stops short of suggesting HR lifers should be CEOs. Heavens, no. The purpose of this is to suggest that other leaders – real leaders, with backgrounds in real functions – should probably be seconded into HR leadership roles for a while to big up on qualities such as empathy and ambiguity tolerance.

The second qualification is the way HBR chooses to trail the story, as shown in the illustration at the top of this page. This is snide sub-editing. ‘Why HR Chiefs Make Great CEOs – Really!’ they say on the cover, and in that word ‘Really!’ lurks a great many sins.

The word panders to a dated misconception of HR people as a bunch of guileless incompetents; it suggests that the ‘real’ readers of the HBR are not HR professionals; it conjures up an image some kind of Harvard Business School men’s room, in which CFOs, CMOs and CTOs slap each other with rolled-up towels and talk condescendingly about the poor folk with nothing better to do than lead people.

HBR: can you do better, please? HR fills your pages and your coffers, so pay it the respect it deserves – really.

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.