Leave morals at the ExCo door
Surely we don't need to sell out to get on, says The VillainI was at a conference last week, where I met someone who actually impressed me.
Her story isn’t momentous, but it does deserve a wider airing. She’d gone from being a big player in global, commercial HR to a smaller role in the third sector. Not even a famous charity, but the kind of ‘university’ that until recently would barely have made it onto a list of dog-end polytechnics.
I asked her about her move, but was pretty sure I could guess the answer: she’d have wanted to ‘give something back’/had care issues at home/had had an affair with a colleague, or something equally predictable. But I was wrong.
Talent shift
Actually, she’d gradually realised that she was being ‘morally compromised’ by her work. She was basically being paid to make people redundant and squeeze down comp and bens for the rank and file. All, of course, to benefit the shareholders and the organisation’s various boards.
Finally, it had made her ill, and the only way she thought she’d get better was to take her talent to a rather more ethical organisation.
It got me thinking. We seem to believe that climbing the corporate ladder – as a profession as well as individuals – necessitates unquestionably adopting the cold hearted ‘commercialism’ of late era capitalism.
We think that the only way to make it to the Executive Committee and beyond is to embrace the slash and burn, devil-take-the-hindmost mindsets that, in 2014, senior business leadership is seemingly all about.
Ah, I hear you say, you’ve got it wrong. It’s about the shareholders, stupid. That’s why we do it.
Think of the shareholders
Well, perhaps. But take a look at who these shareholders actually are. Over the years I’ve worked at places that have been ultimately owned by people of the ilk of Robert Maxwell, Rupert Murdoch, Alan Bond and Asil Nadir.
Frankly, I’d rather not break my back serving up P45s to people on £10K a year so that bosses like these can buy the kind of yacht that won’t show them up at Monaco.
It’s not a question of politics. As I keep saying on these pages, I’m a reactionary old boot who’d rather relocate to the Ukraine than see any of those sandal-wearing tree-huggers in power.
But some things go beyond politics into the realm of basic humanity. The woman I met made a great impression, and I suspect she could be an illumination for HR generally as it stumbles into the future down its dark and dusty road.
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