Here is a paper I wrote to be published, the likes of which are being contemplated by several editors in the form of "how many more ways can I say no to this guy?" But here it is for your reading enjoyment and so I can say I have been published, if nothing else on my own blog!
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Nearly 20 years ago, I received my degree in Industrial Relations and Human Resources and became part of my first HR team. Through these decades, I’ve seen HR professionals across all industries seeking something elusive – notoriety, recognition, support. Since I’ve been in HR, it has always been about getting “a seat at the table” – the chair, the voice, the seat, the nirvana of many HR professionals. Once there, we finally will have arrived. Right?
According to Webster’s dictionary, a profession is “a calling requiring specialized knowledge and often long and intensive academic preparation.” Using this definition, HR would need to possess a recognizable and distinct set of knowledge, skills and abilities that can be easily differentiated from other professions, much akin to lawyers, accountants and engineers. But these professions came to be in a completely different age, a completely different time. Different times call for different measures. These professions are separate and distinct departments from the core operations of the businesses they support, unless the business happens to be a law firm, accountancy or engineering firm. Their professionals take pride in the requirement to have a license to practice them. They base much of their credibility in business on their unique offering of skills and qualifications and on their distinction as being wholly different from any other part of the business.
Is that what HR really aspires to? We appear to be working diligently to progress down that path.
I don’t accept this traditional HR vision, and I don’t think that it’s best for our profession. Licenses and designations for HR are fine if their mission is to promote the very best HR practices. Admittedly most fulfill this role quite well. But I don’t believe we should be seeking to distinguish HR professionals from other business leaders as a means of gaining notoriety, recognition and “our seat”: because HR is a discipline for all of the business, not just those with full-time HR responsibilities or those with full license and designation to practice.
I believe most of my HR colleagues, like me, entered HR for a completely different reason. We didn’t join the HR department to incubate, develop and justify the development of HR as a profession. We weren’t after what consumes most of our HR trade journals pages and is the most widely discussed topic in HR today. Ah, finally HR will be the profession bravely envisioned by those personnel departments of the past. I didn’t seek a career in HR to gain membership to an exclusive HR organization, nor is it why I wake up with a passion for HR everyday. Rather, quite the opposite.
I don’t want a separation from the business I support. I don’t want to be a unique, differentiated and established profession. How can we possibly be seeking this objective when we are supposed to be partnering and aligning with the businesses we support? I just don’t see those paths as linked, or even as near parallels.
I’m not trying to earn notoriety and support for an HR seat at the table. Instead, I’m trying to grow closer to the business I support, trying to establish an indistinguishable alignment with the essence of the business and what it is trying to accomplish. That’s partnering. That’s value creation. And I believe that’s what the C-suite wants. Value creation comes from what HR does to support the business and align with it, not from being a separate profession of qualified HR professionals who began meagerly from personnel departments and have evolved to a larger necessary evil with an expanding portfolio of services to deliver to the business. In most businesses HR and the functions we execute are overhead – cost and expense to be managed, monitored and controlled – optimized at best, limited at worst.
Let me paint a very different picture of what I believe HR departments and professionals should be striving for. We should work toward becoming so intertwined and indistinguishable from our businesses that HR IS THE BUSINESS, and THE BUSINESS IS HR.
Now that’s an aspiration, mission and vision that I believe all HR professionals can get behind. We will encourage all leaders to take personal accountability for the most complex and dynamic business challenge in the world today – leading, managing, rewarding and engaging people. We’ll hone our collective expertise on the subject in a way that creates a business that cannot be replicated, a business whose competitive advantage can be sustained. Now that’s a leadership challenge that shouldn’t be reserved only for HR professionals or those so called people businesses. No, it’s a challenge for all leaders of all businesses, with HR professionals guiding, educating and leading the way.
Now, this message will likely come as a shock to some of my HR colleagues. I will be accused of over simplifying and generalizing the current state and mission of our HR profession, slighting the real views of my colleagues. But I’m doing it for a reason – because there is far more truth to what I’m saying than most HR professionals are willing to admit. We seem to believe that the establishment of HR as a separate and distinct profession will take us where we want to go, take us to where other professions are today, trusted and respected. I just don’t believe that to be true.
No separate seat at the table – all the seats at the table! Yes, CEO. Do you want to lead an organization? Then you have to be an HR professional. You’ll need the HR stamp in your leadership passport. It’s not a separate profession, but a fundamental business competence that is mandatory for business success. Without the HR stamp in your passport, entry into the boardroom will not be possible or at least ill advised because the business is likely to fail. This is true for the CEO, COO, CFO, CIO, etc. It’s time we created collaborative independence for our C-level colleagues, not separate dependence.
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