Why HR needs to be a “bit more pirate”

Because corporations are growing more powerful.

Because best in class, integrated, end to end, process driven, self-service, HR systems cannot conjure up or harness the true potential of people

Because we are more obsessed with control and standardisation than with real people

Because talent, in its many forms, is infinitely more interesting than HR process

Because if we do not make the case for allowing people to be their individual, unique best, HR becomes the tool the organisation uses to limit people.

And here’s the thing: HR has too often been captured by the corporation and lost touch with its unique role, to stand up for talent.

The result? We are producing sticky gloop that holds people, teams and leaders back.

We are squandering the chance to create disproportionate advantage and value that getting right the people part of a business offers.

Why?

At heart what the corporation wants and what talented people need are different.

We will make no progress until we understand this and immerse ourselves in navigating this tension intelligently.

So let’s consider the instincts of a corporation.

The corporation has always been an exercise in delivering short term financial results.

To deliver these results corporations have two approaches. Generate or squeeze.

Generate is epitomised by the dynamic entrepreneurial firm. The corporation builds new assets which grow value.

These are typically idea or product led, fast growing, newer, smaller and with the strong influence of a charismatic founder or founding team that sets the tone.

Squeeze is different. It exploits existing assets, be those natural resources, capital resources, human resources, brands, intellectual property, market power and, of late, peoples’ data. To do this it uses the tools of control, process, and replicability to allocate those resources. This is delivered through top down hierarchies.

These corporates are typically financially led, larger, older and managed by professional managers.

This model of resource exploitation is strongly embedded in the language of business and in the theories of micro economics.

A great example is that people become Human Resources.

Within this model, the instinct for order and control is understandable. It maintains value as corporations get to exploit their advantage over time rather than letting it evaporate into nothingness.

But unchecked this model of exploitation and control sucks the life spirit out of people. It stops talent from expressing its strengths. It stops talented people from being talent.

Now this tension between what the squeeze corporation wants and what talent needs doesn’t have to scare us. It’s not new. It’s not an aberration.

The tension is not a bug, it’s the territory to be navigated, not a zero sum game where there is only one winner, the corporate or the talent.

Talent can’t be treated like the manufacturing process, repeatable and reliable in its methods, where we can accurately measure input and outputs and drive out variance to increase success.

It is when we succumb to the fantasy that we can control and standardise talent, we take out the joy, unpredictability, and human element that we need.

Repeatable methods create uniform outputs only when the process has reliable parameters; and people are simply not reliable enough as a raw material.

The same conversation with two different people can have diametrically opposed outcomes

The same person in a different team can go from a zero to a hero

The same person can have an aspiration on Monday which has changed by Friday

Talent is a living thing, it is either decaying or it is growing. It is not stable.

That is why uniformity kills talent.

And this is a tragedy as we know the outsize value of talent to an organisation both instinctively and through studies. Talent is often a team, not a person, but the difference it makes is large.

This kind of talent, the stuff that gets people excited, that puts the “dent” in the world, is not created by a simple ‘if then’ process

Now some of HR can be broken into’ if this then that’ systems which are predictable and just work.

But what works for delivering HR housekeeping, does not translate into what works for exciting the apathetic, allowing people to get on with being their best and supporting people to deliver great work – a distinction that we ignore or misunderstand at our peril.

The answer

HR, and how they develop talent, must become undomesticated and allow disorder as well as order

Liberating talent means – bridging the contact gap and getting empathy back

Too many talent professionals have too little meaningful contact with real people in their real world – where they actually work.

For many talent professionals “Talent” is now a label – a theoretical or abstract concept. A score in a box, a name on a chart. An obtuse 20 page pdf profile.

The few moments of what passes for real world contact are reduced to putting people in artificial situations, getting them to be interviewed by anonymous experts they don’t know and subjecting them, to pseudo science tests, all to give the label.

When we only see the ‘label’ we dehumanise the whole thing, and reduce people to just another input into a process we call talent. And in so doing, we reduce HR to a process which fails at the most basic hurdle of being human.

But it isn’t real life.

It’s people ripped out of the contexts of their daily work, their teams, their relationships, their jobs. At best it provides us with a distorted version of reality.

No wonder psychobabble and junk science is passed off as insight, it offers false hope of certainty.

No wonder the obvious is passed off as revelation, it offers a quick hit of excitement.

And no won