“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
Albert Einstein
Its about that time when the HR conference season gets into full swing, so I’m beginning to prepare myself for the hundreds of conversations I’ll have with great HR Pros all over the world. One thing that I will hear over and over, and more than anything else is: “HR just doesn’t get…” To be honest, I think HR gets a whole bunch, but I think many of us lack the courage it takes, at the right time, to show how much we actually get. So we sit there with our mouths closed, and others then have this perception we don’t get it. But we do. We just weren’t able, or ready, to put our necks on the line, at that moment.
I do agree, though, that there are still certain things we struggle with in HR. For me, the above quote from Albert, sums up what we still struggle to appreciate in HR. We hire people for one set of skills then upon arrival, or at another point in their tenure, expect them to perform a different set of skills. This behavior happens everyday in our organizations. It’s a classic reason at why most people fail in your organization.
I bet if you went back and measured your last 100 terminations in your organizations, 60% of your terms would fall into this category: person wasn’t performing, but the job they were asked to do was different from what they were hired to do originally.
So, what is it that we still don’t get in HR?
Read the whole post over at The Tim Sackett Project (an FOT contributor blog).
If you Google “Tim Sackett” you’ll find our Tim, and a truck driver chaplain. Our Tim is NOT the truck driver chaplain, although how awesome would that be if he was!? He is a prolific writer in the HR and TA space who just happens to also run an Engineering and IT contract staffing agency (HRU Technical Resources) out of Michigan. He also writes every day at his own blog, the Tim Sackett Project. Weirdly, he’s known as an expert in workplace hugging, which was kind of cool years ago, but now seems painfully creepy, but we still love him and he’s fairly harmless. Tim is also on the board of the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP), lifetime Michigan State Spartan fan, husband to a Hall of Fame wife, 3 sons, and his best friend Scout. He also wrote a book with SHRM called The Talent Fix, you can find it on Amazon.