People are our most important assets?
I’ve been following a discussion about the miserable treatment of “our most important assets” in most organizations today. Some argue HR isn’t doing its job, others blame execs.
The question of whether HR should step up its game or executives should lead really raises the point that they should be a team. Yes, I’d like to see HR stand for the vision of employees as appreciating assets. And, I’d like to see executive leaders hire and champion HR leaders who challenge them and articulate a powerful vision of developing and retaining vital employee contribution.
Unfortunately, I’m seeing CEO’s and COO’s hiring HR chiefs for their subservience, their acquiesence, their grooming of executive egos, and their ruthless willingness to sacrifice any employee, and their own HR staff, in order to please the boss and advance their career. Since HR professionals from inside the company are more likely to stand up for employees, executives seem to be hiring HR carpetbaggers who sweep in, make big noise about cleaning up, and sweep off to the next post when their short-term strategies begin to fail.
I think we need a series of changes:
in the presentation of HR philosophy, practice and value in our business schools, especially at the MBA level;
in focusing the business press on the great stories of sustained appreciation of human assets and the payoffs for the bottom line;
in the lecture circuit of management and leadership gurus to include voices that actually have managed for development of the best in employees and the best for employees; and
in the selection of corporate board members for their commitment to the long-term success of the business and the employees, rather than for self-promotion and short-term gains.
I was a Personnel Director once in the dark past, and I argued to change the name to Human Resources to encourage valuing people as “our most important asset”. I’ve been enormously chastened by the seeming result that employees are seen similarly to natural resources– extract what you can and dump them in a ravine. Even so, I still hold out hope that, as we discover in so many ways that our heedless consumption of essential natural resources is coming back to haunt us, we can make real progress toward valuing the genius and the effort of our producers at least as much as what they produce.
