Tag Archives: Dave Ulrich

Hating HR is easy – coming up with a better alternative is damned difficult

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HR is a very easy target.  I should know, I have worked in it for over 30 years and taken as much abuse as anyone else; usually from those who haven’t got a clue what they are talking about.  But I can also dish it out, openly criticising HR, in the hope that it will change for the better.

I do so in the knowledge that supportive ‘families’ will take criticism (and ridicule) from other family members that they will not accept from outside.  This was the fundamental problem with the infamous ‘Why we hate HR’ by Keith Hammonds back in 2005.  Keith is an outsider and has done nothing to resolve whatever problems he thought he had identified.  He also failed to recognise that the ‘we’ he refers to (every operational manager I have ever met), who apparently ‘hate HR’, are as much a part of the problem as anyone else.

Don’t get me wrong Keith, you certainly possess a keen intellect, a sharp sense of humour and the accuracy of a sniper in picking off many of your HR targets.  You also made some positive suggestions, repeated in a more recent update of your views, showing that you went -

“beyond criticism to offer five ways to work well: Say the right thing; measure the right thing; get rid of the “social workers”; serve the business; and make value, not activity.”

So what sort of mental process led you to conclude that ivory tower academics like Ulrich (who talks about value but never defines it), Gratton, Boudreau and Lawler would know the ‘right’ thing to do?.  They are a main part of the problem – teaching methods that just don’t work in the real world.  As one might expect from a journalist this is a classic case of talking the talk, rather than walking the walk.  How do you define value Keith?  Your current LinkedIn profile tells us that you are now working for Ashoka, which “envisions an Everyone A Changemaker™ world“, and you are -

“Starting up an initiative, with core funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, to identify, support, and connect entrepreneurs whose innovations promise to inform, engage, and connect people in powerful ways that advance democratic society.”

Sorry Keith, but to borrow one of your own phrases aimed at HR – “I have no idea what you’re talking about”.  It all sounds like a lot of activity and that key word ‘value’ does not feature.  Perhaps, in the deepest recesses of your psyche, you are really just another pink and fluffy HR type of guy desperate to come out of the closet?  Such empty rhetoric would certainly make you feel at home in any HR department that would have you.

I’m sure your colleagues at Ashoka have very good intentions – just as many of the HR people I have worked with do – but turning good intentions into value is a tough challenge; especially when the system that we are all subject to says the only thing that really matters is profit rather than value.  Not-for-profit organisations do not change that system, even if they make the people who work in them feel better about themselves, and social enterprise is, to say the least, a very shaky concept (see ‘The Value Motive’).

Constructive criticism is always valid and should be welcomed but only the right actions create value.  Number one on the current HR to-do list is not saying the right thing but doing the right thing and, as I am sure you would concur Keith, that has to start with ‘measuring the right thing’.  I will be the first to admit that is easier said than done; especially when organisational leaders (sic) don’t know the fundamental difference between profit and value.

By the way Keith, if you are listening, hating people who don’t know what they are talking about does not help them to understand or learn – the two reasons I came into HR in the first place.

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Organisational Maturity 3 – Off the scale, on a road to nowhere

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If you are interested in improving your HR maturity level visit IHRM -  The Institute of HR Maturity

The Learning and HR Maturity Scales explored in Parts 1 and 2 only apply to organisations that really mean what they say about making the most of their people.  They have been designed to offer such organisations a clear and coherent direction of travel towards a strategic, systemic and holistic approach to human capital management.

Of course some organisations, even if they understand the concept of organisational maturity, would not necessarily choose these particular models, which begs the question – what do they use instead?  If no model is followed it is no wonder that so many HR functions are chaotic and reactive.  Presumably some do have their own evolutionary and developmental continuum but where do they get their ideas from?  These Maturity Scales have been developed from the very best organisations I have ever personally encountered (see The Top 10 in HCM); they were not conjured out of thin air and have been road-tested for well over 15 years.

The most obvious alternative candidate is the one that HR functions already suggest they follow, Dave Ulrich’s.  For an introduction to what this looks like try viewing Ulrich’s “Master’s Class” (sic) presentation and note the date – March 2008 – and a question raised on slide number 4 under – “Your questions – HR”  -

“What does he think of RBS’ HR model given its probably the truest representation of the Ulrich model in Scotland?”

One month later – April 2008 – RBS imploded, so I would be interested to hear what  Ulrich said then and compare it to what he might say now.  I wonder if it would prompt Ulrich (or his consultancy arm – RBL) to change a few of these slides, or possibly re-visit the basis of their theory?

Whilst speaking at a recent conference in Norway I had the opportunity to hear Ed Lawler III for the first time.  Ed is held in some esteem in certain HR circles and declared Ulrich to be a good friend and collaborator.  His own presentation consisted of his ‘research’ using, what appeared to be, unsupported correlations between HR and organisational performance.  Ed did not raise the difficult question of causation and I didn’t see any reference to the collapse of RBS, or any other bank for that matter, and how that might influence future HR ‘research’.

Ed also remarked how PepsiCo had set out to produce the best HR people in the world.  Some of these have washed up in the UK.  Clare Chapman, ex-PepsiCo and Tesco, who flailed around aimlessly at the NHS, getting nowhere fast before moving on once again (a classic trait of the non-evidence-based).

These people are the epitome of immaturity – refusing to look at evidence, failing to learn and carrying on blindly rather than stopping for a moment to ask whether inflicting their dubious methods on unsuspecting (and unquestioning) victims has added any value or not.

I am sure PepsiCo is still a very ambitious and very successful business but one thing is for certain – they are very immature when it comes to strategic, human capital management.  Arguably they have managed to produce some of the very worst HR people in the world who have left untold damage in their wake.

If you need help in assessing your organisation’s HR Maturity contact info@paulkearns.co.uk

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HR playing the Fool

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I was sorely tempted to write an April Fool’s piece today but instead I opted for a history lesson on ‘The HR Department’.  In case you were still wondering, this is not a site for HR people – or at least not the majority of those in conventional HR roles.  As far back as I can remember there were soothsayers predicting that HR was at a ‘crossroads’ and had to decide which path to take.  In 1991 I decided to take a very different path to the one that the other 99% of the ‘HR profession’ thought was a safer bet.  So let’s go back 20 years and remind ourselves what the current thinking was then.

1991

The precursor of the UK’s CIPD was the IPM (Institute of Personnel Management).  Its president was Barry Curnow who wrote a piece for Human Resources magazine (Summer issue) entitled -

“Measuring the intangible – performance criteria in jobs without a bottom line”.

Barry, obviously having a penchant for self-immolation, did not present the most positive face that one might expect from a professional body’s titular head.  But even in 1991 Barry was totally out of touch with the real world, which was increasingly demanding a ‘total quality’ approach to management that had to exclude all muda (a Japanese term used in the Toyota Production System for an activity that is wasteful, unproductive and adds no value) and personnel people were definitely starting to be seen, at best, as a necessary evil and, at worst, as the PC (political correctness) police.

1993

Two years later I was asked to speak at the IPM’s annual conference on the radically new theme of ‘The added value of Personnel’ (HR was still not on the scene).  Someone had finally decided that the Personnel department should at least acknowledge it had a bottom line.  Although it had not yet registered with the 500+ members in the audience: the majority of whom had bemused looks on their faces, as though I were speaking a foreign language.

The keynote conference speaker that year was Dr. Richard Pascale (“The art of Japanese Management”)  who told his audience -

“In the US people in personnel take on a psychological contract to be a victim.” (reported in Personnel Today, 9 November 1993).

So the US experience was no different apparently.

1995

By 1995 the response from beleaguered personnel departments, to all of this damning criticism, was to re-invent themselves as ‘HR’ – because it sounded more like the sort of department that might actually have a ‘bottom line’.  Yet the guy who had taken over Barry Curnow’s role, the infamous Geoff Armstrong, was having none of it.  In a book review in Personnel Today (23 February 1995) he predicted –

“In my view, it is wrong to tie strategic people issues to the HRM bandwagon.  They were around before HRM was invented, and will still be around long after its faddish label has faded.”

Whilst over-staying his welcome at the CIPD, and building a sycophantic regime that even Colonel Gaddafi would envy, Armstrong arguably did more damage to the cause of business-focused HR professionalism than any other person.  Certainly it set back the CIPD’s development by at least 10 years, IMHO.

1996

Meanwhile observers such as Thomas Stewart in Fortune magazine (15 January 1996) had a simple solution to the HR department ‘problem’ -

“Why not blow the sucker up?”

and added -

“Human resources has come to the proverbial fork in the road.  One path leads to a highly automated employee services operation…. The other leads straight to the CEO’s office.”

What he didn’t cover in any detail was what the HR director would do once they got there (having never been a strategic HR director himself).  Stewart is now the MD and editor of Harvard Business Review (HBR), a journal that has also failed to come up with an answer to maximising HR’s impact on the bottom line, despite publishing many questionable ‘solutions’ in the meantime (Prahalad and Hamel’s ‘core competence’ theory being probably the worst culprit, IMHO, although W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s piece on ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’ gets my personal award for the most crass HBR article of all time).  I think it’s high time he blew that sucker up as well.

1998

Then Dave Ulrich turned up on the scene with his own HBR article entitled “A new mandate for human resources” where he argued -

“In recent years, a number of people who study and write about business have been debating whether we should do away with HR. The debate arises out of serious and widespread doubts about HR’s contribution to organizational performance. And as much as I like HR people, I must agree that there is a good reason for HR’s beleaguered reputation. It is often ineffective, incompetent, and costly; in a phrase, it is value sapping. But the truth is that HR has never been more necessary.”

This was a very clever article.  Ulrich knew his audience.  At a single stroke he wrote off HR departments as ineffective but then held out the prospect of a promised land, for the very same people who were so obviously ineffective, with his magic wand that would transform them all into strategic, business partners. He also remembered that when ‘personnel’ people were struggling in 1991 they were happy enough to just change their name rather than their modus operandi.  So he offered them an opportunity to pull the same stunt again, with new titles, only to suggest a full decade later, in …

2008

… at a conference hosted by PwC, that HR had failed to make his model work, rather than admit he had produced a seriously flawed model (which remains fundamentally flawed despite his more recent amendments).

Which roughly brings us up to the present day.

2011

So what are the key items on the organisational, HR agenda now, when HR no longer pretends it does not have a bottom line?*

  • Human capital management and reporting
  • Evidence based (HR) management methods
  • Tougher professional standards for HR people (SHRM is currently working on this)
  • Demonstrating added value and ROI

So, after two decades, HR has arrived right back at the same historical junction.  Of course, some HR departments have already tried to get away with their re-naming stunt once more – this time calling themselves ‘Human Capital’. Others are stuck on a vicious, circular path that always leads back to the transactional ghetto still fooling themselves that efficient transactions have something to do with value – but they are no longer fooling anyone else.

For personal development linked to this topic visit the Consummate Professional Series

*But see Ulrich’s 2003 book “Why the bottom line isn’t!”

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The HR ‘Wheel’ of questionable value

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An odd title, you might think, for someone who has been espousing the cause of competitive advantage through strategic, evidence-based HR for well over 20 years?

Not really.  This series is promoting VALUE, not HR.  Conventional HR (i.e. non-evidence-based) is, at best, a means to an end and at worst a drain on resources. This fact of life is one that the vast majority of HR people either do not understand or choose to studiously ignore: a great deal of their work adds little value and some of it actually reduces value (maybe that’s 2 facts of life but it is essentially the same point).  Let us first deal with the issue of conventional HR work adding little, if any, value.

Ask yourself what is the value of a laptop to an individual or an organisation but, before you reach for your calculator to work out productivity rates (with and without laptops), stop for a second and consider whether you would bother doing the same calculation for the use of the wheel?  No doubt the invention of the wheel gave the Mesopotamians a competitive advantage in heavy-rock logistics 3500 years ago but I don’t hear anyone singing the praises of the wheel these days, do you?  Similarly we all take laptops for granted because they do not cost much these days.

A more nuanced point is that whatever advantage was gained from buying laptops in the past, in terms of efficiency, is now enjoyed by all of your competitors and they have all translated those efficiency savings into lower costs and more competitive pricing.  Ergo, no one can achieve any more value from laptops.

Of course, the dedicated EB-HR manager in me says – yes, but what about the way people use their laptops?  The doctor who can make a quicker diagnosis, the graphic designer who is better trained to use its full potential?  Surely that brings a competitive edge and more value?  That might be true, again for a short time, but if all doctors and graphic designers are equally well-trained (yes, I accept that is a huge ‘if’) then the advantage eventually disappears.

So why do HR and ‘learning’ people get so excited about their employee engagement scores or their ‘e-learning solutions’?  They are kidding themselves that these, in some way, are bringing them advantages – but they are not.  What might bring them some advantage though is how they use these tools strategically – first mover societies that seize upon and exploit the strategic or military advantage of the next ‘wheel’ will dominate the world.

With that inspirational thought now uppermost in your mind I am sorry to have to bring you back down to the fact that HR methods can actually reduce value when not deployed correctly.  Take the issue of performance management using forced ranking; a method that was once flavour-of-the-month.  Here is a quote from an article about the VP-HR of Ford Europe’s experience under the heading – “Ford rethinks cull of its lowest performers”

“Boy did it get a bad reaction. It turned a lot of staff against the company just by the manner in which it was done. We’ve moved away from that now. If you put in a performance management approach, make sure it fits the company culture.”

Paradoxically, while HR is pretending to play a strategic game there is plenty of evidence that it is actually wasting huge amounts of value every day just doing the reactive, transactional work that is the comfort blanket of the majority of HR practitioners.  The disciplinary, grievance, legal and contractual work they pretend to dislike is actually the only job they know.  Worse still, they have a perverse incentive to ensure they have as many problems to deal with as possible, which has the dual appeal of not only keeping them in employment (for now) but also, simultaneously, making them ‘too busy’ to do the really difficult, but high value, strategic work.

All this nonsense about HR outsourcing or moving to a shared service centre, so that HR can become more ‘strategic’ ( a line Dave Ulrich has been simplistically trotting out far past its sell-by date) was always a con. Outsourcing HR transactions is never going to add value if the value of those transactions is nil or their frequency is not significantly curtailed by adopting a well-conceived and implemented strategic approach (like dealing with strategic employee relations issues and recalcitrant union representatives). Ford were not ready for forced ranking; it was the wrong solution for a poorly diagnosed problem.  It was never going to work because Ford shied away from taking the difficult, long-term, strategic HR decisions – and still does so today.

So where does that leave the potential for HR and learning to add value? Could the technological ‘wheel’ of the internet provide greater opportunities?  Not if we accept Michael Dell’s earlier prediction that the internet would be so ubiquitous and low cost that it would be just like everyone having access to the same electric light switch.  So whenever we hear of the supposed ‘advantages’ of e-HR and e-learning solutions* being trumpeted we are really just witnessing HR and learning departments where the cold light of truth has yet to dawn.  They need to get themselves ready for the day when the CFO, who has been trying to get rid of their costs for so long, finally wakes up.  Without evidence of value that day cannot be too far away.

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And the award for the best evidence goes to ….

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It’s that time of year again – the awards ceremonies.  As a judge in this year’s Personnel Today Awards – ‘HR Impact’ category, of course – the only category that would attract the interest of an evidence-based HR manager – I have had to wait for the final results to be announced on 30th November before writing this piece – not that I am planning to divulge any secrets here; except to say that some HR teams have a funny way of defining ‘impact’.  If any entrants for this category want some personal feedback as to why they did not win please feel free to get in touch.

I have always wondered what the point of awards are when organisations enter themselves – presumably they genuinely believe they are doing something pretty special or out of the ordinary – but if the awards are not treated with great respect by the professional community at large then what purpose do they serve?

I got a mention myself in dispatches in Personnel Today’s ‘Top 40 Power Players’ in 2007 (no.30, in case you were wondering) without anyone interviewing me or assessing my work (as far as I am aware) – I didn’t ask to be mentioned – in fact I would have much preferred it if they hadn’t because looking at the other ‘Power Players’ there was no one that I would have held in high esteem – Neil Roden (ex Royal Bank of Scotland) was No. 1.  I suppose if helping to get your bank nationalised is a mark of success then he obviously deserved his award. It just shows that these league tables are not great predictors of success.

In fact Roden was No. 2 in HR Magazine’s list for 2008 (yes, that was after we all knew that RBS had crashed!) so perhaps some HR journalists are a bit out of touch with reality? That same year I was also one of the ‘ones to watch’ in their list (at the very tender age of 53 and after a mere 30 years in the business).  HR Magazine also had a list of the ‘top HR thinkers’ (sic) which included Dave Ulrich at No.1, whose infamous model has rapidly fallen into disrepute and Will Hutton at No.7, who took the Industrial Society and ‘transformed’ it into the financial disaster and pseudo-research joke that is now the Work Foundation. If I had known I was to be in such sparkling company I would have asked HR Magazine to stop tarnishing whatever reputation I might have earned with its own very low standards.

Of course, the only reason I am mentioning all of this is that the one thing that is usually conspicuous by its absence at awards ceremonies is any real evidence of success. I remember Personnel Today many years ago used to run an annual, recruitment advertising  competition but no one bothered to ask whether any vacancies were successfully filled or not – never mind whether the new recruits actually performed.

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