Quotes to ponder

Every week or so I come across an interesting quote which causes me to reflect on my own profession and wonder how things could be done, structured or viewed differently to change results.

I'll start uploading these quotes as I come across them. Today I will be uploading quotes from a Donnington Report. The report itself is a few years old now (2008) but I find its content still particularly relevant. I came across it attending one of Donnington's professional development seminars.

I feel these quotes really speak for themselves and I particularly like the last one:

A lot of seemingly very important talk about culture, but the one question I always ask is: how aligned is the culture that we're talking about to the stuff that makes the business actually perform? Or is it really just an interesting theoretical chat about what happens to motivate people or how things are done in an organisation at a particular point in time? Unless the talk about culture is linked to what makes the business perform, then the only people who will be talking about it are people in HR who are probably surveying it.

I think in the professionalising of HR, the professional training has become incredibly narrow and, without being too derogatory, is a bit "pop psychology". In my opinion, really good HR people should know how to write a decent business case, not make it up or hope they can find someone who could help them do it. HR professionals need to demonstrate a greater awareness that the world is a complex place and that the issues they deal with are amongst the most complex. This means that they shouldn't rush to find solutions that they can package up nearly, tie bows around - which is why I think HR people love policies.

For all the rhetoric about people being the most important asset in our businesses, we haven't done the work that makes sense of that; we are just stating a truism. You know, like saying the world is round, so what! People are important, so what!

What we have ended up doing in our businesses is professionalise HR so people go zip up the ladder in HR and never touch anything else. It's the same with risk functions where you have people who only know how to do the technical analysis, they actually don't get how it interacts with the business. And yet we are looking for leadership and capacity to drive across functions of our organisations.   

I don't think many of us in the HR function are anywhere near enough engaged in the business of business. Rather than finding the courage to solve complex business problems we have instead tended to drape ourselves in moral authority and hope people notice us as we swan through organisations.

We need the courage as a profession to stop doing the stuff that doesn't make any difference. We need to do the things we know are right in our organisations and something that will make a fundamental difference. HR needs to measure the right things so they can have the debate differently. They then need to find the people they can align within the business to take it forward.