Four Groups Blog

Liz Ryan at Business Week and Steve at Catbert (amongst others!) have all chipped in with the debate surrounding HR, credibility and HR’s role within business. From my perspective, I think it is a two-fold issue, a combination of personal and systematic credibility. On the one hand, it is about personal credibility and standing up for yourself and your department. On the other hand and from the systemic standpoint, HR struggles to have the tools and techniques that win the credibility and buy-in of other parts of the business. Of course, both approaches are needed to move HR forward from its current position. Liz captures the problems around personal credibility here;

I fear the real problem is HR leadership credibility. It’s lacking. When a leader is credible, people listen. We have a bad habit of putting noncharismatic, noncompelling business people into HR leadership spots, and it doesn’t help the profession or our companies. If you want to make the case that building a robust organization is good for business, and you have to do that by means of an algorithm, you’ve already lost the war.

While the personal credibility piece is spot on, I think that there is a place for algorithms. Consider the algorithms involved in accountancy, corporate finance, or even the use of NPV calculations (Net Present Value). These are often everyday parlance for strategists and senior executives and accordingly, they allow a sound commercial point to be made. This of course isn’t to say that HR can immediately jump into the world of metrics and quantification (see Putting a Number on HR?) but that a method that drives obvious value and quickly solves people-based problems would go a long way in this situation. However, to quote Liz again and her own view of the status quo

We HR leaders are parties to our own powerlessness — and the reason is that we accept it.

Acting and exploring systematic methods for HR, along with building personal credibility surely has to be a step in the right direction here?