Common sense says that “career is an employee’s responsibility”, “leadership is a leader’s responsibility”, so what is the role of HR?
Google the HR subjects below with the word “responsibility” at the end, that’s the headline you are going to find (seriously, try it):
- Career development: “The Employee’s Responsibilities”
- Performance management: “Managers and the employees share a responsibility for the implementation and success of the PM system”.
- Talent Management: “a line managers responsibility to develop…”
- Employee development: “ Employee development is a shared responsibility of management and the individual employee”
- Leadership: A leader responsibility, of course!
You can keep trying. Odds are that you are going to find that all HR buzzwords were outsourced either to line managers or to employees themselves (or both)!
Why that happens? If you have a “Marketing department”, who is responsible for marketing? And if you have a “Sales department”, are the line managers those accountable for selling? What about Accounting? Operations? Logistics?
Can you imagine the following discussion between the sales VP and the CEO(?):
“CEO – Why are the sales down this month?”
“Sales VP – Hum…. Don’t know… Maybe seasonality? Or employee morale? Not sure… Need to double-check and get back to you”
Or…
“Sales VP: Probably because our line managers and employees are not motivated enough. Yeah, you know how they are, it is tough to make them think about this fluffy stuff”
Don’t know, but I find hard to picture that. All the departments hold themselves responsible for what they do. All the departments have on the tip of their tongs their key performance indicators and the reason why they are behaving like that! So why should we spare HR?
Best,
What are you looking for?
Best performance and reward strategy?
Setting a meritocratic culture?
photo credit: qmnonic via photopin cc
