Can HR Please Stop! Searching for Relevance?

As I work through my "Re-Connecting, Refreshing, Re-Tooling" career stop, I have spent a great deal of time reading about my chosen profession.  I have grown to realize that HR has, for a generation or more, been searching for relevance.  Here's Dave Ulrich in a 2012 interview with Dan Schawbel from Forbes on the future of Human Resources:

• "For the last 20 years, we have been enamored with “strategic” HR where the strategy is a mirror that reflects what HR should focus on.  We now believe that HR should look through the strategy to the outside world.  Strategy becomes a window on both the general business conditions and on specific stakeholder expectations so that HR can connect their work to external factors."

With all due respect, it is as if we have deemed to be insufficient our operational excellence charter that asks us to help our managers recruit and hire great people.  To solve for creative and effective ways to compensate them and to incent their sustained performance.  To help managers deal with struggling employees and all the issues that stem from leading global, diverse and uniquely human teams.  To develop systems to teach and professionally develop levels of employee ranging from production worker to CEO.  And to offer cogent policies, well written processes, easy to use enabling technology and capable and motivated HR partners of all disciplines (e.g., recruiters, generalists, teachers) to sustain excellence in all of the above.

Is it conceivable that we have taken our "eye off the ball" in terms of our operational excellence charter and, instead, been drawn to the allure of questions like:  (1) How do we get a seat at the table?  (2) How do we become a true strategic partner?  (3) How do we elevate beyond the administrative?  Beyond the tactical?  (4) When will the business respect us for our workforce planning prowess, our organization design capability, our new love of HR Analytics or our inherited claim as the only legitimate assessors of leadership talent?

I am left with two troubling questions:

• Why does it seem that functions like Finance, Communications, Legal, IT, and Facilities spend no time searching for relevance while HR can't seem to let it go? When is the last time you heard a Finance or IT person lament that they don't have a seat at the table?  Have they been doing so and I've been too absorbed in HR to hear them?

• Is it possible that HR has pre-maturely declared victory in operational areas like recruitment, compensation, employee relations, learning and development and HR systems and technology?  Or, worse, has HR subconsciously run away from these core disciplines because they are really hard and, if we were to be honest, few HR organizations have realized recognition from the business that we do any of these things particularly well?

This second question makes me think of Steve Jobs, who said:

• "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things." (Apple Worldwide Developers' Conference, 1997)

Has HR said "no" to anything?  Or, in our quest for relevance and parallel insecurity about the value of our operational excellence charter, have we found ourselves drawn to so-called "loftier" pursuits?

I once worked for a senior business leader who, when presented with my one page engagement model, wherein I detailed my operational excellence charter on the top and business transformation agenda on the bottom, counseled me as follows:

• Get your operational excellence charter right, prove to us that you can sustain excellent levels of performance, deliver real value to us in those spaces, and then we'll talk about your other agenda.

Following his guidance, my team became absorbed with requisition fulfillment, compensation and incentive plan design and delivery, a rebuild of the organizational learning plan, a new HR alignment of business partner with business leader, delivery of robust talent management and leadership succession plans, and the creation of systems (policy, process, tool, skill) to elevate and sustain performance.

Our learning's  (1) You can't do this once and declare victory. You have to prove your competence every day.  (2) It's hard work and it requires the input and commitment of the full HR team - recruiters, teachers, compensation professionals, etc... - all hands on deck. (3) The business almost immediately recognizes the value and wants more of the same.  (4) Doing this work excellently impacts business performance positively. Continuing on this path helps change culture in and of itself.

With these learning's we stopped searching for relevance; we had already found it.

Paul E. DuCharme. September 2013