In The fifth discipline Peter Senge says "I believe that the prevailing system of management is at its core dedicated to mediocrity. It forces people to work harder and harder to compensate for failing to tap the spirit and collective intelligence that charachterises working together at their best"
Can anything be more meaningless. No I don't mean what Peter Senge is saying is meaningless !
What I am talking of is the prevailing system of Management . Being a HR professional I guess it is sacreligious to say this but i do think the culprits are so called HR Professionals. Our sense of identity comes from complicating the ordinary with complex processes: which gets outdated in a few years ,so to sustain ourselves we bottle it in a more complex shaped bottle and have have no qualms about the content being the same. First and forefost there was nothing wrong with the simple content so there is no reason to change it but if don't pretend there is a change we have not kept up with times ,the latest jargon in the latest book on the shelf!
Something as simple as goal setting and review, becomes Management by Objectives, becomes Key Performance Indicators, but some would swear by Key Result Areas, no thats not impressive enough it should be Balanced Score Card or else you are doomed !
That is not enough you have to rate me on a scale , put me into a 3X3 matrix , Leaders are put into a quandry, they have to get work out of people they have put into a "label" which is compulsory because there is a theoritical number in each category ,a forced percentage for each
cell in the matrix , there is a bellcurve to be fitted into. After all this is done the TEAM is expected to work as a TEAM ! Team Building workshops during the year and the year ends with your Bell Curves and Matrix ensures that there is discontent , and rumbling in the so called team .
To make matters worse we reward and give importance to RAPPORT BUILDING, COMMUNICATION ,MANAGERIAL STYLE ,INFLUENCING all very good skills , extremely useful in the corporate world , but have we ever thought what these skills mean in the absence of equally important attitudes and orientation like INTEGRITY,EQUITY& FAIRNESS,RESPECT FOR OTHERS ,EMPATHY ?
We need to give this a lot of thought.
If these highly valued skills are very low , though we may have the right orientation/attitude it makes us simple folks , we get taken advantage of and we are not effective though we may be good people.
If we neither have the skill nor the right orientation/attitude we are no better than a street bully.
The much greater concern is the large number of people populating organisations especially rising higher in the hierarchy on account of their exceptionally good skills that are so valued by the corporate sector despite the fact that they lack the essential right orientation/attitude.We fail to realise that they are just street bullies who have grown into being CORPORATE POLITICIANS!( they justify it by calling themselves STRATEGIC ! )
It is pathetic that we have to search for Leaders who have both the skills and the right orientation and attitude, they are far too few.
What then is Human Resource Development ? Of what worth are we HR professionals when we see this happening in our organisations but are impotent to do anything about it, worse still we are also in the same rat race , competeting to be the best corporate politician? Is that what STRATEGIC HR is all about?
Can anything be more meaningless. No I don't mean what Peter Senge is saying is meaningless !
What I am talking of is the prevailing system of Management . Being a HR professional I guess it is sacreligious to say this but i do think the culprits are so called HR Professionals. Our sense of identity comes from complicating the ordinary with complex processes: which gets outdated in a few years ,so to sustain ourselves we bottle it in a more complex shaped bottle and have have no qualms about the content being the same. First and forefost there was nothing wrong with the simple content so there is no reason to change it but if don't pretend there is a change we have not kept up with times ,the latest jargon in the latest book on the shelf!
Something as simple as goal setting and review, becomes Management by Objectives, becomes Key Performance Indicators, but some would swear by Key Result Areas, no thats not impressive enough it should be Balanced Score Card or else you are doomed !
That is not enough you have to rate me on a scale , put me into a 3X3 matrix , Leaders are put into a quandry, they have to get work out of people they have put into a "label" which is compulsory because there is a theoritical number in each category ,a forced percentage for each
cell in the matrix , there is a bellcurve to be fitted into. After all this is done the TEAM is expected to work as a TEAM ! Team Building workshops during the year and the year ends with your Bell Curves and Matrix ensures that there is discontent , and rumbling in the so called team .
To make matters worse we reward and give importance to RAPPORT BUILDING, COMMUNICATION ,MANAGERIAL STYLE ,INFLUENCING all very good skills , extremely useful in the corporate world , but have we ever thought what these skills mean in the absence of equally important attitudes and orientation like INTEGRITY,EQUITY& FAIRNESS,RESPECT FOR OTHERS ,EMPATHY ?
We need to give this a lot of thought.
If these highly valued skills are very low , though we may have the right orientation/attitude it makes us simple folks , we get taken advantage of and we are not effective though we may be good people.
If we neither have the skill nor the right orientation/attitude we are no better than a street bully.
The much greater concern is the large number of people populating organisations especially rising higher in the hierarchy on account of their exceptionally good skills that are so valued by the corporate sector despite the fact that they lack the essential right orientation/attitude.We fail to realise that they are just street bullies who have grown into being CORPORATE POLITICIANS!( they justify it by calling themselves STRATEGIC ! )
It is pathetic that we have to search for Leaders who have both the skills and the right orientation and attitude, they are far too few.
What then is Human Resource Development ? Of what worth are we HR professionals when we see this happening in our organisations but are impotent to do anything about it, worse still we are also in the same rat race , competeting to be the best corporate politician? Is that what STRATEGIC HR is all about?
2 comments:
God, u just snatched my words and thoughts on HR! Jargon, Jargon, Jargon! Mostly, it is just this in the modernn day HR and if u r not good at it, u r looked askance at! I am in HR as well and cringe, everytime someone mouths one!
rajanvt@gmail.com
32 years in HR ...what more should I say....Anguish is all I could title it!
So happy to know there are HR people who feel this way, one day hopefully there will be more anguish and that may lead to change.
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