(Like the one about the guy who threatened to sue his wife’s
company for “enabling” her affair with a coworker. Then
there was the mentally disabled worker and the hooker —
well, no, never mind. . . .)
But then the facade cracks. It happens at an afternoon
presentation called “From Technicians to Consultants: How
to Transform Your HR Staff into Strategic Business
Partners.” The speaker, Julie Muckler, is senior vice
president of human resources at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage.
She is an enthusiastic woman with a broad smile and 20 years
of experience at companies such as Johnson & Johnson and
General Tire. She has degrees in consumer economics and
human resources and organizational development.
And I have no idea what she’s talking about. There is
mention of “internal action learning” and “being more planful
in my approach.” PowerPoint slides outline Wells Fargo
Home Mortgage’s initiatives in performance management,
organization design, and horizontal-solutions teams. Muckler
describes leveraging internal resources and involving
external resources — and she leaves her audience dazed. That
evening, even the human-resources pros confide they didn’t
understand much of it, either.
This, friends, is the trouble with HR. In a knowledge
economy, companies that have the best talent win. We all
know that. Human resources execs should be making the most
of our, well, human resources — finding the best hires,
nurturing the stars, fostering a productive work environment
— just as IT runs the computers and finance minds the
capital. HR should be joined to business strategy at the hip.
Instead, most HR organizations have ghettoized themselves
literally to the brink of obsolescence. They are competent at
the administrivia of pay, benefits, and retirement, but
companies increasingly are farming those functions out to
contractors who can handle such routine tasks at lower
expense. What’s left is the more important strategic role of
raising the reputational and intellectual capital of the
company — but HR is, it turns out, uniquely unsuited for
that.
Here’s why.
1. HR people aren’t the sharpest tacks in the box. We’ll be
blunt: If you are an ambitious young thing newly graduated
from a top college or B-school with your eye on a rewarding
career in business, your first instinct is not to join the
human-resources dance. (At the University of Michigan’s
Ross School of Business, which arguably boasts the nation’s
top faculty for organizational issues, just 1.2% of 2004 grads
did so.) Says a management professor at one leading school:
“The best and the brightest don’t go into HR.”
Who does? Intelligent people, sometimes — but not
businesspeople. “HR doesn’t tend to hire a lot of independent
thinkers or people who stand up as moral compasses,” says
Garold L. Markle, a longtime human-resources executive at
Exxon and Shell Offshore who now runs his own consultancy.
