Understanding the business and being involved in day-to-day operations help HR professionals overcome stereotypes
Question: How do you move beyond the typical HR stereotype?
Answer: There are four major HR stereotypes. These are often overlapping and sometimes contradictory, and their possible antidotes are listed below:
The touchy-feely “HR people are so nice” stereotype: Sure, we all want people to think we’re nice, don’t we? But, unfortunately, this stereotype is rooted in a deep misunderstanding of what HR actually does. When people say HR people are “nice,” this backhanded compliment really means they see us as the planners of company picnics rather than strategic business partners.
To move beyond this stereotype, your colleagues need to see you’re involved in more than just the feel-good aspects of a company. You need to show them HR really is a business discipline and you’re not afraid of areas such as business strategy, marketing, sales, finance, operations, information technology, corporate governance and employment law.
Take some business courses (and not just courses in HR and organizational behaviour). Use the language of business. Learn more about the actual business you’re in and become more involved in the day-to-day operations. Find out what’s keeping line managers up at night. Prove your value through the use of meaningful metrics. Strive to really understand labour and employment law so you can explain the potential risks and exposures involved in a course of action, and you don’t have to run to a lawyer every time you have a simple question.
The transactional, old school “personnel manager” stereotype: Even though we’d hoped this stereotype had died out back in the 1970s, it persists at least partially because there are still some old-fashioned “personnel managers” out there who see their jobs as nothing more than hiring, firing and recordkeeping. The antidote to this particular stereotype begins with the above but also includes moving outside your comfort zone into new areas such as performance management, employee engagement, employee retention, human resources planning, HR strategy development, rewards management, diversity and change management. To go even further in moving your career in a more strategic direction, get involved in new and emerging areas of HR such as employment branding, ethics and governance, outsourcing and corporate social responsibility.
The executive’s “HR doesn’t understand the business” stereotype: Even some HR professionals wrongly think of human resources as something other than a business function. How many times have you heard HR colleagues talk about “the business” or “senior management” as if these were somehow separate and distinct from the HR department?
The other problem is many employees, and again even some HR practitioners, don’t realize HR’s primary accountability is to the employer. While we need to act as employee advocates at times, we’re really there to ensure employers make the most out of human capital investment.
It sounds a bit cold but you need to get the message across to business leaders loud and clear that you’re there to help them with the bottom line and you understand the business and their challenges.
The emerging “HR is just hot air and buzzwords” stereotype: This is a tough one and, in all fairness, all business professions are guilty of it to some extent. For some reason, we have lost the message that the purpose of effective communication is to get our point across to our audience in an effective manner, not to baffle them with jargon and nonsense. How many times have you sat through a presentation and thought to yourself either: “This all sounds wonderful and very sophisticated but I haven’t got a clue what this person is actually saying” or “They’re just repackaging the same old ideas they teach you in HR 101 and jazzing them up with five-dollar words?”
Even though marketing, finance and IT are all guilty of this to some extent, the HR profession has an even bigger problem to overcome in that our set of jargon and buzzwords isn’t as well-known as the gobbledygook used by people in other professions. This all comes back to a recurring theme — if you want business people to understand you, use the language of business. In most cases, this will be quite different from typical “HR speak.”
You also need to establish a reputation for yourself as being someone who delivers on your promises. It’s a cliché, but actions really do speak louder than words.
