Chickenshit HR
When Management Imposes Cowardice
We know precisely when fear becomes part of the business narrative. It’s when entrepreneurs mistakenly believe they need management to run their enterprise. Thriving to become large enough to consider management issues, entrepreneurs are already working with a cadre of leaders capable of moving forward on their own.
Why mess up a good thing with management? It’s because they tasted the bitter fruit of doubt that the world dangles as temptation to believe they might fail. The antidote, they wrongly assume, is management, a Trojan horse of horrors.
One of those horrors is the dreaded HR, “human resources” unit. Every top management group believes they need HR in order to have a layer of insulation and plausible deniability between them and the rest of the company. A well functioning HR organization serves top management by deflecting criticism from everywhere, absorbing complaints from below, issuing policies and instructions throughout and diffusing responsibility into meaninglessness, all the while making everyone in the company believe it is on their side.
That’s a tall order, quite a trick. And mostly HR pulls it off to a background of low groans and inaudible grumbles that leave a residue of disbelief just potent enough to poison the minds of employees without causing them to stop work or even alter course. Everyone knows that contrary actions can result in immense unpleasantness up to and including termination of employment.
But once in a while, HR stumbles on one of its own policies and chokes on its own control mechanisms. Cover-ups are commonplace in business. So what if HR does it, too?
It is not uncommon for HR credibility to stretch to the breaking point, leaving subordinate management actors still fulfilling their justly assigned roles. At that point, HR, acting out its own fear, sometimes applies the full weight of its undeniable authority against managers, preventing them from performing legitimately by imposing their own cowardice. That’s chickenshit. It hurts the company then and it hurts it in the future because the co-opted manager will never forget. And it cannot be forgiven.
HR once forbade me from spilling to a federal investigator about an employee. The reason? HR simply feared problems my comments might cause. Can you guess how little respect I had afterward for that company? I wasn’t around long enough for it to matter. Neither was the company.
Shift the example to a situation in which another company suffered direct loss from repeated fraudulent maneuvers by an employee but refused to allow the manager to take any action. HR was apparently afraid of confronting the employee. Once the directive was issued denying action by the manager, HR stopped answering email or returning phone calls. More chickenshit. And after complaint outside HR channels, superior management responded with, “Oh, well…”
There it died and with it, the potential for excellence on the part of a manager who wanted to perform at a superior level, for himself, the company and those with whom he worked. “Oh, well…”
When corporate level fear is forced upon capable managers, denying them the ability to exercise their judgment and act reasonably and righteously, everyone suffers. Now scale this deceit and this failure upward and outward to more impactful circumstances among countless workers. As the pile of chickenshit grows, so does the waste and the destruction.
in the public domain by Michael Driver
Follow on Twitter: @mdMichaelDriver
Michael Driver is author of Own Your Employment: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century Workers available almost for free on AMAZON.
