Robert Jeffery watches the ‘notorious’ former BBC HR director on the comeback trail
Lucy Adams is the HR equivalent of Britney Spears. By which I refer not to her carefully coiffeured hair or designer shoes – to both of which the Daily Mail has devoted more than enough column inches– but to the fact that associating her name with any online article guarantees you extra hits. It’s probably why you’re reading this, unless you are a Britney aficionado. In which case this is going to be quite a letdown as blogs go.
The comparisons don’t end there. Because just as Ms Spears has transformed from pop starlet to comeback kid, so Adams – monstered for her failure to prevent huge payoffs at the BBC and subsequently savaged by a Select Committee for being vague with her email trail – has launched a second career as a speaker and consultant. Her rebirth last week, in a conference room a few minutes from the Bank of England, as part of the London HR Connection series of events, lacked Las Vegas glitz. But her audience of HR directors was rapt, warm and generous with their applause as she held forth on the topic of ‘Disruptive HR’ The queue to meet and greet her at the end suggested there were many who wanted to hear more, or who at least felt Adams was given a raw deal by the national press and carried the can for institutional failings above her pay grade. Both of which are probably true.
Adams is a confident and capable speaker with a neat line in self-deprecation. There were nods here to her own notoriety, and her fear of Margaret Hodge. She professed herself open to discussing anything, but her main topic was the failings of the HR profession to prepare for a ‘VUCA’ world where the certainties of old are rapidly being dismantled. This isn’t HR directors’ fault, she insisted: “When you’re doing 12-hour days, with 14 meetings a day, I defy anyone to go back to their desk and think strategic thoughts.”
As a result, HR acts as an organisational parent, simply because it’s the default mode: its currency is annual appraisals, engagement surveys, staff handbooks and employment contracts which seek to set controls and limits rather than trusting staff to find their own way. Data could liberate organisations, but it’s mainly used to cut costs and corners. OD is unwieldy and overly complex – there were 5,500 job titles across 20,000 people during Adams’ time in Broadcasting House.
Many potential solutions were offered, among them encouraging mavericks and risk-takers, employing a dash of neuroscience and cutting at least a few of the processes Adams said made HR so ‘unpopular’ among many businesspeople. There was plenty to enjoy, with references to business thinkers and serious studies jostling with jokey asides. And while there are many on the speaking circuit making similar points, few are doing so with quite so much direct HR acumen or clear, genuine organisational savvy.
The problem, of course, is the Lucy Adams brand. Many won’t want to hear anything she has to say, and they’d be right to suggest the Beeb was hardly a model of organisational innovation during her tenure. She derides the obsession with strategy, but it was her insistence that she was a “business thinker, not an HR director” – as told to People Management and quoted by incredulous MPs – that came to epitomise that mindset. I hope she’ll be given a chance, because she has plenty to say, a knack of winning over the cynics and the ability to join the dots between much of the HR-oriented thinking out there. But it’s going to be a long road back.