The former BBC HR director tells People Management why it’s time to challenge HR’s role as a ‘parent’ to employees
In the March issue of People Management, former BBC HR director Lucy Adams– author of HR Disrupted, a new book on the future of the profession – opened up about her ordeal at the hands of the tabloids, and why she doesn’t think HR is currently fit for purpose. In the second part of our interview, we asked her to go into detail on how HR professionals should challenge assumptions around process and progress.
In HR Disrupted, you say HR has become the ‘parent’ of the organisation. How has this situation come about?
The parental view of organisations and their people has been there for centuries. If you think back to Joseph Rowntree and Cadbury, they built their own villages. That led to an idea that leaders knew best and employees were slightly ignorant or not able to make decisions for themselves. It’s exacerbated by the fact we haven’t put people into line management and leadership roles who see themselves first and foremost as people leaders. It’s not their overwhelming priority to engage their people and enable them to do the best work of their lives. That has led to HR feeling they need to fill that gap – to compensate for poor leaders instead of looking at how you change the framework for leadership. We’ve fallen into this compensatory role.
If HR is going to change what it does, where should it start?
When we do a workshop, we offer people the chance to look at performance management – because it’s the hot topic – but almost always they choose talent and engagement. HR should be looking at the triumvirate of talent, engagement and performance. I’m not saying recruitment, induction or reward aren’t important. But if you have the ability and you’re focused as an HR team on how to enable people to perform at their best, then typically it will lead you to those areas.
Many people will be looking at performance management right now, often at the behest of their leaders. How do you approach it?
My first recommendation is not to think there’s a new and better process. Unfortunately, our desire to have a neat process to provide clarity – or to give ourselves comfort that we can monitor things – has been part of the problem. Our starting point is how do we make sure managers do it and make sure everyone has had a conversation? That leads us to a process.
The most successful organisations I’m seeing are not starting from a process, but are asking what they want performance to look like. Do we want to differentiate performance? Do we want to improve it or categorise it? Do we feel it’s about the regular check-in? Typically, those questions drive you to ask why on earth you would have an objective you set in April and review the next March, and why you’re saving up all your feedback to give it to someone in one lump when individuals can only change one thing at a time? We end up with a number that only frustrates and demotivates.
This morning, I was with a client trying to change the one-to-one, task-focused conversations they’re having with their people to be more of a coaching conversation. They want to reframe the performance review to be more about your career. It’s not a huge change – it’s a change of language and emphasis, and a change to whose responsibility it is.
What would you like HR to be doing differently in five or 10 years’ time?
I’d like to move away from an assumption that one size fitting all is a good thing. In HR, we have a globally consistent process and we make a virtue of that. I don’t think that’s a virtue – I think we want to get to personalised HR, so we reach a point where our experience as an employee is tailored to who we are, what matters to us, how we learn and how we manage performance.
The primary thing is some real shaking of this accepted wisdom that rating people drives performance, or that dangling a financial carrot at the end of the year increases motivation – some of those really basic human values that we are still tied to. Our approach at the moment is based on processes that match a mythical annual business cycle or on organisational hierarchies that don’t really reflect the way we do work.