HR @ the speed of light –
Building to last or ...to finish last

I know of an organization that has been doing Institution Building for the last 10 years. Everything (and almost every body except the top layer) has moved on. Their cash cow is on the verge of being milked dry, phased out due to new technologies; and their flagship business hasn’t yet quite sunk but is under severe margin pressures. The management response: they’ve just announced yet another round of institution building workshops – “These processes take time. We are ‘building to last’”, says the HR Director.
Or does he mean “… to finish last?” Agreed it takes time. Unfortunately the business has run out of it.
I myself have been guilty of recommending long drawn out HR interventions with foggy outcomes and ‘feel good’ intentions that meander like an Atal Bihari Vajapayee speech in his later years as PM. In fact, I’d like to argue, that in general the HR fraternity, as a whole, strongly believes in the adage that human processes take time to flower. They have to be planted deep. Nurtured carefully. Protected from the chaos and politics.
Maybe for a stable economy there might be a kernel of truth in that viewpoint. But in one that’s blazing along like India’s unfortunately the gardener doesn’t have that kind of time – dallying around trying to build to last is a surefire way of turning the garden into your businesses’ graveyard. And yours. Sure HR talent is in great demand. But unfortunately the market is looking for gardeners not undertakers. We can keep lamenting that we tried to partner with the business, that we wanted to hold their hands but they just kept running right on ahead.
I believe it’s time we stopped trying to hold the business back and ran, rather flew, along with it instead. We’re hopelessly out of rhythm with the business. If you think of an arrow formation of jets (the different functions) we should probably be at the nose leading the show. Right now, to be honest, we are watching the flypast from the ground and trying to control its turns and twists with a remote that broke down long back.

And I believe its beyond repair. Tinker with it as much as you will, it won’t get us to fly. We HR folks need to invent a brand new machine! A vehicle that delivers HR processes at the speed of light. As a benchmark I throw down this gauntlet - from concept to implementation to evaluation of the most complex HR intervention shouldn’t take more than three months. Most should aim at being completed in one.
An inventor of such a vehicle will first need to jettison sacrosanct mindsets embodied in pet HR keywords like, ‘accountability’, ‘retention’, ‘career planning’, ‘work-life balance’ and shift instead to new ways of thinking that might propel us on.
I propose ‘ownership’ in place of ‘accountability’, ‘contracting’ and ‘freedom’ instead of ‘retention’, ‘aspiration management’ for ‘career planning’ and ‘joyful work’ as against ‘work-life balance’.
My counsel to the ‘institution builders’ is to stop being so self-indulgent. Take a lesson from kings of yesteryears, illustrious rulers of our past, who built ornate palaces for themselves that became merely pretty curiosities, years down the line. A hard look in the mirror will convince you of the reality – that ninety percent of the people in a vibrant business are going to be moving on within a couple of years. We live in a world of instant utopias. Maggie noodles, instant coffee, two minute videos on Utube – pitch your institution building against that and figure out for yourself who’s going to live in those institutions?
Get real folks! More than just our survival depends on it!