Change Your Mindset and Blow Up Your HR Practices!

Peter Cappelli opened this year's CUPA-HR Symposium with a big bang! His article last year in the Harvard Business Review created quite a stir in the HR world and rather than getting upset and blowing it off as someone who doesn't know HR the CUPA-HR folks charged Dr. Cappelli with the notion that if we 'blow up HR' then 'WHAT!' How do we fix it? What can we do?

Dr. Cappelli's two hour interactive session gave plenty of feedback and fodder for these questions. I came away feeling a little burnt arount the edges but not so destroyed that I hung my head. I felt invigorated with the ideas and notions that he proposed. You cannot deny that he has done his research and unfortunately he DOES know Human Resources, but thankfully he gave lots of ideas on how to turn our business models around.

I'll go through some of my personal takeaways and challenge my CUPA-HR colleagues, who were there, to add to the list. Dr. Cappelli noted that Control = Influence. As an extension of this idea he stated that "HR is responsible for encouraging manager to behave in certain ways without the authority to make them do it." So we end up becoming beggars rather than leaders. We plead with employees to do their job. My take on that is that often if an employee doesn't follow through the onus is then on HR because we didn't follow through and make sure whatever task needed to be completed was done. Dr. Cappelli stated that the problem with HR's popularity is that we are trying to make people behave and they don't like to be told what to do. I would definitely agree that is the premise of probably 80% of the HR offices that were present in the session.

Dr. Cappelli noted that we need to raise our influence by stop taking on tasks where we have responsibility but no real authority to enforce. This is definitely going to be lodged in my brain for a while, whenever HR is given a task I will be asking myself who has authority in that task. If HR doesn't, then I will be asking more probing questions and talk to that particular authority figure. It definitely will lead to more conversation starters in my opinion.

Performance Appraisals were one area that Dr. Cappelli felt were antiquated and were in need of overhaul for the majority of organizations. He noted that there are some very innovative companies changing the concept and that their methods are gaining in popularity. He noted that Performance Management should be about continual engagement and not about a yearly review given scores, rankings and tied to any form of salary increase or structure. WHOAH!!! Did you catch that too. How different is that from MOST of our Performance Management systems in place today! He equated the current system to the 'Santa Conversation'. I equated it to Santa's Naughty or Nice list and based on what the review says the employee either gets something or not. This was very thought provoking.

When Dr. Cappelli's time had ended I had a million thoughts running around in my head related to current processes and how different my organization could look if I implemented any one of these revolutionary business practices. Thanks Dr. Cappelli for a session that will stay with me long after I fly out of Phoenix and will ride with me to work on Thursday.

jamie