HR In Control

There is an aphorism that business types (and others) recite in a wide variety of situations: Control the Controllable. It is a pleasant New-Age-y kind of sentiment. It means, if something isn't under your control, let it go. It's not worth stressing about. It's a good aphorism. I like to remind myself to Control the Controllable, and let the rest slide, every now and then.

But there's another side to the Control the Controllable worldview. If you let the stuff outside of your control unfold as it may, you have to take responsibility for the stuff that you DO control. You can't say "It's not under my control" and exempt yourself from accountability.

This is my problem with the way HR is practiced, so often. We say "I can't control the turnover rate." "I can't control the performance-review process." "I can't control the way managers sweatshop the Call Center folks." I'm only the HR guy, whaddya want from me?

If we're not in control of the systems and processes that direct our employees in their work, who is? A CFO couldn't get away with saying "We are terribly over budget, but you'll have to talk to the line managers about that." The CFO would be gone. But we HR folk get to say "Line managers make these decisions, and goldarnit, they won't listen to me."

The most appalling corporate 'badships' to me fall in the area of employee trust. We just don't trust our employees. Now, if I am shopping at the grocery store and I notice that the shopping cart full of groceries won't make it quite to my car (which is parked halfway between the grocery store and the TJ Maxx next to it) because there's a device on the cart's wheels that stops the cart at a certain point in the parking lot, I can rail and kvetch about that. But I have to allow that the sign on the cart makes some sense: "In order to preserve our low prices, we have installed wheel-stops that keep our carts in the parking lot." They mean that some people might steal the carts otherwise. I can live with that, because grocery stores don't get to choose their customers.

But employers do get to choose whom they hire. Yet we HR practitioners behave as though we have no control of who flounces in the door to work at our companies. "We have to monitor your Internet access at work, because, you know, some miscreant employee may steal time from us." "We have to have video monitors in the break room, because you never know when an employee might steal the coffee bags." Yet everyone on the payroll came in and stays in at our pleasure. Don't the other employees -- the vast majority of employees, who don't rip off the employer in any way -- deserve that we take responsibility for the hiring decisions we make?

We HR people have more power than we think, more influence and more force of will. I wish there were an HR appliance that HR people could purchase and install around our wrists, that would give us a mild shock whenever we utter the words "I'm sorry, that's out of my control." What's out of our control, really, if we lead the organization's HR function? The weather, politics -- to some degree, the behavior of our competitors - that's about it. Shame on us if we don't control the 99% of activity in our environments that we can and should control, influence or disrupt.
"It's out of my control" HR people get to keep their jobs at a high cost: they have to look at themselves in the mirror every morning. How much would an HR job have to pay to surmount that hurdle?