This was the second year of the conference and I had high hopes for a great session after a really excellent first year. I didn't get to blog on that as I was chairing, but I particularly remember some provocative comments from Graham White at Brighton NHS Trust and Irene Stark at ATS Euromaster.
Graham had shared some comments from a manager blog:
"I've never had a positive interaction with Human Resources... it starts with annoyance and ends with infuriation... HR are empathetic strangers. HR rings false and no bond is created."
Irene noted what can be achieved - "In my business, HR is not a support function. It's central to business planning and strategy." She also shared a brave challenge to her MD basically suggesting he hadn't been doing his job adequately.
I thought it was brilliant.
So in opening up this year's conference I referred briefly to this being a sequel, mashing up Jaws and Star Wars to label this conference as the return of the shark (and next year's as the severed limb fights back.)
You can read more on the conference sessions in this post from Chloe Green: Successful HR business partnering: Return of the shark.
Rather than repeat any of this, I just wanted to refer to the comments I tweeted and have shown in the picture above. Especially as, to me, this short input was more meaningful, more powerful than any of the other things which were said during the day, or at the event last year. It was very actually very similar in many respects to the conversation we'd been having at Art of HR.
Where ever it's done, we need more of this. More challenge. More discomfort. More pushing back on our businesses rather than worrying about fitting HR into a model of business which clearly doesn't work.
We'll have more impact if we do this, though like Irene we do have have to be willing to be fired! But I bet it would deal with many of our managers' negative perceptions of our support.
Bravo HR!
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