I was reminded recently of that classic children’s rhyme “sticks and stones may break my bones”.
You know the one. The classic knee-jerk response to a verbal insult.
“Sticks and stones may break my bones. But words will never harm me.”
Tell that to a novelist who receives a rejection letter, the employee who gets a poor performance review or the teenager bullied on social media.
What about the person referred to as a “Human Resource”?
Or characterized as “Human Capital”?
There was a time when the innocuous banality of those words might not have hit a nerve with me. However, in the midst of the most profound period of workplace introspection in living memory, I increasingly feel that there’s something quite jarring that sits beneath those innocuous terms.
Something that infers ownership of, but not accountability for, the people in our organizations.
Something that smacks of being able to enthusiastically exploit, but seldom empower, the most creative, ingenious and inventive parts of our firms.
It’s quite likely that I’m overthinking these particular terms, but they do reflect an attitude, quite deeply embedded in many sectors, that the people we employ are merely a “resource” or source of “capital” that can be applied, leveraged, utilized and then casually tossed aside when another fresher, brighter, younger resource comes along.
I think it’s that Industrial Age perception of humans as mindless cogs in a production line that increasingly galls me. The production line mentality that continues to create hierarchies of increasing bureaucracy inside a business rather than Agile, flat teams, that believes we need “managers” because our workforce lacks the intellect to do the job properly without constant oversight, that draws a direct equivalence between a low-skill job and a low-skill person and doesn’t see the inaccuracy or the bias in that.
The same Industrial Age production line mentality that would let a senior manager in Hong Kong send this to his entire staff without a moment’s pause or a fleeting thought that it is a group of humans on the receiving end.
Even in 2021 our businesses have retained this weird Industrial Age obsession with outputs while completely missing the glaring opportunity to be more creative with the inputs.
In short, a sad fixation with the Productivity from our workforce when we could be more creative with the Possibility inside our workforce.
If you’re skeptical that Productivity can’t be significantly enhanced by focusing on the inputs of your people, look no further than the ground-breaking “Care & Growth” model developed by South African Anthropologist Etsko Schuitema. In his landmark work on the South African mining sector, he was able to prove that two dimensions – Care and, wait for it, Growth – drove more consistent productivity and productivity gains than a host of the other levers we typically employ like better pay, better working conditions or better benefits. Leaders who showed their workforce that they cared about them as human beings and who showed a consistent investment in their personal growth, were able to derive significant productivity from their people. More from their people by focusing on what was inside their people.
More recently, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini’s sublime book “Humanocracy” showcases numerous organizations who flourished by removing the creativity-choking layers of management hierarchy and bureaucratic bottle-necks that still seem so rife across businesses today. Example after example that show the traditional (Industrial Age) models of organizational design and structure are too cumbersome and plodding for the type of resilient and adaptive businesses needed today. That a leadership ethos obsessed with rigorous, suffocating centralized control cannot unlock and unleash the infinite potential in their people.
To be clear my issue is not with the people who have Human Resources or Human Capital in their job titles and LinkedIn profiles. Many are some of the most passionate and empathetic leaders I know. It’s with the connotations of those phrases. It’s how those terms create and codify a time and an ethos we are far beyond. Terms that I do believe harm our people versus unleash them.
For a one brief moment I wonder what might change amongst our leaders, our teams, our companies and our society if all Chief Human Resource Officers became Chief Human Potential Officers instead.
If instead of seeing merely Human Resources, we sought out Human Potential.
Rather than undermining our Human Resources with out-dated policies, we strove to unleash our Human Potential.
Rather than believing our Human Resources are merely vessels of productivity, we understood Human Potential was this incredible source of ingenuity.
In the end words we use do matter, Dear Reader.
They actually matter very very much.
