WHY ENGINEERS NEVER GET HIRED FOR HR

WHY ENGINEERS NEVER GET HIRED FOR HR

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© October 31, 2019

Some years ago, I was addressing about thirty program managers “off campus” on matters of personnel relationships and motivation.  At the time, I was a management development psychologist for Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida: translated, an organizational development (OD) psychologist. 

One of the program managers came up to me after the session, and said, “You sure don’t sound like an HR (Human Resources) guy.  You sound more like us.”  I smiled.  “How do you explain that?”  I simply answered, “I’ve not always been in HR.”  In fact, HR was a new experience.

I started out as a chemist in R&D for Standard Brands, Inc., then became a chemical sales engineer for Nalco Chemical Company in its Industrial Division, went up the executive ladder and ended up facilitating a new conglomerate in South Africa; went back to school to earn a Ph.D. in industrial/organization psychology, consulted for a time, ending up working for one of my clients, Honeywell, Inc.  Eventually, I was promoted to Human Resources Director of Planning & Development for Honeywell Europe SA. 

This eclectic experience became fodder for many of my books and articles often critical of HR.  This is representative:

Management’s Union

While organizations are reducing their raw numbers of people, the pesky problem of management creep still persists. Staff engineers, administrators, and service professionals know how to work this phenomenon.

In 1980 I saw management creep up close and personal. A Fortune 500 facility had 4,200 employees and a complement of 250 managers, supervisors, and staff engineers. In 1989, after several iterative reductions in personnel, the facility had 3,200 employees and 400 managers, supervisors, and staff engineers.

Over the same period, the operation doubled in sales. In 1980, for example, HRD (Human Resources Department) had 65 employees and 7 managers. In 1989 the HRD staff had been reduced to 34 employees, but still retained its 7 managers.

Meanwhile, most workers were asked to do the work of two or more people. HRD, the assumed advocate of workers, was in a position to educate management on the cultural shadings to the issue of the common good and personhood, particularly as it related to the changing nature of work. It was also in a position to create a psychological climate conducive to open exchange between managers, professionals, and other workers on the changing nature of the work relationship.

Instead, HRD literally became part of the problem. This was accomplished by unwittingly becoming management’s union rather than the employee’s advocate. By telling management what it wanted to hear instead of what it needed to know, by failing to report the arrogant way many professionals went about their jobs, and by creating innocuous but costly and time-consuming cosmetic interventions, which challenged none of management’s pet biases, HRD failed management and tuned out professionals and most workers. What’s worse, chances are HRD will never again be trusted with so much influence.

The function of HRD is that of an inside-outsider. It is never that of the “yes man.” To discharge its function effectively, HRD is a provocateur—the role of the consultant—which is the antithesis of the consoler, the role of the sycophant.

HRD gravitated to what the organization didn’t need, a union for management. As a result, it put many organizations in jeopardy, not by design, but certainly by default. This happened at a time when the organization most urgently needed leadership and healing. By being reactive, HRD compounded an already tenuous situation—the need for senior management to become totally involved and committed to change and the failure of this management to accept this role, choosing instead to unwisely delegate it to HRD (SIX SILENT KILLERS: Management Greatest Challenge, St. Lucie Press, 1998, p. 35).

It is why I thought DILBERT in The Tampa Bay Times yesterday (October 30,  2019) was especially apropos.