Getting Beyond Bureaucracy In Human Resources

By becoming more strategic and operating with an edge, corporate HR departments can boost their effectiveness and shed their bureaucratic reputation. The company’s leaders, previously stuck in a process-oriented rut, have now articulated the strategic rationale for what they are doing and why it’s important—in this case, to understand the company’s people, help fill talent gaps, and thereby improve returns. It is now building a database and infrastructure to capture those results and make the highest performers more visible. HR might have had a difficult time, on its own, committing the company to new performance criteria and gaining the resources to update its systems, but collaboration with a major leader gave the effort teeth. It’s easy to say, “HR needs to let go and get out of the way,” but the pendulum can easily swing too far in the other direction: granting managers unlimited freedom in making HR decisions can generate too much variability, potential liability exposure, and cost creep. High-quality, timely information about talent pools and gaps represents a competitive advantage that HR is uniquely positioned to provide. Compliance efforts in areas such as labor and antidiscrimination obligations can easily make forms and layers of bureaucracy proliferate. A rigorous HR function—an “adviser with an edge”—should track and interpret data and assert a point of view: “yes, we are doing well realizing internal goals or meeting industry benchmarks” or “no, we may be beginning to run off the rails”. Many leadership-development efforts don’t achieve their goals, because they ignore the business context and offer insufficient opportunities for personal reflection and individualization. An assertive HR department clarifies expectations for leadership development across the company, provides a baseline backbone of proven tools and methodologies, and flags priorities to adapt them to the needs of businesses and individuals.

Reference: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/getting-beyond-bureaucracy-in-human-resources