Good and objective measures of performance are hard to come by. Giving human resources specialists a role in evaluating general managers may turn recommendations from the same specialists into something closer to \”commands,\” an outcome we would very much like to avoid. On balance, however, this is a role that can often play and a role that ought to be undertaken by someone; so this is a task we urge you to consider assigning to specialists. And there is ample precedent for such a role. After all, many companies have used a similar approach in other arenas-for instance, having specialists charged with overseeing corporate quality or ethics initiatives are responsible for training, coaching, and helping to evaluate general managers in contributing to those initiatives.

A dotted-line relationship between service providers and (especially) in-the-field human resources specialists is an excellent idea. Should you hire for this newly configured human resources function? What sort of training should you give them? What kinds of career paths should they follow?

One should think of these people as \”nearly\” general managers who specialize in these issues. They should be trained in business generally. They should be interested in and knowledgeable about business, particularly your business. As part of their on-the-job training, they should get exposure to the other business realities facing your enterprise. The reasons should be obvious: To be successful, human resources needs to be integrated with other general business concerns. A specialist, in an advisory position or otherwise, who doesn\’t appreciate the larger general business picture facing the organization is poorly situated to provide sensible guidance. And even if the guidance given is sensible, this person is less likely to be able to get the ear and respect of general managers.

Think of hiring general management types and then giving them the experience and training needed to become human resources experts, or you can think of hiring human resources types with basic business training, who are ready and willing to migrate into general management. There is no reason to suspect that either of these is generally superior to the other. But it is worth pointing out that each of them poses a particular problem to be surmounted.

If you decide to hire someone with professional training, it may be hard to find someone with basic training in other crucial aspects of business. If you peruse the curricula of undergraduate and graduate-level programs that grant specialized degrees in industrial relations, personnel management, human resources, and the like, you will discover that graduates frequently are not required to have taken a course in business strategy, and sometimes not even corporate finance or accounting. Not to put too fine a point on it, we don\’t think the simple net present value calculations used in a few places in any book should be off-putting to any student in any field of management. But one of the academics who anonymously reviewed a book manuscript for its publisher – a professor whom we expect teaches in a well-regarded department or school of industrial relations or human resources – suggested that such material would make it impossible to use the book for his or her students. If you hire folks professionally trained in human resources, you should be careful to ascertain what they know of a general business nature and how willing and able they are to plug any holes in their knowledge. You should verify that they are ready, willing, and able to spend time learning other aspects of your specific business. And then you should follow through, with tours of duty in other functions or (at least) with some in-house training in what your firm does and how.

Senior human resources executives frequently complain that their biggest challenge is finding smart, talented people for their human resources organizations who know or can learn the business. Give us those people, they say (including to the schools responsible for producing professionals), and we can train them in the specialized human resources knowledge they need to do their jobs well. So the answer might be, instead, to hire general managers and steer them toward a human resources specialty. Management recruits and lower-level managers, seeking to rise in the corporation, will have to be disabused of those worries-and the most convincing argument will be the existence of clear career paths leading from or through human resources into the highest reaches of top management.

http://www.arturvictoria.info/
http://sites.google.com/site/cliptheschoolbeginning/
http://sites.google.com/site/arturvictoriasite
http://adesg-europa.blogspot.com/

http://www.arturvictoria.info/
http://sites.google.com/site/cliptheschoolbeginning/
http://sites.google.com/site/arturvictoriasite
http://adesg-europa.blogspot.com/

Author Bio: http://www.arturvictoria.info/
http://sites.google.com/site/cliptheschoolbeginning/
http://sites.google.com/site/arturvictoriasite
http://adesg-europa.blogspot.com/

Category: Business Management
Keywords: Organization, behavior, human, information, career, responsible, planning, human resources