Did you know 67% of second marriages fail?
That seems high to me. You would think conventional wisdom would teach us that those folks failing the first time what they did wrong, and what they need to differently the second time to make marriage successful. But it doesn’t work that way. By the way, 73% of third marriages fail. We get worse, not better!
Why?
It’s because of you. You suck at marriage. Stop getting married. Now, no one really wants to believe this, which is probably the foundational problem to begin with, but the one common denominator in every failed second and third marriage, is you. You are the problem. For whatever reason that might be, you’re just bad a picking a spouse that you are compatible with, and the more times you do it, the worse you’re going to get. Buy a dog, there great companions.
HR has ‘You’ Problems.
We tend to want to think it’s everyone else. It’s not us! We get it. It’s those damn idiots over in sales, they’re morons! Stupid operations never does anything right!
Yeah, it’s them, not us.
We have ‘you’ problems because we refuse to believe that maybe, just maybe, we are the ones who don’t get it. Maybe it’s us, that needs to change. Maybe, all this time, the reason we haven’t gotten that seat at the table, no respect, lacked influence, had nothing to do with everyone else, it had to do with us…
No way, can’t be. We get it. Right?
Playing along with the analogy of marriage, any successfully married man with 20+ years of fulfillment in a marriage will advise that the secret to a happy marriage is to respond somewhere along the lines of “Yes Dear.”
As long as the requests are based on an agreed upon standard and ethical by nature, jump on it and get it done.
Do everything possible to keep a healthy relationship going.
Some HR people do “get it” some don’t. Just like some operations, marketing, production people do or don’t. Past practice has a powerful gravitational pull and HR has a lot to overcome. If the leaders of the organization believe HR is admin and parties, that will determine their course in the organization. The people hired into HR will be the kind of people who do that well. Just as (theoretically) the people who are hired into operations etc will be the people who will maintain the status quo. It will remain a closed loop until by chance or design someone hires a change agent.