Here is my favorite HR foible of the past month. Bear in mind that I have to cull these down from scores that people mention to me in my coaching programs.
A consultant reached conceptual agreement with a general manager-the buyer for the project-to implement a project designed to find causes of low morale in one of six company sites. The survey results, productivity, and overall performance were the worst in the company, and bringing the site up even to the next worst site would mean well into seven figures of improved retention, productivity, and so forth. The buyer agreed to a $14,000 fee and said, "Let's go."
So far, so good, right? Ah, but then the general manager said, "Get the paperwork and implementation settled with my human resource director," and the consultant made the mistake of actually attempting to do so.
The HR person-and you can't make this up-reviewed the agreement and said, "You're charging us $14,000. Yet similar firms we've worked with have always billed at daily rates. If I divide your fee by the number of days I'm estimating you'll be here, you're exceeding $2,000 per day which I feel is our limit for such services."
The consultant asked me how to deal with this and I advised him not to, but rather to go back to the general manager and get his proposal signed. You can't teach goats to fly, and putting a pair of wings on them and dumping them out of a low-flying plane doesn´t improve the result.
Here's a general managers, realizing the he has a better than ten-to-one return on this consultant's fee, and that's before you annualize the ROI, making the return far greater. Here's an HR person looking at daily rates and tasks, completely oblivious to investing in value. There's a reason those other "daily" firms weren't chosen-my colleague's approaches and proposal were deemed superior by the buyer.
Line managers are paid to get results, and they find investment resources that will enable them to do that. HR people (and trainers) are too often in the mindset of believing that they perform best when conserving budget and hoarding resources, no matter how much better off the company may be from their investment.
You can't view life as input; you have to view it as output. You can't be romanced by methodologies (which is why HR is a haven for every nutcase fad and professor with a book), but must be dedicated to outcomes; you can't pride yourself on not spending your entire budget, you must be gratified by achieving exemplary results.
Yet all this continues to be alien to HR thinking.
My colleague made one attempt to convince the HR person to simply process the paperwork as had been agreed with the general manager. "You don't hire the cheapest heart surgeon," he reasoned, "and you don't want a meter running while I'm here, and it's unethical for me to be paid more the longer I'm here while you're best served by a quick resolution, and you don't want your people to have to make an investment decision every time they may need my help."
Her response was, "All I'm interested in is comparative costs, and you're out of line with our recent consulting expenditures." You see, he's a cost, not an investment.
That plane and those wings are starting to look better and better.
Alan Weiss, Ph.D. is the author of 25 books, including Million Dollar Consulting (McGraw-Hill) which appear in 7 languages. He runs the unique Million Dollar ConsultingTM Colleges three times a year. You can reach him at http://www.summitconsulting.com, where you can also download hundreds of free articles.
© Alan Weiss 2006 All rights reserved.
