People Work for People

My first job in management was when I was eleven years old. Yeah, you read that right, eleven years old. I was sporting the brand-new kaki shirt that signaled my advancement from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts. I was in the big leagues now of Scouting and I really was proud of my new uniform. I was attending a Troop meeting and we were having elections for patrol leaders. My brother was six years older than me, so he was pretty much done with his Scouting career as mine was just taking off. I was a member of the famed “Defenders” patrol. This was the patrol that my brother and his gang of buddies had formed. As a Cub Scout I grew up in their shadow and heard the tales of their great adventures.

It sounds corny today, but I worshiped my older brother and his friends. Most of them had older brothers or were only children, or worse yet, they had sisters, so I became something of an adopted little brother for them to pick on and treat as a servant. The unspoken agreement was that I was allowed to hang out with them so long as I did exactly as I was told, didn’t complain about ANYTHING, and swore to take their secrets to my grave, which would be expediated if I failed to comply with any of these conditions. I was only too happy to comply just so I could hang out with the cooler older guys. My loyalty was really tested when one of them swiped a pack of cigarettes and the real tests of manhood began. However, I withstood my mother’s interrogation (some of her methods are still being used at black sites around the globe to this day) and so my status as their mascot stood.

When I crossed over into our Boy Scout troop, I wasted no time in joining their old patrol, the Defenders. None of the original members were around, but the legacy was there, and I was ready to be branded. Turns out the brand that I thought was a real initiation ritual was just my brother and one of the other original Defenders stupidly handling a hot Dutch oven and they accidently burned themselves. It was cooler to call it a brand then to admit they were just dumb. Regardless, I would have my own contributions to make to the Defender legacy and Scouts in the future would sing songs around the campfire about my deeds.

The first contribution to that legacy would be assuming the mantel of leadership. My father was our Scoutmaster. He never participated in Scouts growing up but with two boys, he was all in on the program. He had been in the Navy and more importantly had read and digested Lord Baden Powell’s book. Lord Powell is the founder of Scouting and he believed that the adult’s role was to lead by example and keep the boys safe, but otherwise experience would be our guide. Most importantly, the boys needed to lead the troop, not the adults. While the term helicopter parent had not yet been coined, baby boomer parents were not all on board with the school of hard knocks. Regardless, this troop would be led by the boys who made up its ranks. Kind of a Lord of the Flies meets Field and Stream situation.

I looked around the roster of the other seven future captains of industry that made up the Defenders patrol and decided that I was less than impressed with their qualifications to lead, so I tossed my name in the hat (literally) for patrol leader. My only competition for the job was a buddy of mine that was held back a year in school. While he was older and puberty had already called him home (he was a foot taller than everyone else) he wasn’t exactly a candidate for Mensa. I made my campaign speech to my peers and five slips of torn up notebook paper later I was commissioned as a Patrol Leader. This would be my first official position of authority and the journey of a thousand miles began with this first step.

For the next seven years of my Scouting career I was either a patrol leader or the senior patrol leader. It wasn’t so much that I was power hungry and craved dominion over my peers (although I cannot lie and say that didn’t play some small part), but rather I was responding to the adage that nature abhors a vacuum. Absent suitable leadership, I raised my hand and stepped into the role. This wasn’t limited to Scouting. I was the captain of my baseball team, and I was a section leader in the marching band and even filled in as the drum major when ours broke her leg. At one point in high school, I had three different uniforms hanging in my closet: baseball, Scouts, and marching band. Yeah, I was a real catch in high school! Maybe it was the uniforms that made me seek positions of leadership, or maybe it was something different.

When asked about some of my professional successes and skills, I often default to lessons I learned in Scouting. Did you know that since the inception of Scouting in the United States, six US Presidents were Scouts? Am I saying I’m the next president of the United States? No, of course not, but I did earn the rank of Eagle Scout so I’m abundantly qualified for the job. I think the real reason I default to Scouts is because this is where I learned not just lessons about leadership, but about human resources. No, there’s not an HR merit badge, but if there were I definitely would have earned it and sewn it onto my uniform!

Of course, I’m not talking about filling out forms and becoming the worst/best hall monitor in the world. So often when we talk about Human Resources the ideas that pop into our mind are less than flattering, and with good reason. For a very long time many human resource professionals were trained in the world of compliance. It’s a fancy word for rules. So many rules! And many of them are very necessary because, you know…the law. Employment laws exist to protect both workers and companies and those laws exist for a reason. And broadly speaking I support following the law. And then you have labor. The age-old battle of workers vs. management is a very real thing in so many working environments, and it’s a good idea to keep some people around who know how to navigate the labyrinth of legally binding agreements. On the whole, having folks who both understand these issues and can keep your organization compliant is not altogether a bad thing.

Broadly speaking there are two kinds of human resource professionals. There’s the cop and there’s the advocate. The cop works for the company. They are the compliance officers and hall monitors. They work for the company, and they answer up, always up. They see their primary responsibility as protecting the company and they are excellent bodyguards. They are not afraid of hard conversations, and they will grind your recruitment to a halt if you haven’t followed the process.  Who’s process you ask? Their process, and don’t ask. No inappropriate question has ever been asked in their interviews and no one is hired with less than three reference checks. Theirs is lonely and isolated work, they are always underappreciated, and they are too comfortable with being hated.

The advocate does all of the things the cop does, but they try to hide it from everyone while they do their work. They’re like a youth pastor at a non-denominational church. They’re super friendly, they know everyone’s name, and they really “get” you. And just like a youth group, most everyone likes them even though we all know that nothing is ever going to get too crazy because they’re still in charge of the rules…even though they pretend like they hate the rules too. When they have to have tough conversations, they tend to crumple or make you feel like you’ve put THEM in a bad spot. Here comes the “I’m disappointed in you” speech.

If you have worked in more than two places in your life, the chances are that you have experienced both kinds of human resource professionals. I mean no disrespect to those who respond to this calling and professional path. It’s noble and necessary work. It’s also a paradigm in desperate need of an overhaul.

The youth pastor human resource managers of Silicon Valley tried this dangerous operation a decade or so back. These were the tech giant companies that introduced napping pods, unlimited latte bars, foose ball tables in conference rooms, scooters to get from meeting to meeting on campus and of course the office happy hours. Every company had their own version of this nonsense, but the sentiment was the same: we’re cool man. We’re not your parent’s stuffy office. Screw the rules, we go fast and break things! Hahahahahahahahahahaha!

Funny thing, those same companies saw an increase in their health care costs with a corresponding decrease in employee satisfaction. Turns out creating all those amazing perks to keep employees on campus and working insane hours because “work is fun” turns out to be a giant truckload of horse manure. Also…when you give people something it’s really hard to take it away. After several of these companies realized the errors of their ways and began cutting back on some of these “perks,” employees rebelled, and satisfaction and retention rates fell further. Turns out the Rolling Stones were right, “you can’t always get what you want.”

Imagine then, if I told you there was yet another flavor of human resources in the world. The truth is that there are many more flavors, and the emersion of new public administration and values-based management are injecting the working world with some new and innovative approaches to managing our single largest cost, our human assets. I wrote in another piece about this, but simply put, for many organizations (and most definitely in the nonprofit sector) payroll comprises one of our single largest monthly expenses. I pay a guy handsomely to go on our roof every week and make sure our HVAC is working well and we maximize our investment. Why? Because HVAC units are very expensive to replace and horribly inconvenient when they break. The cost of this regular maintenance is a fraction of my monthly payroll expenses. Why then would anyone in a similar situation do anything less than invest in and maintain the single greatest asset the organization has? The people doing the work! This has been my guiding philosophy since my first appointment as a chief executive and I evangelize to any others who will listen.

To understand a bit more about the flavor of human resources I have concocted in my organization, it’s worth sharing some of my experiences with the cops and advocates I have worked with along the way. These examples are meant to be illustrative and not intended to call anything out as wrong or bad. They are however critical touch points in my career where I learned some very valuable lessons about the role of human resources and how to engage with and treat employees.

The first person I fired quit. Wait, what? You read that correctly. Let me explain. My first job where I was directly supervising other employees in an official capacity was at the museum that started my career. It was a large organization with three full time people who worked in human resources. To say they subscribed to the “cop” model of human resources would be understating things a bit. This particular group was even more sterile than most in that they seldom got their hands dirty and avoided doing the ugly part of directly interacting with problematic employees. They were there to “support” the supervisors and managers and left them with all the heavy lifting. In my case I was struggling with an employee who was seriously underperforming. As a rookie supervisor, I had not yet been given the tools or training to properly deal with the situation, so I was making every mistake in the book.

Eventually I sought the guidance of the folks in human resources. That’s when I was introduced to the idea of the “slow squeeze.” Rather than take a direct approach to the problematic employee, I was advised to apply subtle/passive pressure on all aspects of their work. It was described to me like cooking a frog. If you drop a frog into a boiling pot of water, they will immediately jump out. But if you put that frog in a pot of cold water and slowly turn the heat up, eventually you end up with a cooked frog. The idea being the employee will either get better at their job or they will quit, and the problem goes away.

You are right in your thinking; that’s a terribly cruel approach and crude analogy. Also, why are we trying to cook our employee? I wasn’t wanting to get rid of them, I just wanted them to be better at their work. I immediately felt icky about this approach. However, this was coming from the people who are supposed to know these things. Reluctantly I followed the advice given. I passive aggressively began applying pressure to every aspect of this employee’s workday. Would you believe their performance did not get better? But they saw right through me and knew what I was doing. They were not interested in quitting, so this became a war of wills. This insanity lasted for several long and pointless months until eventually I chose the nuclear option and made my cases to the cops to fire this employee. Of course, that too took time. When the fated day arrived and I had built up the courage to fire this person my plan backfired. Like the days of dueling, my future former employee drew first and slid their resignation across the table. The slow squeeze worked, and the employee was gone. The cops chalked it up as a victory. I saw it for the epic fail that it was and to this day regret the stain it left on everyone involved.

Fast forward a few years and promotions and I was managing a much larger group of employees (a few hundred). Among the many offerings of our museum, we ran three residential outdoor schools. Managing remote employees who live at their place of work is a very unique and special skill set. But these were my people and they were doing some very mission-centric work. I really was inspired by them on a daily basis and did my best to be their advocate. The cops really did not care for this group of employees because the line between personal life and work life was so often blurred that it was a ticking time bomb of issues and problems. In fairness, they weren’t altogether wrong. Young people living at their place of work in remote places is definitely a recipe for the occasional disaster.

One of our camps was located in a very remote section of the high desert in Eastern Oregon. It’s a very old and rustic location completely surrounded by a national monument, so it is an ideal location for an outdoor school and nature camp. The on-site staff numbered around 20 and everyone had a part to play. We had instructors, maintenance staff, a program manager and cooks because people have to eat. Everyone plays a part in running this delicate ecosystem of residential camp. Because of our extremely remote and rugged location, we even had some of our staff who were specially trained (and authorized) to deal with the nature that surrounded our facility. And by that, I mean that there are animals in the food chain who on occasion wander into camp and threaten to do harm to humans during the natural course of their day. Our most common interloper was the Western Diamondback rattlesnake.

One morning our cook was taking an early morning stroll before diving into the task of making enough pancakes to feed 70 kids. His daily walk took him OFF the camp property and into the national monument. While making his return to camp he heard the tell-tale rattle of a snake warning him of his proximity to a bad day. I should note that our camp cooks are not the staff mentioned earlier who are specially trained and AUTHORIZED to deal with animals like this. Also, the snake was in its natural territory and should have been left alone. However, the cook thought it would be great for the kids in camp to see this beautiful creature a little closer, so he CAUGHT THE SNAKE and BROUGHT IT INTO CAMP!

While walking to one of the education barns to put said snake into a large terrarium for safe viewing, a group or students just waking up to greet the new day saw him and were immediately interested and terrified in equal measure. The cook had what he believed to be a very firm hold of the snake, pinching his head in his hand, just behind the jaws of the snake and supporting the 4-foot body with his other hand. Turns out the firm grip was loosened when met with the screech of a young, terrified camper. That was all the opportunity the snake needed to snap around and strike his captor on the hand. A split second was all the snake needed to inject a dangerous dose of venom and make his escape.

The wilderness first responders on staff leapt into action. The nearest hospital was a three-hour drive and the cook needed help much sooner. The regular life flight helicopter was responding to a highway accident, so the next level of care was the National Guard. Thirty minutes later a Blackhawk helicopter was landing in camp to medically evacuate the cook.

Here’s the good news, the cook survived the incident, and he kept all his body parts (sometimes bites like this result in partial amputations). Now the not so good news. The cook knew what he did was a mistake and was terribly repentant. What he did was dumb, dangerous and an obvious violation of museum policy. He was way past any written warning or graduated discipline program. This was going to cost him his job. As is often said, timing is everything. In this case, the time was now, or so I was told. The quick response forces of human resources were now on the scene and informed me that the cook needed to be fired…right now. I reminded them that he was lying in a hospital bed with his wife and young child in the room. That did not matter. The decision had been made.

While I agreed that the total lack of responsibility in this case warranted termination, I was dumbfounded by the timing of the decision. We fired a living, breathing human while he lay in a hospital bed, antivenom still in his body, with his wife sitting in the front row. Cold. There is no other word. There was little surprise or objection to the news that was being delivered but the unspoken conversation in the room went something like this, “really, you’re firing me in front of my wife while lying in a hospital bed after suffering a near fatal injury? Sure, I know it’s my fault and I deserve this, but damn, that’s cold.”

Following that incident, I decided then and there that I would never again ignore my instincts and blindly follow the directions of the compliance officers. They had lost site of the first word in their job descriptions, human. People are not inanimate objects to be deployed and programed. At the root of nearly every single performance issue there is a human just trying to do their best. No one ever wakes up in the morning and says, “I’m going to try and get fired today.” Even if you hate your job, you’re likely not trying to get fired from it because you need that job until a better one comes along. More importantly people want to do well at their work. It doesn’t matter what that work is, we all generally want to do well. If performance is suffering, it is seldom the result of a lack of desire to do well. There’s almost always something else going on. My assumption is that everyone wants to do well at their job until they prove otherwise.

After the cook firing, I began to approach all human resource issues from the perspective of the youth pastor advocate. I was a vice president of a large museum at this point, and I had started as a part time summer camp counselor. I had climbed my way up from the bottom to my current position and now I was a man of the people. And that’s how a lot of my staff saw me and referred to me. Finally, someone in senior leadership would be making decisions that were informed by the experience of actually doing the work of the people. Other than my boss, the president, I was the only member of our senior leadership team that held this special status. Every other senior manager had come into the organization from outside or from other fields of work. It was a status I enjoyed but carried the burden of responsibility in a very serious way. And now I was a born-again human resource professional, an advocate, a champion of the people and things were going to change!

Or so I thought. Turns out “the people” want things from you. While you were one of them, now you are one of them. What? I was living in this walking dead state of being. As a member of senior leadership, I was no longer a man of the people, even though I had come the from the lowest possible starting point in the organization. But my peers didn’t accept me because I had come from the working poor of our organization and it was automatically assumed that my positions and opinions were tainted (which of course they were, but that was for me to prove, not for them to assume). Threading the needle was impossible and I regularly found myself disappointing both sides.

Turns out there is another downside to the advocate role. There’s a dirty little secret about the workplace that no one ever teaches you, it’s just learned the hard way again and again. If you haven’t learned this lesson yet, let me be the first to enlighten you. Fair warning, this is not a popular or easy thing to hear. Are you ready? You can be friendly at work, but you can’t be friends. Ouch. Here’s what I mean. If you are promoted from within the ranks, those coworkers are now subordinate to you in the organizational structure. There is a power imbalance. I know what you’re thinking. You’re the one who can break the cycle. Just set boundaries. Work is work, and friendships are friendships. That’s what I did, and it worked great, right up until it didn’t. See how well those boundaries hold when you deny a time off request, or a raise, or heaven forbid you lay someone off. How well does your friendship hold when you engage in progressive performance management and document your friend’s performance issues.

The bruising heals, but the scars are forever. While the idea of the employee advocate model is desirable, ultimately it fails in its execution. So, what’s left? This can’t be the only two options. This was the existential crisis I was grappling with when I returned to school to earn a master’s degree. I earned a coveted seat at the Hatfield School of Government’s Public Administration Program and would go on to receive my MPA and a Certificate in Nonprofit Management. What set this program apart was a relatively novel approach to creating public and nonprofit sector executives called “new public administration.” It is a curriculum designed to upend the classic bureaucratic and poverty mentality models that so many public managers and nonprofit executives operate from. At its core lies the idea of values-based management.

I would spend the next three years steeping in the academic tea leaves taking my real-world work experience up to that point in my career into the classroom to serve as my case studies. It was the best classroom I had ever been in and was the place that I first heard this idea about being friendly, but not being friends. I want to make sure I’m not giving you the wrong impression. I have very close relationships with most of the people that work for, near, or around me. I spend more time per week with them than I do with my family. I know about their kids, I know about their hobbies and interests, we share intensely difficult and sometimes private struggles. I have a deep feeling of caring and respect for each one. But…none of them come to my house on the weekend to watch the game or have a beer. I haven’t loaned any of them my car, driven them to the airport (except for work trips), or gone to a Christening of a child. I’m not typically invited to weddings or birthdays, and those same events in my life are private and off limits. It’s a subtle but important distinction when defining roles and keeping those boundaries.

I also learned this very simple but life changing idea. People work for people. That should not be a startling revelation, but in a Western society workforce we are trained to think of the workplace as a battle ground between management and workers. There is an unspoken class system embedded in every organizational chart in America. Titles and compensation come commensurate with dominion over others in the organization. Supervision and the development of other people are seldom matched to those with the skills to do this work in a healthy and successful way. Rather, technicians skilled in the trade craft of their chosen profession are promoted to roles they never studied for and seldom receive proper training. If they are successful in managing others, they are the exception that proves the rule in most cases.

My academic pursuits left me with the nagging feeling of “how do we shift this paradigm?” I wanted to find a way, at least in the organizations where I worked, that I could put these ideas (and so many more) into practical application. I wanted to create a leadership incubator where I could help develop better managers of people, where a third flavor of human resources could be offered. And it didn’t take long for that to happen.

There is a very natural phenomenon that occurs when someone earns a master’s degree in (enter your favorite subject matter here). Upon receiving one’s degree, you instantly become the smartest person in the room. Partly because you are, but mostly because you just spent 2-3 years intensely studying one very niche topic area and you really want to play with all your new toys. In this case the toys I’m refereeing to are ideas, concepts, and models I learned in school. My graduate thesis was based on the argument that we must train and develop our people. Specifically, I made the case for the return on investment in the nonprofit sector of developing in-house pipelines of managers and formal leaders.

I argued that all the resources needed for a comprehensive education, training and development program for our staff already existed inside our organizations and the cost of attrition and opportunity loss far exceeded the cost of real investment in our people. Back at my museum I created an internal training academy using in house content experts and experienced managers as instructors. The academy was open to all staff and on paid time. Completion of the academy, which was 100% voluntary and on paid time, resulted in compensation increases and preferred status on internal promotions and hiring. My job was to grow everyone else out of their job. Hopefully we grew them out of their job into another in the organization, but if not, that was fine too. This rising tide would lift every boat in our harbor. And that’s just what happened.

I have caried this internal academy model to two more museums that I have led and helped others establish similar programs in their organizations. This was good stuff, but I felt there was more to do. My next target was the dreaded performance review. Almost every company and organization have them and there is almost no one who likes them. They are time consuming, inherently flawed, and wildly inconsistent. Humans grading, rating, and sorting other humans is just a ridiculous exercise in futility. Even in sporting events like gymnastics or ice skating where every move is named, defined, and expertly judged and athletes are separated by thousandths of points, final ratings are subjective and controversial. So why do we do performance reviews?

The answer has two parts. Part one: because the compliance cops tell us we have to. Part two: because we’re really bad at doing what we should be doing to coach and manage performance in others. In a values-based leadership model, supervision of other people is viewed as a full-time responsibility. Feedback on performance is micro-dosed and given on a near constant basis. Employees are given meaningful and substantive feedback so regularly that it becomes imperceptible. Big performance issues seldom pop up in this model because it is exceedingly difficult for those issues to ever take root. Employees no longer fear their supervisors because the feedback loop is ever present, and the positive reinforcement of desired outcomes far exceeds any negative or constructive comments.

This of course is the ideal environment, and like all ideal concepts is aspirational. I make no claim that I have achieved this status, but it is one that I aspire to and push every supervisor that works for me towards. To help us get there, we have our response to the performance review called a GOOD session. These are conducted on a regular basis with employees and substitutes the traditional performance review. GOOD stands for goals, opportunities, obstacles, and decisions. Essentially, this is a conversational framework and note taking tool for both employee and supervisor to identify areas of focus for an employee. It is a never-ending document during the tenure of the employee and is revisited on a regular basis by both employee and supervisor. It satisfies the need for documentation of performance, and if/when needed, a resource when dealing with disciplinary issues. More importantly it provides a lattice for the supervisors to grow their continuous feedback and guidance upon.

The only reason the American workforce puts up with traditional performance reviews is because in many cases at the end of the process awaits the much-anticipated raise. The problem there is that often that raise is a pre-determined percentage or cost of living adjustment. I’m curious, did you ever send a thank you note to your boss for that 3% raise they gave you? Probably not, and in a lot of cases that’s the pool or fixed amount that managers are given to reward you at the end of the process. Did you feel valued and want to work harder? Again, probably not as inflation gobbled up your increase before you even had time to notice. Compensation was my next target on the human resource hit list.

Nonprofits are too often infected with a poverty mentality. It is too convenient of an excuse for everyone to turn to as a foregone conclusion when discussing anything money related. It goes something like this, “I wish I could pay you more, but you know, we’re a nonprofit.” I’ve heard that thinking repeatedly and it’s a manufactured crisis. True, nonprofits operate with a different margin than the private and public sector. There are never enough resources to do all the things our missions call us to do, and by resources, I mean money. But here’s the real bottom line, we are still a business, and we are competing for talent. If you pay substandard wages, you will attract and employ people with fewer and lesser skills who will struggle to deliver on said mission. It’s a hard thing to say, but we are competing for the best available talent and few of us in the marketplace can afford, or should accept, working for anything less than what we are worth in a free market society.

This is a very hard place for many nonprofits to get to for so many reasons that we cannot cover here. What I have endeavored to do is pay at or better wages as compared to both market and industry standards. This effort at least gives me some standing to compete for top quality candidates and employees. I will seldom be the best offer, but I can almost always be competitive. We then sweeten the pot with a host of other non-financial incentives that when viewed overall make us very competitive if not pushes us to the point of being the best offer someone receives. No one is going to get rich, but everyone can feel good about their compensation and leave at the end of the day feeling valued.

But what about the raise? If you don’t have a formal performance review, how does anyone get a raise? I’m so glad you brought me back to this point. Sure, we try and start everyone in a good place financially, but outstanding and sustained performance deserves to be recognized and compensated. I am particularly proud of what I believe is a pretty novel approach to this age-old issue in the workplace. We have created what we call the salary review process. Yeah, it’s not a particularly exciting name, but check this out. Anytime an employee feels they are due for an increase, they complete a pretty simple request form. There are some questions that prompt them to make their case and site specific examples of their performance, and then they call their shot. The employee puts a value to that work and states what they are asking for or want to see in an increase.

There are several special things that happen in this process. First, we are teaching our employees to be their own advocate. If you think you have earned something, say it, don’t wait around for someone else to lift you up. Second, the power dynamic has been flipped on its head. The employee decides when a raise is due and for how much. It doesn’t mean its automatically approved, but the employee drives the conversation. They can submit a review as often as they deem appropriate, and if the case is strong can receive an increase multiple times over the course of a single fiscal cycle. Third, and most interestingly, it ultimately costs the company less than if we issue a blanket percentage increase across the entire workforce. We build in a pool each fiscal year to draw from, but each year we end up distributing less from the pool than allotted. Retention and satisfaction rates all increase as a result.

These are some of the highlights of our third flavor of human resources. Of course, I have had some epic failures along the ways. Ideas and programs that have fallen flat or missed the mark. Even with the examples listed here they are never static or complete. If you take your eye of the ball for a split-second the result will begin to vary and eventually your house of cards will come crashing down.

I learned this lesson in the hardest of ways. Following the global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, as we struggled to rebuild our organization, I fell into some human resource quicksand that threatened to suck me down below the surface. Prior to the pandemic, our organization had won its fourth “best place to work” award. Other organizations would regularly call us to learn about our secret recipes for success and we would gladly share. Again, a rising tide lifts all boats. As business began to return to normal, we began to scale up our operations and hire new staff. These staff only knew the museum as it was at the time of their hiring. They had none of our organizational history or knowledge.

Making things worse, we lost some institutional knowledge and experience along the way. The pandemic disrupted a lot more than we realized at the time. Some staff moved on to other opportunities, and the grizzled veterans that worked out of class and countless hours to get us through the pandemic were exhausted. We were badly battered and bruised as an organization. Coming to work was like looking in one of those crazy carnival mirrors, our reality did not match what I was seeing in our reflection.

Without even knowing it, the compliance cops showed up in force. We started to say things like “that’s not how we do things here,” or “we don’t have the resources for…”. It was ugly and getting in our way. It took a near implosion for me to see the real lesson in all of this. Pride before the fall. I was so excited with all our human resource innovations and best place to work accolades that I failed to see that the function of human resources itself is a continuous improvement process. You must always be cranking on the flywheel to achieve and maintain a superior level of performance. Our flywheel had slowed down a lot and building up its momentum was going to take time, effort, and consistency.

And there it is, that’s the secret to great human resources. It takes time, effort, and consistency. People working for people is a dynamic and ever-changing environment. There are no set rules or ways of doing things. Sure, we must follow the laws. Harassment and discrimination are bad, very bad. The workplace should be fair and safe. Employees should be viewed as a critical asset and not a disposable component of a larger machine. The difference between success and failure of an organization comes down to the question of how effective the organization is in bringing out the skills, talents, and ambitions of its single greatest asset, it’s people.