As a human resources professional, which of the following belief statements belong in your brain?
1. Diversity can and should be celebrated to the maximum extent possible.
2. It is not only possible for diversity and organisational effectiveness to coexist, but also to be a win-win for both employers and employees.
3. Pay/rewards for performance are essential to creating a high-performance organisation and culture.
Are these trick questions?
No. Would it not be blasphemous for any HR professional, or any leader, for that matter, to not agree with these belief statements? Of course! But ironically, while the HR profession has bemoaned the lack of a seat at the strategic table for decades, we continue to preach one thing, and practice another.
How so? What really brought this message home for me was the reaction I got to my second book: Weirdos in the Workplace! The New Normal…Thriving in the Age of the Individual from many of my HR colleagues. On the one hand, CEOs, entrepreneurs, business owners and non-HR executives love and embrace the message, while some HR professionals, without actually reading the book, pull back and gasp. How insensitive! We can’t call people weirdos? We’re HR professionals. Please!
Before you have an HR hernia, you must understand the basic premise that “a weirdo is anyone not like you.” Hmm! That’s the point. Can you believe we are approaching the 46th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the States, which was the genesis of equal opportunity, and all the laws that followed? As a former EEO Compliance Officer for a Fortune 100 manufacturer in the 1970s and 1980s, I speak with both knowledge and experience. I even agreed philosophically with the need for these laws, given the bad behaviour of our society and some of its organisations.
However, for the times we are in: The Age of the Individual, it is not only simplistic and naïve to continue defining diversity in terms of government mandated protected classes: race, sex, religion, national origin, sexual preference and the like, but it actually runs contrary to a purist philosophy of diversity. True diversity is individuality.
In fact, for truly liberated, progressive HR professionals, it should be downright insulting and even somewhat bigoted to operate from an implied assumption that all women think and act alike, or that all Asians think and act alike, and so on. Granted, there is the need to be able to categorise people for the purposes such as legal compliance and reporting, but it is high time we transcend these artificial barriers for the purposes of real organisational effectiveness, progress and true celebration of the individual.
Now that you understand the premise and motivation behind my logic, I would like to share with you some of the more controversial ‘weirdisms’ within it.
Weirdism #1: all workers are not created equal
Again, at first blush, many ‘political correctites’ may hesitate to jump on this bandwagon. However, if we are in agreement with the logic thus far, one has to concur that to celebrate individuality, and to grant the rights and privileges that come with it comes the responsibility to recognise that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ HR model for creating a performance-driven organisation; or a meritocracy.
HR professionals, who continue to cry for a seat at the strategic table, must also learn to recognise when the expression and manifestation of individuality is in alignment with organisational strategies and objectives, and when it is not. Not all individuality is worthy of being celebrated. Some may be tolerated, but some may even need to be terminated. There are limits of behaviour to earn the rights and privileges to live in a free society, and the workplace is a microcosm of society.
So, the whole point of Weirdism #1 is that if we accept the new definition of diversity as individuality, we have no choice but to be responsible to our organisations, and to the individuals within them, to recognise their differences—in behaviour, performance, value—and to respond accordingly. This brings us to Weirdism #2.
Weirdism #2: discrimination is good, it is right, and it is necessary
This is the real litmus test. Had we started with this principle at the beginning, many would never have read this far. Take a breath. With the advent of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and it’s resultant EEO, OFCCP, AAP’s, ERISA, ADA, ADEA, and all the other acronyms of ‘discrimination’ in the U.S., many organisations, and especially their HR Departments, have misguidedly evolved into a ‘fair is equal’ mindset.
In other words, to avoid the risk, legally or perceptually, of being accused of ‘discrimination’ we have become victims of the law of unintended consequences. Treating everyone the same can only result in institutionalised mediocrity. Giving everyone a 3% merit raise not only punishes the performers, but also rewards the slugs, and wastes valuable organisational resources. That’s a lose-lose-lose.
The word discrimination is not a bad word. But we have made it one. If someone says you have discriminating taste, you say, “Thank you” and take it as a compliment. If you answered ‘yes’ to the belief statement at the beginning that ‘pay for performance is essential to creating a high-performance organisation and culture’, then you believe in the virtues of discrimination. Discrimination based on performance! Not race or sex or the like. Welcome to the Age of the Individual, and to enlightened HR.
Any manager or leader who does not discriminate is not manager or leader material. Being willing and able to make distinctions and make tough decisions is a core competency of modern management and leadership. And that goes for HR management and leadership, as well. In fact, HR should be leading the charge.
Conclusion
None of this should be new to you. And it probably isn’t, now that you understand the logic and rationale. So why create such controversy? Why use such potentially inflammatory and politically incorrect verbiage?
When CEOs, business owners, entrepreneurs and non-HR executives hear this message, they rejoice. They say they have been thinking this way for a long time, and wish they could hear it from their own HR departments. And ironically, HR probably agrees. So let’s make it a win-win.
One of my hidden objectives is to get the strategic HR message out to the non-HR mainstream, to the people who hold the keys to the boardroom, and to the ‘individuals’ we must all attract, retain and motivate. HR should already get it. I shouldn’t have to preach to the choir.
But, now it’s HR’s job to shift its mental paradigm of how to position itself with its own leadership. That is, to get their leaders’ attention by speaking their language, without compromising the beliefs or principles of the HR profession. And by following the aforementioned logic, now they can.
HR cannot be seen as glorified union stewards, blindly advocating for the rights of all employees. They must be stewards of both the individual and the organisation. It is not incongruous to advocate for the individual and the organisation simultaneously. The greatest places to work are usually the greatest companies in all other aspects, as well: profitability, effectiveness, customer service and so on.
But it takes backbone. It takes courage. It takes hard work and tough decisions to create a culture that both recognises and celebrates the individual and then discriminates based on performance and value, in order to do so. You cannot have one without the other.
See? We agree after all!
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
