The Prime Directive: Does Your Company’s HR Function Lead or Fail to Lead?

By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter

Some years ago, Businessweek carried a terrific column from Jack and Suzy Welsh entitled, “So Many CEO’s Get This Wrong” which describes how HR should function and the mistakes that corporate HR makes. They later re-purposed it for LinkedIn.

Responding to a question that points out the HR is often felt negatively vs. The Welsh’s claim that it is the most powerful part of any organization, they acknowledge that HR is often marginalized in organizations into the people who issue the newsletter, plan the company picnic or, at the other extreme, “the cloak-and-dagger society.”

They then call for HR to be “the killer app” within a company but acknowledge it seldom is, laying the blame squarely upon the CEO who does not put HR at the table the same way as the CFO.

They recount a story of speaking to 5000 HR executives in Mexico City and asking how many of their organizations were on the same footing as the CFO and getting fewer than 50 hands to go up. They then ask whether the Boston Red Sox would be better run by the CFO or the Director of Player Personnel (as a Yankee fan, I encourage the Red Sox to try the Welsh’s suggestion and report back in a decade or two).