Any
true business leader will tell you that keeping their team productive
can be hard – sometimes the hardest thing a business person has to deal
with. That’s why the business gurus created Human Resources – turn the
management of people into a quasi-science and surely the problem goes
away. No big surprise then that it didn’t work because the problem with
calling humans "resources" is that you dehumanise them and treat them as
an asset. The term puts human beings conceptually in the same bucket as
raw materials on the factory floor. It ignores the fact that people are
complicated and that getting them to work as a team requires treating
them as individuals rather than as plug-and-play commodities.
When people are treated as assets the temptation is to manage them by
numbers which leads to an endless round of admin – record keeping,
holiday booking, sickness reporting and performance management. All
necessary tasks but the end result is that there is no time to engage
with the individuals – listening, coaching, encouraging, challenging.
Many HR professionals recognise this and try to spend their time
supporting the individuals rather than managing the resource. Smaller
companies don’t have the luxury of dedicated HR so they end up with
senior people doing employee related admin which distracts them from
running the business.
As an example, experience shows us that many SMEs still track staff holiday allocation
using paper based forms, which need to be located, distributed,
collected and the data recorded on a master document each time a staff
member books some time off. We estimate that a business with 50 staff,
spends up to 125 hours a year just managing holiday requests for their
staff. That’s 17 lost working days and much of it is senior management
time!
It‘s time to let go of the outdated idea that our people can be
treated as a resource and lead rather than manage our people. There are
lots of opinions about the difference between leadership and management
but I particularly like how Seth Godin puts it:
“Managers work to get their employees to do what they did yesterday, but a little faster and a little cheaper.”
“Leaders, on the other hand, know where they'd like to
go, but understand that they can't get there without their tribe,
without giving those they lead the tools to make something happen.”
“Managers want authority. Leaders take responsibility.”
“We need both. But we have to be careful not to confuse
them. And it helps to remember that leaders are scarce and thus more
valuable.”
http://uk.hrmanager.com/articles/share/66575/
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