The Preface - Why I wrote the book "Everybody Hates HR"
I never wanted to be an HR professional, and I am yet to meet anyone that has celebrated realizing their childhood dream of working in HR. I would have been much happier pursuing my love of song, art and writing but I was raised in a time and culture that associated the need for security and safety with a Monday to Friday, 9-5, too boring to describe, corporate job.
To this day, I remember the moment I was enticed into the world of human capital management. I was working in the Customer Operations division of Canada’s largest communication’s company as a technical trainer in their call centers. I had spent time as a call center representative upon joining the organization and was rapidly working my way up the ranks. A technical trainer was a coveted position in the call centers because it meant less time on the phones with customers – an extremely demanding and challenging role. After one training session, my leader observed me coaching a participant on their overall engagement in the session and afterwards said to me, “You are SO HR.” I brushed it off in the moment saying I needed more excitement and variety at work and couldn’t, “push papers” for a living, but the curiosity flame had been lit.
I began researching HR which confirmed everything I had already assumed to be true; it was seemingly a whole lot of dull administrative work like writing job postings and pulling headcount reports. Nothing I could get excited about. But then I researched HR salaries, and my opinion began to shift.
I was in my early 20’s and cash was king. Without a mortgage, kids, bills or any obligations, benefits and pensions held very little value to me. I wanted money - as much as I could get, as fast as I could get it. Why? Because having lost loved ones early on in life, I understood one thing very, very well; time is finite and the more money one has, the more control they gain over the time they are granted. I wanted that control, so my primary goal and motivator was money for many years to come.
So, I now knew that the people in HR were making a LOT more money than I was, and they didn’t even have to talk to customers! This was a no brainer, I was going to work in HR, make loads of money and do way less work or at least way easier work than customer service. I relied on that original leader that saw something in me, to assist me in moving into an HR role and she wasted no time introducing me to what would become my leader, my mentor and one of my closest friends. In September of 2006, I became an HR Manager of a small satellite TV branch within the same organization.
My promotion didn’t go through without issue. My qualifications for the role were challenged formally by existing HR team members. Those with more years of service and experience were in an uproar that someone from the call center would be hired into such a “critical” position. And I was someone that didn’t have a university degree or ANY formal training in HR. I was nervous that the offer would be redacted but it wasn’t. My new leader stood strong against the resistance, insisting that she followed the organization’s philosophy of behavioural-based hiring and provided evidence to support that the hiring process itself was adhered to, and I had outperformed my competition in the panel interview.
Her initial support and ability to spot raw potential led to me achieving 17 consecutive annual top HR performer ratings (across multiple leaders and organizations), me being a critical member of the senior leadership team that designed, built and launched a 3,500 person, multi-site global business process outsourcing operation and finally, it led to me building the requirements and logic behind an in-house AI based people management digital solution which is still in use at the time of writing this book and to my knowledge, remains the only HR product of its kind in existence today, ten years after its launch.
My success was not well received by my peers and led to more complaints against me, ranging from the type of opportunities for meaty projects I was being given (they were assigned based on performance), my completion of work being too fast that their clients wanted the same and they couldn’t deliver at that speed and the most hurtful complaint from my peers to be transferred to a different team because they felt they would never get a top box rating if they were competing against me because there was only one spot and it always went to me.
While leadership continued to recognize my exemplary performance, they did little to ease the tensions between myself and my peers. I am thankful that most people that complained about me throughout the years remain close acquaintances today, only because after working together for so long, it became evident that it took a lot of effort for me to consistently deliver at that level and that this compulsion to overdeliver and never make a mistake was all consuming. I would later be diagnosed as neurodivergent.
Regardless, the hardest part of my job has always been dealing with HR. And yes, I understand how that sounds, considering I work in HR, but it is the truth. The most problematic behaviours I’ve observed within the typical HR Persona include a severe gap in understanding how business works outside of the HR context, confusion with regards to the role and purpose of an HR professional and finally, a rigidity that time and time again proves detrimental to the business’ overall objectives.[EM1]
I have spent a good amount of time bending and catering and masking to accommodate the traditional HR persona, studying and learning all that there is to learn about why we are the way we are in HR and what value we bring. I spent two decades influencing change in the HR space, making marginal gains in each organization. I inspired improved performance in those that worked directly with me. I asked questions over and over in meetings, leading to team members beginning to anticipate the challenges, coming more prepared to meetings and enhancing their presentation materials to address my questions before they were asked. But these are improvements that aren’t obvious… and thus, they went unnoticed for the most part.
I started to analyze my own performance and compare it to my peers, creating a blueprint for “good HR”. I wanted all HR teams to enjoy the benefits of showing up differently and wowing their clients. I challenged thinking, I suggested different approaches, I dug into the data and presented data-based arguments to support doing things differently. It all fell on ears of individuals that said they wanted change but didn’t align their actions to their words. That’s when I realized that if I wanted to make lasting change happen, I had to approach it from the outside in. The power to change HR lies in people leaders, not in HR.
This realization led to the birth of Everyone Hates HR, a people leader’s guide to turning HR into your greatest competitive advantage. I believe that if I can get people leaders to start demanding and expecting more from HR, the entire profession will evolve for the better.
This book outlines the formula for turning HR into your greatest asset. By applying the recommendations outlined in this book, you will make your life as a leader easier, you will be enabled to meet your deliverables, your employee engagement will be positively impacted, and you will have helped improve the overall HR function.
I am on a mission to ultimately improve people’s work lives, and it starts with HR. I thank you in advance for supporting this movement.
